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Biden to visit devastated areas of California on Thursday
President Joe Biden will travel to California’s central coast Thursday to visit areas that have been devastated by extreme weather.
The White House said in a statement Monday that the president would visit with first responders and state and local officials, survey recovery efforts and assess what additional federal support is needed.
Read: Survivors emerge from wreckage after US storms kill 9 people
The president’s trip was announced as the ninth atmospheric river in a three-week series of major winter storms was churning through California.
The storms have dumped rain and snow on California since late December, cutting power to thousands, swamping roads, toppling trees, unleashing debris flows and triggering landslides. Monday’s system was relatively weak compared with earlier storms, but flooding and mudslide risks remained because the state was so saturated, forecasters said.
Biden: Americans should ‘pay attention’ to MLK’s legacy
President Joe Biden made a historical pilgrimage Sunday to “America’s freedom church” to mark Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, saying democracy was at a perilous moment and that the civil rights leader’s life and legacy “show us the way and we should pay attention.”
As the first sitting president to deliver a Sunday morning sermon at King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, Biden cited the telling question that King himself once asked of the nation.
“He said, ‘Where do we go from here?’” Biden said from the pulpit. ”Well, my message to this nation on this day is we go forward, we go together, when we choose democracy over autocracy, a beloved community over chaos, when we choose believers and the dreams, to be doers, to be unafraid, always keeping the faith.”
In a divided country only two years removed from a violent insurrection, Biden told congregants, elected officials and dignitaries that “the battle for the soul of this nation is perennial. It’s a constant struggle ... between hope and fear, kindness and cruelty, justice and injustice.”
He spoke out against those who “traffic in racism, extremism, insurrection” and said the struggle to safeguard democracy was playing out in courthouses and ballot boxes, protests and other ways. ”At our best, the American promise wins out. … But I don’t need to tell you that we’re not always at our best. We’re fallible. We fail and fall.”
The stop at Ebenezer came at a delicate moment for Biden after Attorney General Merrick Garland on Thursday announced the appointment of a special counsel to investigate how the president handled classified documents after leaving the vice presidency in 2017. The White House on Saturday revealed that additional classified records were found at Biden’s home near Wilmington, Delaware.
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In introducing Biden, the church’s senior pastor, Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock noted that the president was “a devout Catholic” for whom “this Baptist service might be a little bit rambunctious and animated. But I saw him over there clapping his hands.”
King, “the greatest American prophet of the 20th century,” as Warnock put it, served as co-pastor from 1960 until he was assassinated in 1968.
Warnock, like many battleground state Democrats who won reelection in 2022, kept his distance during the campaign from Biden as the president’s approval rating lagged and the inflation rate climbed.
But with the election behind him and a full six-year term ahead, Warnock fully embraced Biden at the service. Near the close, he asked Biden to come to the front of the church and asked Ebenezer’s congregants to pray for the president as he listed several of Biden’s legislative achievements.
“That, my friends, is God’s work,” said Warnock, adding that Biden “had a little something to do with it.”
As Biden begins to turn his attention toward an expected 2024 reelection effort, Georgia is going to get plenty of his attention.
In 2020, Biden managed to win Georgia as well as closely contested Michigan and Pennsylvania, where Black votes made up a disproportionate share of the Democratic electorate. Turning out Black voters in those states will be essential to Biden’s 2024 hopes.
The White House has tried to promote Biden’s agenda in minority communities. The White House has cited efforts to encourage states to take equity into account for public works projects as they spend money from the administration’s $1 trillion infrastructure bill. The administration also has acted to end sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine offenses, scrapping a policy widely seen as racist.
The administration also highlights Biden’s work to diversify the federal judiciary, including his appointment of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson as the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court and the confirmation of 11 Black women judges to federal appeals courts — more than those installed to those powerful courts under all previous presidents combined.
Biden’s failure to win passage of a measure that would have bolstered voting right protections, a central campaign pledge, is one of his biggest disappointments of his first two years in office. The task is even steeper now that Republicans control the House.
Read more: More classified documents found at Biden's home by lawyers
In his remarks, the president said that for all the progress the United States has made, the country had now reached a critical point in its history. He said democracies can backslide, noting the collapse of the institutional structures of democracy in places such as Brazil.
