Biden to announce over $600M in Florida resiliency projects following hurricanes
(WASHINGTON) — President Joe Biden will travel on Sunday to Florida areas ravaged by the back-to-back hurricanes, and announce federal funding for projects to strengthen the electrical grid, according to the White House.
Biden will be touring St. Petersburg, one of the hardest hit Florida cities from Hurricane Milton last week, and reveal $612 million for six Department of Energy projects in the southeast.
Two of the projects are focused in Florida and provide a combined $94M in federal funds, according to the White House.
Gainesville Regional Utilities will use the funding to help mitigate the effects of increasingly extreme weather in north central Florida, “through storm hardening, as well as faster restoration through deployment of self-healing devices and tools that will enable more efficient and precise dispatching of field teams during outages,” the White House said in a statement.
Switched Source, a private utility technology developer, will work with Florida Power and Light to deploy Phase-EQ, which “optimizes power flow in distribution circuits, will unlock over 200 MW of system capacity, and improve reliability on circuits serving communities that are most susceptible to prolonged outages,” according to the White House.
“These investments are part of the president’s commitment to making long-term investments that protect, enhance, and upgrade our nation’s electric grid, especially in the face of extreme weather events,” the White House said in a statement.
Hurricane Milton made landfall in Florida as a Category 3 storm on Wednesday evening. At least 16 people were killed in the storm and over a million remain without power.
Biden has spoken to numerous state and local officials, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who he said was “very cooperative.” When asked if he would meet with DeSantis on Sunday, Biden said yes so long as the governor was available.
(ATMORE, Ala.) — Alabama carried out the second-ever nitrogen gas execution in the United States on Thursday.
Alan Eugene Miller, 59, was sentenced to death for the 1999 murders of his then-coworkers Lee Holdbrooks and Christoper Scott Yancy, and his former supervisor Terry Lee Jarvis.
Miller was executed after 6 p.m. CT at the William C. Holman Correctional Facility, a state prison in Atmore, Alabama. His time of death, according to Gov. Kay Ivey’s office, was 6:38 p.m.
“Justice has been served,” Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said in a statement. “After two decades, Alan Miller was finally put to death for a depraved murder spree that cruelly took the lives of three innocent men.
“I ask the people of Alabama to join me in praying for the families and friends of the victims, that they might now find peace and closure,” Marshall’s statement concluded.
Miller was initially sentenced to be executed in September 2022 via lethal injection, but it was called off after officials had trouble inserting an intravenous line to administer the fatal drugs and were concerned they would not be able to do so before the death warrant expired.
Prior to the botched execution, the state had considered carrying out the death sentence via nitrogen hypoxia, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit that provides data and analysis on capital punishment.
In November 2022, Alabama officials agreed not to execute Miller by lethal injection again but said if they made a second effort, the state would use nitrogen hypoxia as the method, the DPIC said.
In May 2024, the Alabama State Supreme Court agreed to let the Department of Corrections carry out Miller’s death sentence by nitrogen hypoxia.
It comes after Alabama became the first state to execute a prisoner, Kenneth Eugene Smith, by nitrogen gas in January of this year.
Nitrogen hypoxia is the term for a means of death caused by breathing in enough nitrogen gas to deprive the body of oxygen — in this case, intended to be used as a method of execution.
The protocol in Alabama calls for an inmate to be strapped to a gurney and fitted with a mask and a breathing tube. The mask is meant to administer 100% pure nitrogen, depriving the person of oxygen until they die.
About 78% of the air that humans breathe is made up of nitrogen gas, which may lead people to believe that nitrogen is not harmful, according to the U.S. Chemical Safety Board.
However, when an environment contains too much nitrogen and the concentration of oxygen becomes too low, the body’s organs, which need oxygen to function, begin shutting down and a person dies.
State officials have argued death by nitrogen gas is a humane, painless form of execution and that the person would lose consciousness within seconds of inhaling the nitrogen and die within minutes.
