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I live in central Illinois. Regular gas is pushing $4 a gallon with premium pushing $5 a gallon. I would guess this is related to Hurricane Beryl blowing through the gulf coast and Houston. Ouch...

This year, hurricane season has taken off with a ferocious, ominous start thanks to Beryl—the earliest Category 5 hurricane ever recorded, with winds topping out at 165 mph. Beryl bulldozed the Caribbean, made its way through Mexico and then plowed into Texas. As of the time of publication, over 2.1 million Texans are without power, just as a severe heat wave descends on the region. The increasing severity of hurricanes acutely stresses power grids like those in Texas, which could adversely affect everything from homes to health care facilities. It could cost a city "billions of dollars to recover from...

CenterPoint’s project would have used the money “to fund high wind and flood mitigation projects.” President Joe Biden’s Department of Energy rejected Houston’s request to strengthen its energy grid in 2023. Houston entered day five of power outages after Hurricane Beryl. Maybe, just maybe, stop concentrating on your fantasy green energy: CenterPoint Energy sought the money from a new $10.5 billion Department of Energy program that is helping utilities, states and local agencies protect the electric grid from the growing threats of extreme weather and climate change. “I don’t understand how the grant application could be rejected,” University of Houston...

HOUSTON, Texas -- Federal aid is now available to residents and business owners affected by Hurricane Beryl in 15 Texas counties. The video above is from a previous story on July 10, 2024, before FEMA individual assistance was granted. In a news release, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said individual assistance was added to Texas' federal disaster declaration after officials assessed homes damaged by the storm. Patrick is serving as governor while Gov. Greg Abbott is on a pre-planned trip to Asia.

HOUSTON — Half a million Texans are expected to suffer through sweltering heat with no electricity into early next week after Hurricane Beryl knocked out power throughout the Houston area Monday, generating anger at the region’s large utility for failing to defend the grid from a predictable summer storm. Food is spoiling in dormant refrigerators days after the Category 1 hurricane tore through power lines and utility poles. Hospitals are swarming with patients struggling with heat stroke. Businesses can’t function as residents are ordered to stay home, and many residents faced at least three or four more days of continued...

White House documentation shows that President Biden ended the Major Disaster Declaration required for FEMA aid the same day he granted it. ===================================================================== Acting Gov. Dan Patrick has levied accusations against President Biden alleging that the president has misled him, Gov. Abbott, and the people of Texas by ending a Major Disaster Declaration the same day he granted it. The Federal Emergency Management Agency published a press release on Wednesday detailing the president’s approval of a Major Disaster Declaration following the destruction wreaked by Hurricane Beryl. A Major Disaster Declaration is required before the federal government grants FEMA aid to...

CenterPoint is a $19 billion, for-profit corporation granted a monopoly over a hundred years ago to manage and maintain the transmission and distribution of electricity across the Houston region. This regulated utility failed to deliver power to 85% of its customers during the height of a mild hurricane. In a perfect world, the Public Utility Commission would have ensured CenterPoint maintained a grid resilient enough to withstand a stronger storm. Instead, elected officials are asking the wrong questions about the emergency response. “I’ll tell you whether I’m satisfied or not when I have a full report of where their crews...

Hurricane Beryl has wreaked havoc in parts of the Caribbean – and put the role of climate change under the spotlight. With maximum sustained wind speeds of more than 160mph (257km/h), it became the earliest category five Atlantic hurricane in records going back around 100 years. In fact, there has only been one previous recorded case of a category five Atlantic hurricane in July – Hurricane Emily, on 16 July 2005. The causes of individual storms are complex, making it difficult to fully attribute specific cases to climate change. But exceptionally high sea surface temperatures are seen as a key...

Hurricane Beryl barreled across the Caribbean, made landfall along the Yucatan Peninsula, and is forecast to make landfall in SE Texas. Mash the graphics below to enlarge. All links and images are self-updating. GOES Satellite NHC Public Advisories NHC DiscussionsTropical Tidbits by Levi Cowan Local NWS Weather Brownsville TX

Hurricane Beryl, a Category 3 storm with winds of 120 mph, is wreaking havoc across the Caribbean, including the Cayman Islands, having already impacted Jamaica and Grenada and resulting in at least 10 fatalities. In response, the North Carolina-based evangelical relief organization Samaritan’s Purse has airlifted over 24 tons of emergency supplies and a team of specialists to the affected regions. On Wednesday, Hurricane Beryl unleashed its most intense winds along Jamaica’s southern coast, while relentless heavy rain and fierce winds battered a broader region, CNN reported early Thursday. From 1 p.m. on Wednesday to 1 a.m. on Thursday, Kingston...