“Progress is never easy, but it’s always possible and things do get better in our march to a more perfect union,” he said. “But at this inflection point, we know a lot of work that has to continue on economic justice civil rights, voting rights, protecting our democracy. And I’m remembering our job is to redeem the soul of America.”
This moment, he said, “is the time of choosing. … Are we a people who will choose democracy over autocracy? Couldn’t ask that question 15 years ago because everybody thought democracy was settled. ... But it’s not.” Americans, he said, ” have to choose a community over chaos. ... These are the vital questions of our time and the reason why I’m here as your president. I believe Dr. King’s life and legacy show us the way and we should pay attention.”
King, who was born on Jan. 15, 1929, was killed at age 39. He helped drive passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. Members of King’s family attended the service, including his 95-year-old sister, Christine King Farris.
``I’ve spoken before parliaments, kings, queens, leaders of the world ... but this is intimidating,” Biden said in opening his sermon.
The president plans to be in Washington on Monday to speak at the National Action Network’s annual breakfast on the King holiday.
More classified documents found at Biden’s home by lawyers
Lawyers for President Joe Biden found more classified documents at his home in Wilmington, Delaware, than previously known, the White House acknowledged Saturday.
White House lawyer Richard Sauber said in a statement that a total of six pages of classified documents were found during a search of Biden’s private library. The White House had said previously that only a single page was found there.
The latest disclosure is in addition to the discovery of documents found in December in Biden’s garage and in November at his former offices at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, from his time as vice president. The apparent mishandling of classified documents and official records from the Obama administration is under investigation by a former U.S. attorney, Robert Hur, who was appointed as a special counsel on Thursday by Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Sauber said in a statement Saturday that Biden’s personal lawyers, who did not have security clearances, stopped their search after finding the first page on Wednesday evening. Sauber found the remaining material Thursday, as he was facilitating their retrieval by the Department of Justice.
Read more: On eve of Biden's border visit, migrants fear new rules
“While I was transferring it to the DOJ officials who accompanied me, five additional pages with classification markings were discovered among the material with it, for a total of six pages,” Sauber said. “The DOJ officials with me immediately took possession of them.”
Sauber has previously said that the White House was “confident that a thorough review will show that these documents were inadvertently misplaced, and the president and his lawyers acted promptly upon discovery of this mistake.”
Sauber’s statement did not explain why the White House waited two days to provide an updated accounting of the number of classified records. The White House is already facing scrutiny for waiting more than two months to acknowledge the discovery of the initial group of documents at the Biden office.
On Thursday, asked whether Biden could guarantee that additional classified documents would not turn up in a further search, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters, “You should assume that it’s been completed, yes.”
Sauber reiterated Saturday that the White House would cooperate with Hur’s investigation.
Bob Bauer, the president’s personal lawyer, said his legal team has “attempted to balance the importance of public transparency where appropriate with the established norms and limitations necessary to protect the investigation’s integrity.”
The Justice Department historically imposes a high legal bar before bringing criminal charges in cases involving the mishandling of classified information, with a requirement that someone intended to break the law as opposed to being merely careless or negligent in doing so. The primary statute governing the illegal removal and retention of classified documents makes it a crime to “knowingly” remove classified documents and store them in an unauthorized way.
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The circumstances involving Biden, at least as so far known, differ from a separate investigation into the mishandling of classified documents at former President Donald Trump’s private club and residence in Florida.
In Trump’s case, special counsel Jack Smith is investigating whether anyone sought to obstruct their investigation into the retention of classified records at the Palm Beach estate. Justice Department officials have said Trump’s representatives failed to fully comply with a subpoena that sought the return of classified records, prompting agents to return to the home with a search warrant so they could collect additional materials.
Southern California sheriff's deputy fatally shot east of LA
A Southern California sheriff's deputy was shot and killed Friday, just two weeks after another deputy in the department was slain in the line of duty.
The suspect is in custody, authorities said.
Riverside County Sheriff's Deputy Darnell Calhoun was fatally shot Friday afternoon in the city of Lake Elsinore, authorities said on Twitter. He was taken to the hospital in serious condition.
Few details were immediately available, including the suspect's identity and what prompted the shooting. It was not clear if the suspect also was injured. The sheriff's office plans to hold a news conference Friday night.
