Tag Archives: Fires

Israel takes out high level target: Hezbollah responds with a barrage of rockets

Israel-fires-from-rockets

Important Takeaways:

  • Hezbollah fired more than 250 rockets into Israel on Wednesday after Israel killed Sami Taleb Abdullah, the most senior Hezbollah commander to be eliminated since October 7.
  • This was the largest one-day rocket attack since the war began and included for the first time in this conflict rocket attacks as far south as Tiberias.
  • The IDF said most rockets fell in open areas, some others were intercepted, and others fell in other locations.
  • Al Mayadeen reported that a number of Israeli military sites, including the Mount Meron air traffic control base, were targeted during the attacks.
  • Hezbollah said it carried out at least 17 operations against Israel on Wednesday, including eight in response to what it called the “assassination”.
  • Abdallah was senior to Wissam Tawil, a high-level Hezbollah commander killed in an Israeli strike in January, said the sources in Lebanon, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

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Lack of Governmental Leadership in Maui leaving locals to take care of one another

Important Takeaways:

  • Maui fire survivors describe nighttime looting and rerouted supply drops as they say local leadership botches emergency response
  • Maui residents are becoming increasingly desperate for local leadership to take control of the emergency response to the catastrophic fires that leveled parts of the Hawaiian island and left at least 93 dead.
  • While rescue crews made their way across the island with water, food, and first aid, locals told Insider supply drops were being rerouted and anguished residents were taking matters into their own hands.
  • “There’s some police presence. There’s some small military presence, but at night, people are being robbed at gunpoint,” Matt Robb, a co-owner of a Lāhainā bar called The Dirty Monkey, told Insider. “People are raped and pillaged. I mean, they’re going through houses — and then by day, it’s hunky-dory. So where is the support? I don’t think our government and our leaders, at this point, know how to handle this or what to do.”
  • Kami Irwin, a Maui resident helping to coordinate relief efforts “I had to deal with a situation that wasn’t even part of who I am or what I do,” Irwin said. “I had to talk to pilots that got grounded with our medical supplies who were stuck on the Big Island because the Department of Health stopped them from transporting insulin. And we have people all over the island that need insulin.”
  • She said residents chose to take matters into their own hands after realizing they were repeatedly seeing the same local volunteers, not government officials, coordinating aid efforts.

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Maui Wildfire: Worst natural disaster in a decade

Hawaii Fires

Important Takeaways:

  • Hawaii mourns the dead in ferocious wildfires while officials warn the full toll is not yet known
  • With the toll at 96, this is already the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century. Two fires have not yet been completely contained, including the one that demolished the historic town of Lahaina, according to an update from Maui County late Sunday.
  • The blaze that swept into centuries-old Lahaina on Tuesday destroyed nearly every building in the town of 13,000, leaving a grid of gray rubble wedged between the blue ocean and lush green slopes. That fire has been 85% contained, according to the county, while the Upcountry fire has been 60% contained.
  • “There’s very little left there,” Gov. Josh Green said, holding up a map of the area titled “Buildings Damaged in Maui Wildfires Lahaina Area.” He added that “an estimated value of $5.6 billion has gone away.”
  • The cause of the wildfires is under investigation, and Green said authorities would also examine their response. One fire, for instance, was thought to be out but later flared again. Before a fire engulfed Lahaina, Maui County officials also failed to activate sirens that would have warned the entire population and instead relied on social media posts.
  • Fueled by a dry summer and strong winds from a passing hurricane, the flames on Maui raced through parched brush — one moving as fast as 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) every minute, according to Green.

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UN High Commissioner paints a dystopian future if we don’t address climate change and ignore the critics

Matthew 24:7 For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places.

