Important Takeaways:
Important Takeaways:
- Texas has removed 1.1 million people from voter rolls since 2021, Gov. Greg Abbott’s office announced Monday, highlighting efforts to clean up election data and ensure legal registration.
- That includes 6,500 potential noncitizens and 457,000 deceased people, according to data the governor’s office provided.
- The review comes after Abbott signed Senate Bill 1 in 2021, which increased the penalty for lying while registering to vote to a state jail felony and requires the Secretary of State to audit random county election offices every two years.
- “What we want is our voters to say, ‘these are fair, these are transparent, my vote counts.’ As a state, we need to be the gold standard for the country, and the country, the gold standard for the world,” State Rep. Mano DeAyala, R-Houston, said.
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Important Takeaways:
- A small study in Texas suggests that human bird flu cases are being missed on dairy farms where the H5N1 virus has taken off in cows, sparking an unprecedented nationwide outbreak.
- Authors of the study, led by researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, went further, stating bluntly why the US is failing to fully surveil, let alone contain, a virus with pandemic potential.
- “Due to fears that research might damage dairy businesses, studies like this one have been few,” the authors write in the topline summary of their study, which was posted online as a pre-print and had not been peer-reviewed.
- The finding suggests human cases of H5N1 are going undetected. Moreover, managing to find evidence of two undetected infections in a sample of just 14 workers suggests it may not be hard to find more.
- To date, the virus has infected at least 175 dairy farms in 13 states. The official tally of human cases in the dairy outbreak is 14: four in dairy farm workers and 10 in workers on poultry farms with infections linked to the dairy outbreak.
- Experts are anxious that with each new infection, the wily H5N1 virus is getting new opportunities to adapt further to humans. If the virus evolves to cause more severe disease and spread from human to human, it could spark another pandemic.
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Important Takeaways:
- The earthquake, which happened about 10 miles northeast of Hermleigh in West Texas, initially registered as a 4.8-magnitude before being upgraded to 5.1.
- Twelve minutes after the first earthquake, a second earthquake registered as a 3.8-magnitude, according to the USGS data.
- A third earthquake happened about an hour later and registered as a 2.7-magnitude.
- The 5.1-magnitude earthquake was similar in size to the 4.9 that was felt across West Texas and into parts of North Texas on Monday night. Both earthquakes were on the higher end of what Texas experiences with earthquakes, though some in recent years have exceeded a 5.0-magnitude.
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Important Takeaways:
- For more than a week, some residents of the nation’s fourth largest city were left to sleep in their cars, shuffle perilously with canes and walkers across dark rooms and corridors, and watch food and medications spoil and critical medical equipment become inoperable. At times, they cried in desperation after discovering the bodies of neighbors who succumbed to the heat following a comparatively mild Category 1 hurricane.
- At least 14 Houston-area deaths were confirmed to be hurricane-related, including seven people – ranging in age from 50 to 110 – who died from “heat exposure due to power loss,” according to the Harris County Institute of Forensic Sciences.
- CenterPoint Energy told CNN in a statement it was “committed to doing a thorough review of our Hurricane Beryl response.”
- “We are engaging with community leaders, elected officials, local clergy leadership and others across the area to learn about how we can be more responsive to their needs and concerns,” the statement said.
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Important Takeaways:
- Repairing electricity infrastructure after storms usually costs customers. So could strengthening it before the next weather event.
- Many times, thousands of Texans sit in the dark for days — in either the blistering heat or frigid cold — waiting for utility crews to survey and fix the damage so electricity can start flowing again.
- Such power outages are likely to continue.
- Texas had 210 weather-related power outages — more than any other state — from 2000 to 2023, according to an analysis by the nonprofit Climate Central that used power outage data from the U.S. Department of Energy.
- Texas is the only state to have its own power grid.
- Last year, the Legislature made it possible for utility companies to create plans to strengthen their systems. In many cases, those costs would be charged to power providers that sell power, which would then likely pass the costs to customers.
- The costs to make the system more resilient will likely be passed on to Texans. But, so, too might the costs to repair damage to utility companies’ infrastructure in the immediate aftermath of an extreme weather event.