Lake Elsinore is about 55 miles (88 kilometers) southeast of downtown Los Angeles.
Friday's shooting comes as the sheriff's department is reeling from the death of Deputy Isaiah Cordero. The 32-year-old was fatally shot Dec. 29 during a traffic stop in the city of Jurupa Valley, east of Los Angeles.
Read more: Shooting near Chicago school leaves 2 pupils dead and 2 injured
Cordero had pulled over a pickup truck and the driver, 44-year-old William Shae McKay, shot the deputy as he approached the vehicle. Law enforcement pursued McKay in a manhunt that included a chase along freeways in two counties, authorities said.
McKay was killed during a shootout with deputies after the truck crashed.
Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco and Cordero's family have called for the resignation of a Southern California judge who allowed McKay's release from custody on bail despite his lengthy criminal history.
The sheriff said McKay was convicted of a “third strike” offense in 2021 that should have put him in state prison for 25 years to life, but the judge lowered his bail, allowing his release, and later released him following an arrest for failing to appear at his sentencing.
Read more: Killing of Bangladeshi-American in US: Human chain in front of MoFA demands justice
Survivors emerge from wreckage after US storms kill 9 people
Stunned residents tried to salvage belongings, and rescue crews pulled survivors from beneath collapsed houses Friday in the aftermath of a tornado-spawning storm system that killed at least nine people as it barreled across parts of Georgia and Alabama.
The widespread destruction came into view a day after violent storms flipped mobile homes into the air, sent uprooted trees crashing through buildings, snapped trees and utility poles and derailed a freight train.
Those who emerged with their lives gave thanks as they searched the wreckage to find anything worth saving.
“God was sure with us,” Tracey Wilhelm said as she looked over the shattered remnants of her mobile home in Alabama's Autauga County.
She was at work Thursday when a tornado lifted her mobile home off its foundation and dumped it several feet away in a heap of rubble. Her husband and their five dogs scrambled into a shed that stayed intact, she said. Rescue workers later found them inside unharmed.
A search crew also found five people unharmed but trapped in a storm shelter after a wall from the adjacent house fell onto it, Autauga County Coroner Buster Barber said. Someone inside had a phone and kept calling for help.
Read more: 48 deaths reported in US from massive storm
The National Weather Service, which was working to confirm the twisters, said suspected tornado damage was reported in at least 14 counties in Alabama and 14 in Georgia. Temperatures were forecast to plunge below freezing overnight in hard-hit areas of both states, where more than 30,000 homes and businesses remained without power at sundown.
The twister blamed for killing at least seven people in rural Autauga County left damage consistent with an EF3 tornado, which is just two steps below the most powerful category of twister. The tornado had winds of at least 136 mph (218 kph), the weather service said.
Downtown Selma, about 40 miles (64 kilometers) to the southwest, also sustained severe damage before the worst of the weather moved across Georgia south of Atlanta.
At least 12 people were taken to hospitals, Ernie Baggett, Autauga County’s emergency management director, said as crews cut through downed trees looking for survivors.
About 40 homes were destroyed or seriously damaged, including several mobile homes that were launched into the air, he said.
“They weren’t just blown over," he said. "They were blown a distance.”
In Selma, the city council met on a sidewalk using lights from cellphones and declared a state of emergency.
A 5-year-old child riding in a vehicle was killed by a falling tree in central Georgia's Butts County, said Georgia Emergency Management and Homeland Security Director James Stallings. He said a parent who was driving suffered critical injuries.
Elsewhere, a state Department of Transportation worker was killed while responding to storm damage, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp said. He gave no further details.
Kemp surveyed some of the worst storm damage by helicopter. In some areas, he said, rescue teams had to dig into collapsed homes to free trapped survivors.
“We know people that were stranded in homes where literally the whole house collapsed, and they were under the crawl space,” Kemp told reporters.
The governor said the storm inflicted damage statewide, with some of the worst around Troup County near the Georgia-Alabama line, where more than 100 homes were hit. At least 12 people were treated at a hospital in Spalding County, south of Atlanta, where the weather service confirmed at least two tornadoes struck.
The storm hit Spalding County as mourners gathered for a wake at Peterson's Funeral Home in Griffin. About 20 people scrambled for shelter in a restroom and an office when a loud boom sounded as a large tree fell on the building.