Important Takeaways:

  • U.N. Rights Czar — ‘Truly Terrifying’ Famines, Floods, Fires, Ahead Unless ‘Climate Change’ Addressed
  • The Austrian lawyer turned U.N. official said the time has come for everyone to heed the unelected body and address the long list of concerns it sees as threatening the very existence of the planet.
  • Volker Turk, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, declared Monday the planet is “[…] burning. It’s melting. It’s flooding. It’s depleting. It’s drying. It’s dying,” as he evoked a “dystopian future” for all unless “climate change” is addressed.
  • “We, the generation with the most powerful technological tools in history, have the capacity to change it.”
  • Turk urged the world to “shun the green-washers” as well as those who cast doubt on “climate science.”

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U.S. Food Processing Facilities continue to burn – Is there a pattern?

2 Timothy 3:1-5 But realize this, that in the last days difficult times will come.  For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, holding to a form of godliness, although they have denied its power; Avoid such men as these.

Important Takeaways:

  • We are supposed to believe that what we are witnessing is just one “tragic accident” after another.
  • We aren’t supposed to see any sort of a pattern, and we aren’t supposed to ask any questions.
  • Massive flames burned down a barn with tens of thousands of chickens in Wright County
  • In Washington state, 43 rail cars that were carrying much needed potash derailed in Alberta
  • And all of this is taking place at a moment in history when we are being told that we are about to enter an absolutely horrifying global food crisis.

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A List of 16 Major Fires That Have Occurred At Key Food Industry Facilities

Rev 6:6 NAS “And I heard something like a voice in the center of the four living creatures saying, “A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius; and do not damage the oil and the wine.”

Important Takeaways:

A List of 16 Major Fires That Have Occurred At Key Food Industry Facilities in the U.S. Since The Start of 2022

  • #1 Salinas, California
    • Taylor Farms, questions remain on the future of the business and the roughly 1,000 people employed at the Abbott Street facility.
  • #2 Hermiston, Oregon
    • The explosion occurred Tuesday evening at Shearer’s Foods in Hermiston, a city in agriculturally rich eastern Oregon
  • #3 Conway, New Hampshire
    • Crews battled fire for 16 hours at East Conway Beef and Pork
  • #4 San Juan, Texas
    • Rio Fresh’s onion warehouse damaged in fire
  • #5 Jonesboro, Arkansas
    • Nestle Hot Pockets plant remains shuttered following fire
  • #6 Mauston, Wisconsin
    • A portion of Mauston’s Wisconsin River Meats burnt down during an overnight fire Feb. 2-3, with the cause of the fire still under investigation.
  • #7 Fayetteville, Illinois
    • Deli Star deals with the aftermath of devastating fire
  • #8 Belfast, Maine
    • Fire crews from several towns have been battling a fire at the Penobscot McCrum potato processing plant in Belfast.
  • #9 Leoti, Kansas
    • Fertilizer Plant Fire Causes Evacuations in Western Kansas
  • #10 Claypool, Indiana
    • LOUIS DREYFUS REPORTS FIRE AT LARGEST U.S. SOY PROCESSING PLANT
  • #11 Winston-Salem, Carolina
    • Thousands flee homes near Winston-Salem fertilizer plant fire
  • #12 Sunnyside, Washington
    • WA Fertilizer Plant Fire Forces Evacuations
  • #13 Lecompte, Louisiana
    • Explosion andFire Reported at Cargill-Nutrena Feed Mill
  • #14 Maricopa, Arizona
    • 50,000 lbs. of food destroyed after fire ripped through Maricopa Food Pantry
  • #15 Dufur, Oregon
    • The headquarters of Azure Standard, the nation’s premier independent distributor of organic and healthy food, was destroyed by fire overnight.
  • #16 Planfield, Indiana
    • ATF begins on-site investigation into Walmart facility fire in Plainfield

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Data shows large wild fires have grown up to four times since previous decade

2 Timothy 3:1 “But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty.”

Important Takeaways:

  • Large fires becoming even larger, more widespread
  • In the journal Science Advances, a team of environmental scientists found that fire frequency has tripled in some parts of the United States — and that in the 2000s, wildfires grew up to four times the size of fires in previous decades.
  • William Travis, deputy director of the University of Colorado Boulder’s Earth Lab and a co-author of the paper. “More large fires plus intensifying development mean that the worst fire disasters are still to come,” he says in a news release.