Three states — Alabama, Mississippi and Oklahoma — have approved nitrogen gas as a form of execution and Ohio lawmakers introduced a bill earlier this year to allow execution by nitrogen gas.
However, medical and legal experts have told ABC News that nitrogen gas as a method for execution is untested and there’s no evidence the method is any more humane or painless than lethal injection.
Dr. Joel Zivot, an associate professor in the department of anesthesiology at Emory University School of Medicine, said he reviewed Smith’s autopsy which showed blueness of the skin, pulmonary congestion and edema, which he says indicated that he died from being asphyxiated “slowly and painfully.”
“If that’s what Alabama thinks is a job well done, well then there seems to be a wide disagreement on what a job well-done means,” he told ABC News. “So, if this is again, what they intend, then they intend to kill him cruelly, and they will intend to kill Alan Miller in the same cruel way.”
Zivot has previously reported analyzing autopsies after lethal injection cases and reports finding that many show signs of pulmonary edema. In 2020, NPR said it expanded this work by analyzing over 200 autopsies after lethal injection and reported that signs of pulmonary edema were mentioned in 84% of the cases it reviewed.
Attorney General Steve Marshall described Smith’s execution as “textbook” but Zivot said it’s hard to describe nitrogen hypoxia as “textbook” and that it’s a “proven method” when it’s never been a tested method.
“I recognize that [people were] murdered and that what is at stake here is a very, very serious problem,” he said. “We’re not saying that Kenneth Smith or Alan Miller have become saint-like men as they have been incarcerated. It doesn’t matter whether they’re good or bad at this point with respect to how their punishment should be delivered. That doesn’t give us license to torture them.”
(NEW YORK) — Federal prosecutors requested an indefinite delay Wednesday in scheduling the trial for the man charged in an apparent assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump at his Florida golf course last month, citing a massive amount of evidence they’ve gathered in the 17 days since Ryan Routh’s arrest.
In a filing Wednesday afternoon requesting Florida District Judge Aileen Cannon officially designate Routh’s case as “complex,” prosecutors revealed new details about the scope of evidence they’ve amassed as they try to further gain insight into Routh’s actions leading up to his suspected attempt to kill Trump.
“Over the past two weeks, the United States has interviewed hundreds of witnesses,” prosecutors said in the filing. “It has also executed 13 search warrants in Florida, Hawaii, and North Carolina, and seized hundreds of items of evidence, including multiple electronic devices.”
Investigators reportedly have more than 100 outstanding subpoena returns in connection with the investigation, the filing states, and they estimate they have “thousands of videos to review” from the large volume of electronic devices seized thus far.
“All videos, still images, text files, and audio files constitute approximately 4,000 terabytes (4 million gigabytes) of digital review to complete,” the filing says.
The FBI also continues to conduct forensic tests on other evidence, including “ballistics testing, and fingerprint and DNA comparisons,” which will likely require them to prepare several expert witnesses to testify about in advance of Routh’s eventual trial.
The filing states Routh’s defense attorneys did not oppose the government’s request to indefinitely delay his trial date.
Routh, 58, appeared in federal court in West Palm Beach, Florida, on Monday for his arraignment on attempted assassination charges. Routh’s lawyers entered a not guilty plea on his behalf.
Routh had previously been charged with possession of a firearm as a convicted felon and possession of a firearm with an obliterated serial number for the incident that took place at Trump International Golf Club on Sept. 15.
On the day of the alleged attempted assassination, Trump was playing golf on the course when a Secret Service agent spotted a gun barrel poking out from the tree line near the sixth green, according to investigators.
The agent then fired in the direction of the rifle and saw Routh fleeing the area and entering his nearby vehicle, according to the criminal complaint filed in the case.
(MAUI, Hawaii.) –Scientists say they still don’t understand the full extent of the damage the Maui wildfires did to the corals and marine ecosystem off the west coast of the island.
After an initial blaze sparked into a weeklong series of wildfires, the needs of those on land — resulting from at least 100 people dead or missing as well as entire neighborhoods obliterated — remained the priority in the months following, leaving little resources left to monitor the marine environment, researchers told ABC News.