“When we came out, we were in total shock," said Sha-Meeka Peterson-Smith, the funeral home's chief operational officer. "We heard everything, but didn’t know how bad it actually was.”
The uprooted tree crashed straight through the front of the building, she said, destroying a viewing room, a lounge and a front office. No one was hurt.
The tornado that hit Selma cut a wide path through the downtown area. Brick buildings collapsed, oak trees were uprooted, cars were tossed onto their sides and power lines were left dangling. Several people had serious injuries, Selma Mayor James Perkins said, but no deaths were reported.
Read more: Storms, tornadoes slam US South, killing at least 7 people
Kathy Bunch was inside the Salvation Army Service Center in Selma when tornado sirens sounded. She huddled in a back room and prayed as a loud roar passed through the brick building.
“It took the roof off. It busted the windows,” Bunch said. “And I’m just grateful to God to be alive.”
Workers in Selma used heavy machinery to scoop up splintered wooden framing and mangled siding Friday as utility poles leaned at odd angles and power lines sagged in the street.
Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey visited the city and pledged to ask President Joe Biden to expedite a major disaster declaration to get aid flowing. Officials said federal assistance will be critical for communities such as Selma, where nearly 30% of the city's 18,000 residents live in poverty.
Located about 50 miles (80 kilometers) west of Montgomery, Alabama's capital, Selma was a flashpoint of the civil rights movement where state troopers viciously attacked Black people who marched non-violently for voting rights across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965.
Three factors — a natural La Nina weather cycle, warming of the Gulf of Mexico likely related to climate change and a decades-long eastward shift of tornado activity — combined to make Thursday’s unusual tornado outbreak, said Victor Gensini, a meteorology professor at Northern Illinois University who studies tornado trends.
Treasury Secretary tells Congress US projected to reach debt limit on Thursday
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen notified Congress on Friday that the U.S. is projected to reach its debt limit on Thursday and will then resort to “extraordinary measures” to avoid default.
In a letter to House and Senate leaders, Yellen said her actions will buy time until Congress can pass legislation that will either raise the debt limit or suspend it again for a period of time.
Those measures include delaying some payments, such as contributions to federal employees’ retirement plans, in order to provide some headroom to make other payments that are deemed essential, including those for Social Security and debt instruments.
“Failure to meet the government’s obligations would cause irreparable harm to the U.S. economy, the livelihoods of all Americans, and global financial stability,” she said. “Indeed, in the past, even threats that the U.S. government might fail to meet its obligations have caused real harms, including the only credit rating downgrade in the history of our nation in 2011.”
Yellen said that while Treasury can’t estimate how long the extraordinary measures will allow the U.S. to continue to pay the government’s obligations, “it is unlikely that cash and extraordinary measures will be exhausted before early June.”
The debate over raising the debt ceiling will almost certainly result in a political showdown between newly empowered GOP lawmakers who now control the House and President Joe Biden and Democrats, who had enjoyed one-party control of Washington for the past two years.
Past forecasts suggest a default could instantly bury the country in a deep recession, right at a moment of slowing global growth as the U.S. and much of the world face high inflation because of the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
US nuclear agency falls short on scheduling, cost estimates
The U.S. agency in charge of jumpstarting the production of key components for the nation’s nuclear arsenal is falling short when it comes to having a comprehensive schedule for the multibillion-dollar project.
The Government Accountability Office said in a report released Thursday that plans by the National Nuclear Security Administration for reestablishing plutonium pit production do not follow best practices and run the risk of delays and cost overruns.
The federal government has not manufactured plutonium cores regularly in more than 30 years and faces a congressionally mandated deadline of turning out at least 80 per year by 2030.
The GAO describes the modernization effort as the agency’s largest investment in weapons production infrastructure to date, noting that plutonium is a dangerous material and making the weapon cores is difficult and time consuming.
“NNSA lacks both a comprehensive cost estimate and a schedule outlining all activities it needs to achieve this capability,” the reports states.
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Nuclear watchdog groups have been voicing similar concerns since the federal government first announced plans in 2018 to restart production by splitting the work between Los Alamos National Laboratory in northern New Mexico and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
At stake are billions of dollars in funding for improving infrastructure at the two locations and thousands of jobs.