Hurricane Beryl is expected to bring life-threatening winds and storm surge to Jamaica Wednesday, after the Category 4 storm ripped across islands in the southeast Caribbean, killing at least six people. According to the latest forecast from the National Hurricane Center, Beryl has lost some intensity but is still expected to be near major-hurricane strength when it passes near or over Jamaica at midday before taking aim at the Cayman Islands and Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. The storm — with maximum sustained winds of 145 mph — is currently located about 75 miles southeast of Kingston, Jamaica, moving west-northwest at 18...

150 MPH, moving WNW at 20 mph.......................

Hurricane Beryl's intensity is once again on the upswing as it charges toward the Caribbean, where it is striking the islands with powerful winds and flooding storm surge. Beryl made landfall on the island of Carriacou at 11 a.m. AST today with 140 mph sustained winds and was upgraded to 150 mph winds soon afterward. On Saturday afternoon, Beryl reached hurricane status with winds of 75 mph just 24 hours after the system was first formed as a tropical depression over the Atlantic Ocean. Beryl first become a major Category 3 hurricane with sustained winds of 115 mph on Sunday...

The hurricane season's next tropical depression or storm is expected to form from a disturbance in the Atlantic by tonight as we also track two other systems with a lower chance of tropical development. W​here these systems are now: We're watching three tropical disturbances spread out from near Mexico to off the African coast, as depicted in the map below. The one expected to form into a tropical depression, and likely tropical storm, in the short-term future is Invest 95L in the central Atlantic. An "invest" is a naming convention used to identify disturbances that are being monitored with specialized...

The special prosecutor’s overreach and the trial judge’s open bias are equally disturbing. Just when you thought the “swamp” judicial system could sink no lower, an Elon Musk-X petition to the Supreme Court reminds us about Jack Smith’s and a leftist judge’s complete disrespect for Americans’ constitutional freedom from intrusive government searches. The information emerges in X Corp.’s petition for a writ of certiorari relating to a court order arising from a search warrant that special counsel, Mr. Jack Smith (yes, that one), served on X demanding data and records from former President Donald Trump’s Twitter account. The problem from...

Company questions process that lets officials obtain secret search warrants.Elon Musk’s X Corp. has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to consider stepping in against a process that lets officials obtain information from social media companies and bars the companies from informing people whose information is handed over.The process wrongly enables officials to “access and review potentially privileged materials without any opportunity for the user to assert privileges—including constitutional privileges,” lawyers for X said in a filing to the nation’s top court.Unsealed documents in 2023 showed that X provided data and records from former President Donald Trump’s Twitter account to special...

By 10 years old, the Utah boy had bought and was running a 350-acre farmstead. This is what it looks like to be unafraid to try. Cole Summers Jun 21 Cole Summers at 8 years old. Social media is mostly garbage. My own feed is crammed with doomsday predictions and ads for scammy diets. But every once in a while, between the hashtags and the hysteria, a jewel presents itself. Like Cole Summers. I never met Cole Summers in real life. But I was completely floored by what I learned about him—and from him—online. At first, to be honest, I...

You already know that water can have three states of matter: solid, liquid and gas. But scientists at the Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL) have discovered that when it's put under extreme pressure in small spaces, the life-giving liquid can exhibit a strange fourth state known as tunneling. The water under question was found in super-small six-sided channels in the mineral beryl, which forms the basis for the gems aquamarine and emerald. The channels measure only about five atoms across and function basically as cages that can each trap one water molecule. What the researchers found was that in this...

000 WTNT32 KNHC 261137 TCPAT2 BULLETIN SUBTROPICAL STORM BERYL INTERMEDIATE ADVISORY NUMBER 2A NWS NATIONAL HURRICANE CENTER MIAMI FL AL022012 800 AM EDT SAT MAY 26 2012 ...BERYL MOVING WEST-SOUTHWESTWARD TOWARD THE SOUTHEASTERN UNITED STATES COASTLINE... SUMMARY OF 800 AM EDT...1200 UTC...INFORMATION ---------------------------------------------- LOCATION...32.0N 76.0W ABOUT 175 MI...280 KM SE OF CAPE FEAR NORTH CAROLINA ABOUT 240 MI...385 KM ESE OF CHARLESTON SOUTH CAROLINA MAXIMUM SUSTAINED WINDS...45 MPH...75 KM/H PRESENT MOVEMENT...WSW OR 255 DEGREES AT 5 MPH...7 KM/H MINIMUM CENTRAL PRESSURE...1001 MB...29.56 INCHES WATCHES AND WARNINGS -------------------- CHANGES WITH THIS ADVISORY... NONE. SUMMARY OF WATCHES AND WARNINGS IN EFFECT... A...