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Lightning-sparked fires rage across California, tens of thousands flee

By Steven Lam

VACAVILLE, Calif. (Reuters) – A firefighting helicopter pilot was killed in a crash, and scores of homes burned in California on Wednesday as hundreds of lightning-sparked blazes forced tens of thousands of people to flee their dwellings.

Nearly 11,000 lightning strikes were documented during a 72-hour stretch this week in the heaviest spate of thunderstorms to hit California in more than a decade, igniting 367 individual fires. Almost two dozen of them have grown into major conflagrations, authorities said.

Multiple fires raced through hills and mountains adjacent to Northern California’s drought-parched wine country, shutting down Interstate 80 at Fairfield, about 35 miles (56 km) southwest of Sacramento, as flames leapt across the highway, trapping motorists caught in a hectic evacuation.

Police in the nearby town of Vacaville reported that advancing flames had prompted the evacuation of a state prison there and a medical facility for inmates.

Four residents whose communities were overrun by flames hours earlier in the same area suffered burns but survived, though the severity of their injuries was not immediately known, said Will Powers a spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CalFire).

He said thousands of residents were under mandatory evacuation orders in a four-county area stricken by a cluster of nine wind-driven fires collectively dubbed the LNU Complex, triggered by lightning on Monday.

In central California, a helicopter was on a water-dropping mission in Fresno County about 160 miles (258 km) south of San Francisco when it crashed, killing the pilot, a private contractor, CalFire said.

As of Wednesday night, the LNU complex of fires had burned largely unchecked across 124,000 acres (50,000 hectares), with zero containment, destroying at least 105 homes and other structures and leaving another 70 damaged, CalFire said. Several of the fires had merged by nightfall.

Wearing a singed nightgown, Diane Bustos said her husband abandoned their car as it caught fire and then blew up on the west side of Vacaville early Wednesday morning. She lost both her shoes when she and her family ran for their lives.

“I made it, God saved me,” Bustos told television station KPIX.

There were social media accounts of people trapped in the blaze, but CalFire’s Powers said authorities had no reports of anyone missing.

A Reuters reporter saw dozens of burned-out homesteads and houses in the Vacaville-Fairfield area, dead livestock among torched properties and some animals wandering loose.

“We are experiencing fires the like of which we haven’t seen in many, many years,” California Governor Gavin Newsom told a news conference, adding he had requested 375 fire engines from out of state to help.

He declared a statewide fire emergency on Tuesday.

The last time California experienced dry lightning storms of such devastating proportions was in 2008, said CalFire spokesman Scott Maclean.

Fanned by “red-flag” high winds, the fires are racing through vegetation parched by a record-breaking heat wave that began on Friday. Meteorologists have said the extreme heat and lightning storms were both linked to the same atmospheric weather pattern – an enormous high-pressure area hovering over America’s desert Southwest.

The largest group of fires, called the SCU Lightning Complex, had scorched at least 102,000 acres some 20 miles east of Palo Alto, while a third cluster, the CZU August Lightning Complex, grew to more than 10,000 acres and forced evacuations around 13 miles south of Palo Alto.

(Reporting by Steven Lam in Vacaville, Calif.; Additional reporting by Jane Ross and Steve Gorman in Los Angeles and Sharon Bernstein in Sacramento. Writing and reporting by Andrew Hay in Taos, New Mexico; Editing by Stephen Coates, Sandra Maler and Lincoln Feast.)