Democratic members of New Mexico's congressional delegation have fought to ensure Los Alamos — a once secret city that helped develop the atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project — would be among the benefactors of the lucrative mission.
Using documents prepared by the nuclear agency for justifying its fiscal year 2023 budget, the GAO identified at least $18 billion to $24 billion in potential costs to build up production capacity.
However, the GAO, other independent analysts and officials in the U.S. Defense Department all have testified in recent years that NNSA would miss the 2030 deadline, no matter how much funding was funneled toward the project.
The NNSA said in a statement Thursday that it agreed with the GAO's recommendations and that some of the work to implement best practices was underway.
“Both the lifecycle cost estimate data and (integrated master schedule) will be updated as needed to reflect the most up-to-date information as the projects and program work progress,” the agency said.
More specifically, the agency said in a letter to the GAO that it planned to complete the cost estimate for the overall project by September 2025 and that the schedule would “continue to mature over time.”
Greg Mello, director of the watchdog Los Alamos Study Group, said Thursday that not having a comprehensive schedule or cost estimate means NNSA does not know what it's doing and has little likelihood of success.
“How can NNSA produce the required number of pits on schedule or on budget, when NNSA has no schedule or budget?” he asked. “These are elementary, normal components in any program or project. After more than two decades of preparation, NNSA doesn’t have them.”
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Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, pointed to some of the price tags associated with the project having doubled over the last four years. He said production overall at the two sites could cost at least $60 billion over 30 years with radioactive waste disposal and other environmental and public health concerns adding to the bill.
Until Congress and the New Mexican delegation demand credible cost estimates and schedules, Coghlan said lawmakers “should stop rewarding the guilty with yet more money.”
"That is simple good governance that could help slow our sleepwalk into the new and unpredictable nuclear arms race,” he said.
Mello agreed, saying the mission needs to be widely debated in Congress, not just discussed behind closed doors or by those lawmakers who sit on defense committees.
In its report, the GAO outlined the process for making plutonium pits along with a history of how and where the work was done during the Cold War. The long-shuttered Rocky Flats Plant outside Denver was capable of producing more than 1,000 war reserve pits annually before work stopped in 1989 due to environmental and regulatory concerns.
With a long history of leaks, fires and other violations, Rocky Flats underwent a $7 billion cleanup that was finished in 2005.
During the Obama administration, a council made up of defense and energy officials told Congress the nation needed to produce between 50 and 80 pits per year. Congress included a legal mandate for production in a 2015 defense measure that was subsequently approved and signed by the president.
That mandate was later amended to call for the 80 pits in 2030. According to the GAO, some of the construction projects and upgrades needed for the work at Los Alamos won't be finished for several years.
US air travel returns to normal after technology breakdown
U.S. air travel returned mostly to normal Thursday, a day after a computer system that sends safety information to pilots broke down and grounded traffic from coast to coast.
By midafternoon on the East Coast, about 150 flights had been canceled and more than 3,700 delayed — much lower figures than on Wednesday, when more than 1,300 flights were scrubbed and 11,000 delayed.
Attention turned to the federal agency where the technology failure apparently started hours before it inconvenienced more than 1 million travelers.
The Federal Aviation Administration said a damaged database file appeared to have caused the outage in the safety-alert system. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg promised a thorough examination to avoid another major failure.
“Our immediate focus is technical — understanding exactly how this happened, why the redundancies and the backups that were build into the system were not able to prevent the level of disruption that we saw,” Buttigieg told reporters.
Buttigieg said there was no indication that the outage was caused by a cyberattack but that officials would not rule that out until they know more.
Read more: Flight disruptions cascade across US after computer outage
The FAA said late Thursday that a preliminary analysis showed the breakdown came after “a data file was damaged by personnel who failed to follow procedures.”
The massive disruption was the latest black eye for the agency, which has traded blame with airlines over who has inconvenienced passengers more. Critics, including airline and tourism leaders, say agency technology is underfunded.
“Investment is going to be required, no doubt,” American Airlines CEO Robert Isom told CNBC. “It’s going to be billions of dollars, and it’s not something that is done overnight.”
United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby has been critical of the FAA on a variety of issues, including staffing of air traffic controllers. He says the agency makes “a heroic effort” and does well most of the time but can be overwhelmed during busy travel times.
