180K evacuate Cuba as Elsa approaches
Cuba evacuated 180,000 people amid fears Sunday that Tropical Storm Elsa could cause heavy flooding after battering several Caribbean islands, killing at least three people.
The Cuban government opened shelters and moved to protect sugarcane and cocoa crops ahead of the storm. Most of those evacuated went to relatives’ homes, while some people sheltered at government facilities. Hundreds living in mountainous areas took refuge in natural caves prepared for the emergency.
The storm’s next target was Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis declared a state of emergency in 15 counties, including in Miami-Dade County, where a high-rise condominium building collapsed last week.
Late Sunday afternoon, Elsa’s center was near Cuba’s southern coast, about 15 miles west of Cabo Cruz, and was moving northwest at 14 mph. It had maximum sustained winds of about 60 mph, according to the National Hurricane Center in Miami.
The center said the storm was expected to gradually weaken while moving across Cuba on Monday.
“After Elsa emerges over the Florida Straits and the southeastern Gulf of Mexico, some slight restrengthening is possible,‘‘ it said.
West gets hotter days, East sweltering nights
As outlandish as the killer heat wave that struck the Pacific Northwest was, it fits into a decadeslong pattern of uneven summer warming across the United States.
The West is getting roasted by hotter summer days while the East Coast is getting swamped by hotter and stickier summer nights, an analysis of decades of U.S. summer weather data by The Associated Press shows.
State-by-state average temperature trends from 1990 to 2020 show America’s summer swelter is increasing more in some of the places that just got baked with extreme heat over the past week: California, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Oregon and Colorado.
The West is the fastestwarming region in the country during June, July and August, up 3 degrees on average since 1990. The Northwest has warmed nearly twice as much in the past 30 years as it has in the Southeast.
That includes Portland, Ore., which set a record 116degree high that was 3 degrees warmer than temperatures ever recorded in Oklahoma City or Dallas-Fort Worth.
45 dead in Philippine military plane crash
A Philippine air force C130 aircraft carrying combat troops assigned to fight Muslim militants crashed and exploded while landing in the south Sunday, killing at least 42 army soldiers on board and three civilians on the ground in one of the worst disasters in the air force’s history.
At least 49 other soldiers were rescued with injuries and survived the fiery noontime crash into a coconut grove outside the Jolo airport in Sulu province, including some who managed to jump off the aircraft before it exploded and was gutted by fire, military officials said. Three of seven villagers who were hit on the ground died.
The aircraft had 96 people on board, including three pilots and five crew while the rest were army personnel, the military said, adding only five soldiers remained unaccounted for late Sunday. The pilots survived but were seriously injured.