Brazil vice president invites DiCaprio to see reality of Amazon rainforest

BRASILIA (Reuters) – Brazilian Vice President Hamilton Mourao on Wednesday called on actor Leonardo DiCaprio to visit the Amazon to see the reality of the situation there, as the government faces criticisms for rising destruction in the world’s largest rain forest.

Mourao invited DiCaprio, an environmental campaigner, to go with him personally on a journey along a notoriously ill-maintained road in the remote far western Amazon near the town of Sao Gabriel da Cachoeira.

“I would like to invite our most recent critic, Leonardo DiCaprio, to go with me to Sao Gabriel da Cachoeira to do an eight-hour ride through the jungle between the Sao Gabriel airport and the Cucui highway,” Mourao said

“He will learn with each big pothole that he has to pass that the Amazon is not a flat land and understand better how things work in this vast region.”

Representatives for DiCaprio did not immediately respond to request for comment.

Last year, as surging fires in the Amazon provoked global outcry, Brazilian right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro accused DiCaprio of funding fires in the Amazon, without presenting any evidence. DiCaprio denied the allegation.

This year, the number of fires rose in June and July compared to a year ago, but in the first 15 days of August, fires were down 17% compared to a year ago, according to government data.

Deforestation is up 34.5% in the 12 months through July, compared to the same period a year ago, preliminary government data shows.

DiCaprio has a foundation dedicated to the environment and has called for Amazon preservation. Scientists say the Amazon is vital to curbing climate change, because of the vast amount of greenhouse gas that the forest absorbs.

In July, DiCaprio on Twitter praised the Brazilian government’s 120-day ban on fires in the Amazon, an attempt to rein in the destruction.

(Reporting by Ricardo Brito and Jake Spring; Editing by Alistair Bell)

Police declare riot as Portland protesters set fires, attack government building

By Kanishka Singh

(Reuters) – Protesters lit fires, threw rocks and smashed windows at county government offices in the U.S. city of Portland on Tuesday, prompting police to declare a riot, after weeks of mostly peaceful anti-racism demonstrations.

The protesters, some wearing gas masks and carrying shields, lit fires in dumpsters and used lighter fuel to start a fire inside the Multnomah Building big enough to set off the sprinkler system, police said.

TV footage showed debris on the street in flames and people throwing stones at the building. The fire in the building was put out by police, media said.

Black Lives Matter protests have been held across the United States in recent months after the May 25 death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old African-American man, who died after a white police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes.

Protests, including in Portland, have at times erupted into arson and violence, and federal officers sent into the Northwestern city have repeatedly clashed with crowds targeting the federal courthouse there.

Police said some officers were targeted a night earlier with a “powerful green laser” capable of causing permanent eye damage when some protesters marched on the Portland Police Association building.

“Portland Police has declared the gathering near the Multnomah Building a riot after individuals vandalized, repeatedly smashed first floor windows with rocks and threw burning material into an office,” the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office said on Twitter.

Police said some crowd control “munitions” were used to disperse the protesters, but no tear gas.

Multnomah County Chair Deborah Kafoury released a statement at midnight, saying a small group of protesters had set fire to the Office of Community Involvement.

“This is the heart of our county, where people in our community come to get married, get their passports, and celebrate their cultural traditions and diversity,” the Oregonian website quoted her as saying, adding the space is dedicated to community members “marginalized by the traditional political process.”

Police said on Wednesday an officer sustained a minor injury and there were two arrests, one on charges of rioting, unlawful use of a weapon and assaulting a public safety officer, and another on charges of criminal mischief and reckless endangering.

A crowd of several hundred people gathered in the city’s Colonel Summers Park late on Tuesday before marching through Southeast Portland streets, eventually arriving at the Multnomah Building, police said.

U.S. Attorney General William Barr came under fire from Democratic lawmakers earlier this month for sending federal officers to disperse protesters in the city.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham on Tuesday called for the Department of Justice to prosecute a group of people caught on videotape beating and kicking a man who crashed his truck near protests in Portland.

(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Nick Macfie)