“They need more investment for technology,” Kirby said at a U.S. Chamber of Commerce event in September. “They have been saying it."
Rep. Rick Larsen of Washington state, the top Democrat on a House aviation subcommittee, said the outage shows the weakness of the FAA's technology and that the agency needs to make significant improvements.
“It's one thing to get things up and going on the old software,” Larsen said in an interview. “It's another thing to invest in the new software platforms that are necessary to ensure this doesn't happen again.”
Mike McCormick, a former FAA manager of airspace security who retired in 2017 after about 35 years at the agency, was more confident in FAA technology. He said the agency modernized computer systems over the past 15 years and is 95% up to date, having upgraded to next-generation satellite-based systems for navigation, flight tracking and communication.
“Software, hardware, the final upgrades, were completed in the last three years, so now they’re actually working on the next generation beyond that and the enhancements to the systems,” said McCormick, who now teaches air-traffic management at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.
The system that generates NOTAMs — or Notice to Air Missions — also was upgraded, but the outage happened as an engineer was working on the main system and the database somehow became corrupted, McCormick said, citing conversations with people at the FAA.
When they switched to the backup system, its database also was corrupted, McCormick said. The system then had to be rebooted.
Read more: Number of flights canceled by Southwest Airlines is growing
“Things can still go wrong,” McCormick said. “You can still have human error, you can still have procedural errors, you can still have technological errors.”
Michael Huerta, FAA administrator from 2013 to 2018, said the systems need to be updated constantly to keep up with technology. Nothing in the FAA system is so old that it's in danger of failing, he said, especially the system that tracks and communicates with planes.
“The public should definitely be confident that the air traffic control system is safe,” he said.
But the NOTAM system is about a decade old when systems reach the point where vendors don't support it or the platform that it runs on has been upgraded.
“It's not a one-and-done type of event,” he said. “It's not very many years that go by before you have to upgrade it.”
The outage came at a bad time for both the FAA and Buttigieg.
The FAA is trying to repair its reputation after being widely criticized for the way it approved the Boeing 737 Max without fully understanding a flight-control system that malfunctioned and played a key role in two crashes that killed 346 people. The agency took a more hands-on approach when considering — and eventually improving — changes that Boeing made to get the plane back in the air.
The meltdown at an agency overseen by the Transportation Department could also undercut Buttigieg’s moral authority to chastise airlines when they cancel or delay flights. He has gone after the airlines since last summer, most recently over disruptions at Southwest Airlines.
Wednesday's breakdown showed how much American air travel depends on the computer system that generates NOTAMs.
Before a plane takes off, pilots and airline dispatchers must review the notices, which include details about weather, runway closures or other temporary factors that could affect the flight. The system was once telephone-based but moved online years ago.
Buttigieg said when the system broke down Tuesday night, a backup system went into effect. The FAA tried a complete reboot of the main system Wednesday morning, but that failed, leading the FAA to take the rare step of preventing planes from taking off.
Storms, tornadoes slam US South, killing at least 7 people
A giant, swirling storm system billowing across the South on Thursday killed at least six people in central Alabama, where a tornado ripped roofs off homes and uprooted trees in historic Selma, while another person was killed in Georgia, where severe winds knocked out power to tens of thousands of people.
In Autauga County, Alabama, 41 miles (66 kilometers) northeast of Selma, at least six fatalities were confirmed and an estimated 40 homes were damaged or destroyed by a tornado that cut a 20-mile (32-kilometer) path across two rural communities, said Ernie Baggett, the county’s emergency management director.
Several mobile homes were launched into the air and at least 12 people were injured severely enough to be taken to hospitals by emergency responders, Baggett told The Associated Press. He said crews were focused Thursday night on cutting through downed trees to look for people who may need help.
“It really did a good bit of damage. This is the worst that I’ve seen here in this county,” Baggett said.
In Georgia, a passenger died when a tree fell on a vehicle in Jackson during the storm, Butts County Coroner Lacey Prue said. In the same county southeast of Atlanta, the storm appeared to have knocked a freight train off its tracks, officials said.
Democrats question worker safety in Amazon warehouse rebuildNationwide, there were 33 separate tornado reports Thursday from the National Weather Service as of Thursday evening, with a handful of tornado warnings still in effect in Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina. However, the reports were not yet confirmed and some of them could later be classified as wind damage after assessments are done in coming days.