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Important Takeaways:
- With around 270,000 homes and businesses still without power in the Houston area almost a week after Hurricane Beryl hit Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott on Sunday said he’s demanding an investigation into the response of the utility that serves the area as well as answers about its preparations for upcoming storms.
- “Power companies along the Gulf Coast must be prepared to deal with hurricanes, to state the obvious,” Abbott said
- While CenterPoint Energy has restored power to about 2 million customers, the slow pace of recovery has put the utility, which provides electricity to the nation’s fourth-largest city, under mounting scrutiny over whether it was sufficiently prepared for the storm that left people without air conditioning in the searing summer heat.
- Abbott said he was sending a letter to the Public Utility Commission of Texas requiring it to investigate why restoration has taken so long and what must be done to fix it.
- With months of hurricane season left, Abbott said he’s giving CenterPoint until the end of the month to specify what it’ll be doing to reduce or eliminate power outages in the event of another storm.
- A post Sunday on CenterPoint’s website from its president and CEO, Jason Wells, said that over 2,100 utility poles were damaged during the storm and over 18,600 trees had to be removed from power lines, which impacted over 75% of the utility’s distribution circuits.
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Important Takeaways:
- After Hurricane Beryl slammed into Texas early Monday, knocking out power to nearly 3 million homes and businesses, unleashing heavy rain and killing at least three people it moved east and later weakened to a tropical depression, the National Hurricane Center said Monday evening. The fast-moving tempest threatened to carve a harsh path over several more states in coming days.
- Texas state and local officials warned it could take several days to restore power after Beryl came ashore as a Category 1 hurricane and toppled 10 transmission lines and knocked down trees that took down power lines.
- At least two people were killed when trees fell on homes, and the National Hurricane Center said damaging winds and flash flooding would continue as Beryl pushes inland. A third person, a civilian employee of the Houston Police Department, was killed when he was trapped in flood waters under a highway overpass, Houston Mayor John Whitmire said. There were no immediate reports of widespread structural damage, however.
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Important Takeaways:
- More than 1.5 million Texas households were without power Monday morning as Hurricane Beryl made landfall on the state’s central coast. Beryl’s eye crossed the Texas coastline early Monday near Matagorda, Texas.
- Texas Division of Emergency Management officials warned that rain bands will lead to flooding in many areas of the state.
- Shortly before sunrise, Hurricane Beryl made landfall near Matagorda, Texas. National Weather Service updates indicate the storm brought winds of up to 80 mph and a life-threatening storm surge to the coastal area.
- On Sargent Beach. Forecasters predicted a storm surge of up to six feet in the area.
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Important Takeaways:
- Hurricane Beryl is now turning its wrath on Mexico as a Category 2 storm, weakened but still dangerous after tearing through a series of Caribbean islands in recent days.
- The NHC is forecasting dangerous hurricane-force winds, a storm surge of four to six feet and damaging waves as the storm moves inland across the northern Yucatan Peninsula during the day. It says the region could see four to six inches of rain, with up to 10 inches in some areas.
- Beryl is expected to emerge over the southwestern Gulf of Mexico on Friday night and move toward northeastern Mexico and southern Texas by the end of the weekend, bringing heavy rainfall with it.
- Gov. Greg Abbott directed the Texas Division of Emergency Management to increase the readiness level of the state’s emergency operations center starting Friday morning.
- The United Nations is making $4 million in emergency relief funds available to Grenada, Jamaica and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. A growing number of humanitarian aid groups are also mobilizing to help affected residents across the Caribbean.
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Important Takeaways:
- Tropical Storm Warnings Issued for Texas, Mexico Coasts Ahead of likely future Alberto
- Tropical storm warnings have been issued for parts of the Texas and Mexico coasts.
- This system will move west toward Mexico.
- Flooding rain, coastal flooding, gusty winds, high surf and rip currents will affect the western Gulf Coast of the U.S., especially Texas.
- Flooding rain is also likely in parts of Mexico and Central America.
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