Snow, record heat and possible tornadoes in crazy US weather forecast

(BELLEVUE, Wash.) — Two people have been killed by falling trees in Washington state as a powerful storm hits the Pacific Northwest.

In Bellevue, a tree fell into a home, hitting and killing a woman while she was in the shower Tuesday night, Bellevue fire officials said.

In Lynwood, a woman in her 50s was killed when a tree fell on a homeless encampment, officials said.

More than 500,000 customers are without power in Washington state on Wednesday.

The storm exploded into a bomb cyclone off the coast, near Vancouver Island, Canada, where winds gusted near 101 mph.

A bomb cyclone means the pressure in the center of the storm drops 24 millibars within 24 hours.

Wind gusts reached 50 to 84 mph from Northern California to Washington.

As the storm sits and spins over the ocean this week, it will help to push a plume of Pacific moisture called an atmospheric river into Oregon and Northern California.

Alerts are in effect through Friday for flooding, snow, avalanches and high winds.

Some places could see more than 1 foot of rain this week. A flood watch has been issued in Northern California.

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(NEW YORK) — Asheville, North Carolina, has been called a potential safe haven for climate refugees by real estate researchers, praised for its temperate mountain weather, distance far from the coast, experiencing less extreme heat and fewer wildfires.

The city of around 95,000 people was believed markings of a place where those escaping the harsh impacts of the climate crisis could go for safety.

Certainly, there are locations that are going to be able to withstand some of those impacts more than others, according to Dave Reidmiller, the director of the Gulf of Maine Research Institute’s Climate Center.

However, the fatal floods and landslides seen after Helene ripped through Buncombe County, which encompasses Asheville, highlight that “no place is truly untouched by climate change, anywhere in the world,” said Reidmiller. Asheville is nearly 400 miles away from where the storm made landfall in Florida last Thursday.

Experts say human-caused climate change has caused an increase in rainfall, increasing the severity and frequency of rainfall events, and more across the country. As extreme weather worsens amid global heating, the crisis is displacing people not just in the U.S., but around the world.

Because of this, Antonia Sebastian, a professor at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Depar​tment of Earth, Marine and Environmental Sciences, doesn’t believe in climate havens.

The designation of a “climate haven” has been denounced by climate experts, who told ABC News that it’s not a widely accepted or official term and that the criteria is unclear.

“Climate change is sort of a pervasive issue that is going to affect communities all over the world — not equally — but definitely it will impact everyone, everywhere in some way,” Sebastian told ABC News.

Helene, which made landfall in Florida’s Big Bend region as a massive Category 4 hurricane, was the strongest hurricane to make landfall in the Big Bend on record. It traveled inland, hitting not just Florida, but also Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee.

Helene dumped more than 30 inches of rain on North Carolina, producing the biggest local flooding in recorded history. The path of the storm’s devastation has spanned more than 600 miles.

More than 30 people are dead and 600 people remain unaccounted for in hard-hit Buncombe County, according to county officials.

“When you get a really extreme rainfall in mountainous regions, you see flooding, you see the potential for landslides. You see a lot more road washouts than you might in a coastal area with the same kind of storm. That’s that elevation component. The topography component really adds to the severity of the flooding that that people experience,” Sebastian said.

“It’s really not only the volume of water that’s really out like astounding — we’re talking thousand-year-levels of rainfall by some measures — but it’s the ferocity with which that water is flowing, the speed and the real intensity of the flood that they had to experience out there,” she noted.

Across Helene’s path, more than 100 people have been killed.

Kristina Dahl, senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, argues that society needs to move away from viewing some groups as refugees of the climate crisis and instead acknowledge the need for everyone to invest in measures that will make communities and individuals more resilient to extreme weather.

“What folks have experienced over the last few days of Hurricane Helene is unprecedented and terrifying, they’re certainly not alone in experiencing it,” Dahl said in an interview.

The international think-tank Institute for Economics & Peace estimates that 1.2 billion people could be displaced globally by 2050.

Despite Asheville’s status as a climate resilient city, Amber Weaver, its sustainability officer, announced earlier this year that it was in the process of developing a resilience assessment to adapt to the growing list of major climate-related dangers.

Reidmiller urged cities nationwide to invest in climate change mitigation and preparedness, adding that the cost of climate change — in both damages and human life — will continue to add up unless action is taken.

“You pay, frankly, pay for climate readiness now, or Mother Nature is going to charge you later with interest,” Reidmiller told ABC News. “As we rebuild, we kind of need to ask ourselves, do we need to rebuild higher, stronger, with different permitting and regulatory requirements to make sure that what we are building back is more capable of withstanding these stronger, more intense, more frequent, longer lasting, greater-in-spatial scale events?”

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(NEW YORK) — The owner of a day care where a 1-year-old boy died of fentanyl poisoning and three other children were sickened pleaded guilty Tuesday to federal charges, resolving a case that horrified New York City and underscored the scourge of the nation’s fentanyl epidemic.

Grei Mendez pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to distribute narcotics resulting in death and serious bodily injury, one count of possession with intent to distribute narcotics resulting in death and one count of possession with intent to distribute narcotics resulting in serious bodily injury. The three counts carry a minimum of 20 years in prison and a maximum of life in prison.

Prosecutors said the children were poisoned because Mendez, her husband and a co-conspirator chose to operate a large-scale fentanyl packaging and distribution facility inside her day care, which she ran out of a small apartment in the Bronx.

On the afternoon of Sept. 15, 2023, when 1-year-old Nicholas Dominici and another child became unresponsive, prosecutors said Mendez placed a series of phone calls: first to the community center that had referred the children to the day care, then to her husband, and then 911.

Moments after Mendez called 911, but before emergency personnel arrived, prosecutors said her husband was seen on surveillance camera rushing through the front door and then leaving out of the back of the building with two heavy bags.

Nicholas died from the fentanyl and three other children — ranging in age from 8 months to 2 years — were hospitalized and treated with Narcan, police said.

At the day care, authorities discovered a one-kilogram brick of fentanyl, two kilo press machines and two trap doors that revealed concealed compartments under the floor tiles of the playroom, authorities said.

Inside the traps were more than 11 kilograms of drugs, including fentanyl and heroin, as well as tools used to brand, package, distribute and traffic narcotics, the indictment said.

Federal prosecutors said they have surveillance footage and a voice message in which Mendez said that running a day care is not her “thing” in order to prove that the facility was a front for the narcotics operation.

“Grei Mendez has just admitted she conspired to maintain and distribute large quantities of dangerously toxic fentanyl in a Bronx Daycare center, a place where parents expected their children would be protected and safe,” Damian Williams, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement Tuesday.

“This case has shown the senseless collateral damage caused by the fentanyl epidemic, and should remind us all that the demand for illegal narcotics so often puts innocent bystanders at risk while drug traffickers ruthlessly pursue profits,” Williams added.

Earlier this month, Mendez’s husband, Felix Herrera Garcia, was sentenced to 45 years in prison after pleading guilty to federal drug charges. The third co-conspirator has also pleaded guilty.

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