In Selma, a city etched in the history of the civil rights movement, a tornado cut a wide path through the downtown area, where brick buildings collapsed, oak trees were uprooted, cars were on their side and power lines were left dangling. Plumes of thick, black smoke rose over the city from a fire burning. It wasn’t immediately known whether the storm caused the blaze.
Selma Mayor James Perkins said no fatalities have been reported, but several people were seriously injured. First responders were continuing to assess the damage and officials hoped to get an aerial view of the city Friday morning.
A large tornado damaged homes and uprooted trees in Alabama Thursday as a powerful storm system pushed through the South. (Jan 12) “We have a lot of downed power lines,” he said. “There is a lot of danger on the streets.”
With widespread power outages, the Selma City Council held a meeting on the sidewalk, using lights from cellphones, to declare a state of emergency. A high school was opened as a shelter, officials said.
Mattie Moore was among Selma residents who picked up boxed meals offered by a charity downtown.
“Thank God that we’re here. It’s like something you see on TV,” Moore said of all the destruction.
A city of about 18,000 people, Selma is about 50 miles (80 kilometers) west of the Alabama capital of Montgomery. It was a flashpoint of the civil rights movement and where Alabama state troopers viciously attacked Black people advocating for voting rights as they marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on March 7, 1965.
After the tornado passed, Krishun Moore emerged from her home to the sound of children crying and screaming. She and her mother encouraged the kids to keep screaming until they found the two of them on top of the roof of a damaged apartment. She estimated the kids were about 1 and 4 years old. Both of them are OK, she said through Facebook messenger.
Malesha McVay drove parallel to the tornado with her family. She said it got less than a mile (less than 2 kilometers) from her home before suddenly turning.
“We stopped and we prayed. We followed it and prayed,” she said. “It was a 100% God thing that it turned right before it hit my house.”
She took video of the giant twister, which would turn black as it swept away home after home.
“It would hit a house, and black smoke would swirl up,” she said. “It was very terrifying.”
About 40,000 customers were without power in Alabama on Thursday night, according to PowerOutage.us, which tracks outages nationwide. In Georgia, about 86,000 customers were without electricity after the storm system carved a path across a tier of counties just south of Atlanta.
The storm hit in Griffin, south of Atlanta, with winds damaging a shopping area, local news outlets reported. A Hobby Lobby store partially lost its roof, and at least one car was flipped in the parking lot of a nearby Walmart.
Damage was also reported west of downtown Atlanta in Douglas County and Cobb County, with Cobb County government posting a damage report showing a crumbled cinder block wall at a warehouse in suburban Austell.
In Kentucky, the National Weather Service in Louisville confirmed that an EF-1 tornado struck Mercer County and said crews were surveying damage in a handful of other counties.
Three factors — a natural La Nina weather cycle, warming of the Gulf of Mexico likely related to climate change and a decades-long shift of tornadoes from the west to east — came together to make Thursday’s tornado outbreak unusual and damaging, said Victor Gensini, a meteorology professor at Northern Illinois University who studies tornado trends.
The La Nina, a cooling of parts of the Pacific that changes weather worldwide, was a factor in making a wavy jet stream that brought a cold front through, Gensini said. But that’s not enough for a tornado outbreak. What’s needed is moisture.
Normally the air in the Southeast is fairly dry this time of year but the dew point was twice what is normal, likely because of unusually warm water in the Gulf of Mexico, which is likely influenced by climate change. That moisture hit the cold front and everything was in place, Gensini said.
Storm-weary Californians clean up, brace for another torrent
Laurie Morse shoveled wet sand into bags in the pouring rain Wednesday, preparing to stack them along her garage in a last ditch effort to keep out a rising creek on California’s central coast, as the storm-ravaged state braced for another round of lashing rains and damaging winds.
Morse's roof was leaking, and along with her neighbors near Santa Cruz, she’s spent every day of 2023 trying to figure out how to keep her house dry after an unrelenting onslaught of violent weather caused widespread damage over the past two weeks. Cars were submerged, trees uprooted and roofs blown off homes.
While the rain eased in many areas, thunderstorms led yet another atmospheric river into the northern half of the state and forecasters said the latest system would be followed by more storms this weekend and next week. From the San Francisco Bay Area down to Los Angeles, Californians had little time to rest between assessing damage from the last storm and preparing for the next.