“We almost felt like it was even inappropriate at first to talk about the research we were doing, just because there was so much pain on our island,” Liz Yannell, program manager at Hui O Ka Wai Ola, a citizen science network based in Maui, told ABC News.
The immediate concern for the coastlines was the debris that was washing into the water offshore, as well as any ash and other toxins that affect air and water quality being carried by the smoke, John Starmer, science director at the Maui Nui Marine Resource Council, told ABC News. In addition, the boats that sank were leaking fuel and other chemicals into the Pacific Ocean.
The murky water appeared so precarious that “nobody wanted to get in” to examine it, Starmer said.
“It was difficult to really get a sense of what the conditions were,” he said.
Researchers initially used a remotely operated vehicle and artificial intelligence to map the reefs off the coastline. Once there was less fear about contamination levels in the water, researchers began to conduct dive surveys. They have been testing the water quality for a suite of samples for metals and other general water quality parameters, like nutrients, Andrea Kealoha, assistant professor in the Department of Oceanography at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, told ABC News.
It was clear from the onset of the fire recovery that the cleanup efforts would be long, difficult and arduous and that the wildfires would have lasting environmental impacts on the island.
When the fires struck, environmental advocates feared the first big rain that would come in the wet season — typically in November, which would have been just three months after the wildfires, Yannell said.
But mother nature was on Maui’s side this time, with the “first flush” not occurring until Jan. 10, giving crews much more time to clear piles of debris, she added.
Still, despite the delayed rains, massive plumes of sediment washed over the reefs in the runoff when the first big storm moved through, Starmer said.
“Once it hits the water, you can’t really do anything about it,” he said.
Researchers say they have found metals in the water — such as copper, which is often used to prevent barnacles from growing on boats.
Despite the widespread devastation and the gargantuan cleanup mission, there is no evidence that the corals or marine ecosystem as a whole in West Maui were physically damaged as a result of the fire, the researchers said.
Visually, there are no impacts, Kealoha said.
“That doesn’t mean that we’re out of the woods yet,” Starmer said.
The Scripps Institution of Oceanography has established a monitoring site in Launiupoko, just south of Lahaina and adjacent to the dump site where they are putting the wildfire debris, following concern expressed in the local community about contamination from that dump impacting the nearby reefs at Launiupoko and Olowalu, the marine research institution announced last week.
Researchers cautioned against conflating the current lack of evidence with the possibility that the marine ecosystem in West Maui were left unscathed by the wildfires in the longterm.
Continued testing is starting to present evidence that there is chemical pollution and other residual environmental consequences of the fires, Starmer said. The toxins are likely bioaccumulating and moving up the food chain, with some fish testing positive for PCBs and PAHs — industrial chemicals — he added.
Complicating monitoring efforts is the fact that wildfires — especially urban fires than contain man-made chemicals — rarely occur near reef systems. Therefore, the researchers don’t know what to expect. They barely know what they’re looking for, they said.
“There’s not any substantial research that was easy to find about urban fires next to coastal waters and what that means for a coral reef ecosystem that’s already so delicate and already struggling,” Yannell said.
Globally, coral reef systems are struggling due to stressors like pollution and increasing ocean temperatures. Overall, the longterm health of the marine ecosystem in West Maui is unclear, and marine researchers will continue their quest to understand how the corals were affected and attempt to prevent runoff contaminated with toxins from rushing into the ocean.
But signs of a recovering marine ecosystem are present. The humpback whales have returned to the region on their annual migration routes, monk seals have taken up residence on their favorite beaches and crabs have reclaimed their favorite spots along the shore, Yannell said.
One of the silver linings of the wildfire aftermath is the reefs have “had a break from people,” such as tourists and surfers, similarly to what happened during the isolation measures of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kealoha said.
“While the world above water has completely changed, the reefs look fairly healthy and comparable to pre-fire coral cover data,” Orion McCarthy, a marine biologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, said in a statement. “It’s still too early to say there is no impact.”