Earlier this week, Morse and her fellow residents of tiny Rio Del Mar were ordered to evacuate as hillsides collapsed and massive logs and stumps tumbled down the bloated Aptos Creek from the Santa Cruz mountains into the Monterey Bay.
Now they were scrambling to clean up while simultaneously stacking sandbags and hoping for the best as the rain got heavier.
“It’s one step forward and two steps back right now,” said Morse, 59, a disabled Army veteran. “There’s so much damage already."
The plume of moisture lurking off the northern coast stretched all the way over the Pacific to Hawaii, making the atmospheric river “a true Pineapple Express,” the National Weather Service said.
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Michael Anderson, climatologist with the Department of Water Resources, said California has been hit by seven storms since the end of December and two more slightly weaker ones were expected before the state gets a reprieve by the end of next week.
“The challenge is they’re storms eight and nine in the sequence and the cumulative effect is likely to cause impacts larger than the storms themselves might cause,” Anderson said.
At least 18 people have died in the storms battering the state. The figure is likely to rise, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Tuesday during a visit to the scenic town of Capitola, just up the Santa Cruz coast from Rio Del Mar, that was hard hit by flooding creek waters. Raging surf destroyed an iconic pier.
A 43-year-old woman was found dead Wednesday in her submerged car a day after calling 911 to say the vehicle was stuck in floodwaters north of San Francisco, according to the Sonoma County Sheriff's Office. When the search resumed at sunrise, divers discovered the car under about 10 feet (3 meters) of water off a rural road near Forestville, the department said.
More than half of California’s 58 counties were declared disaster areas and repairing the damage may cost more than $1 billion, according to Brian Ferguson, spokesperson for the state Office of Emergency Services.
Crews worked to reopen major highways that were closed by rockslides, swamped by flooding or smothered with mud while more than 10,000 people who were ordered out of seaside towns on the central coast were allowed to return home.
That included Montecito, a wealthy Santa Barbara County community that is home to Prince Harry and other celebrities where 23 people died and more than 100 homes were destroyed in a mudslide five years ago.
This week’s storm brought back harrowing memories for Montecito resident Susanne Tobey, who was rescued when the 2018 mudslide roared through her community.
Like five years ago, when the community was asked to evacuate on Monday, the only highway out was closed, she said. “It was terrifying,” she said of the latest storm. “I don’t think I slept the whole night and the rain was ... you just can’t imagine. It’s like just living in a waterfall.” But even with yet another storm on its way, Tobey said she plans to stay put again.
She said the community has made improvements that she hopes will prevent a similar tragedy, including adding steel nets to catch falling boulders, and debris basins to catch the deluge before it overtakes the hillsides that plunge into the Pacific Ocean.
“You have to be brave to live in California,” she said, adding: “I can’t imagine living anywhere else.”
High in the Eastern Sierra, California Department of Transportation snowplows were running around the clock to fully reopen U.S. 395, which at one time was blocked by 75 miles (121 kilometers) of snow, ice and rocks. The Palisades Tahoe ski resort reported that it had received 300 inches (7.6 meters) of snowfall so far this season.
Despite the precipitation, most of the state remained in extreme or severe drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
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Mudslides damaged some homes in pricey Los Angeles hillside areas, while further up the coast a sinkhole damaged 15 homes in the rural community of Orcutt.
Kevin Costner, best-actor winner in a television drama series for “Yellowstone,” was unable to attend Tuesday’s Golden Globe awards in LA because of the weather. Presenter Regina Hall said he was sheltering in place in Santa Barbara due to flooding.
In San Francisco, a tree fell on a commuter bus on Tuesday without causing injuries and lightning struck the city’s iconic Transamerica Pyramid building without damage. In South San Francisco, high winds also ripped away part of the roof on a large apartment building.
Crews wielding chainsaws were working around the clock to clear all the downed trees across the Bay Area. Arborist Remy Hummer said he expected many more trees to fall as rains returned.
“The soil is basically like a sponge, and at some point he can’t hold any more water and trees become essentially almost buoyant in the soil and very loose. And then you get the combinations of high winds and that’s when you get tree failures, meaning full trees uprooting and falling over," he said