(NEW YORK) — The hottest weather of the season is spreading across the eastern half of the U.S. — with cities in the Northeast in the bull’s-eye on Wednesday — after baking the Midwest with extreme temperatures early in the week.
Chicago’s actual temperature hit 99 degrees on Tuesday, breaking the city’s daily record of 97 degrees. The heat index — what temperature it feels like with humidity — soared to a scorching 115 degrees in Chicago on Tuesday.
On Wednesday, heat advisories are in effect from St. Louis, Missouri, to New York City. An excessive heat warning was issued in Philadelphia, where the heat index could hit 105 degrees.
The heat index is forecast to rise Wednesday to 106 degrees in Baltimore, Maryland; 103 in Washington, D.C.; and 97 in New York City.
The final tennis major of the year, the U.S. Open, which is underway in New York City, is operating under an “extreme weather policy,” with stadium roofs partially closed and extended breaks for players.
More than a dozen cities could shatter their record high temperatures, including Washington, D.C., if it reaches 100 degrees.
The extreme temperatures will end in the Northeast on Thursday, but will linger in the Ohio Valley and Tennessee Valley through Friday.
On Thursday, the heat index is forecast to climb to 104 degrees in Nashville, Tennessee, and Columbia, South Carolina; 102 degrees in Raleigh, North Carolina, and Louisville, Kentucky; and 105 degrees in Greenville, Mississippi.
Record highs are possible Thursday in cities including Nashville and Louisville.
There are hundreds of deaths each year in the U.S. due to excessive heat, according to CDC WONDER, an online database, and scientists caution that the actual number of heat-related deaths is likely higher.
Last year marked the most heat-related deaths in the U.S. on record, according to JAMA, a peer-reviewed medical journal published by the American Medical Association.
(GREENSBORO, N.C.) — A 19-year-old woman has been found dead on a picnic table under a pavilion at a park in North Carolina, police say.
The woman was found on Sunday at approximately 7:27 p.m. when officers from the Greensboro Police Department responded to the 2900 block of Haig Street after a caller expressed concern about “a person lying on a picnic table under a pavilion in the park at that location,” according to a statement from the Greensboro Police Department detailing the incident.
“The caller advised that the person was not moving. The caller said they had heard what they thought were fireworks about an hour earlier,” the statement said. “On closer inspection, the caller reported that the person was not breathing and had injuries that the caller described as gunshot wounds.”
Responding officers immediately went to the scene where they located the victim — later identified as 19-year-old Jakala Marie Goode — and pronounced her deceased at the scene.
Police are investigating Goode’s death as a homicide but did not disclose any potential motives or suspects in the case.
This is the 22nd homicide in Greensboro this year and police are asking for anybody with information to call Greensboro/Guilford Crime Stoppers at 336-373-1000.
All tips to Crime Stoppers are completely anonymous and the investigation is currently ongoing.
(LOS ANGELES) — Los Angeles County is choosing to continue with the “care first, jails last” approach when addressing the more than 75,000 individuals experiencing homelessness in the county, despite recent pressure from California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom.
“We can’t arrest our way out of what’s going on in the streets,” said L.A. Board Supervisor Kathryn Barger, who is one of five board members who unanimously voted this week against Newsom’s executive order on dismantling homeless encampments across the state.
In his executive order on July 25, Newsom announced $24 billion in funding given to local governments across the state to address widespread homeless encampments, saying in a statement there are “simply no more excuses. It’s time for everyone to do their part.”
The governor’s order follows the Supreme Court’s landmark City of Grants Pass, Oregon, v. Johnson decision in June that gave localities the justification to fine and arrest people for sleeping outdoors on public property.
Barger maintained that she’s not at odds with Newsom’s order but rather supporting the ongoing work the board and its partners have been doing to solve the homelessness crisis in the county.
“The concern we have is if we’re not all on the same page, as it relates to how the Grants Pass decision impacts the ability to clean up encampments, we are going to be just moving people from one city to another,” Barger said of the 88 municipalities within Los Angeles County.
Showing a united front with the board of supervisors, L.A. County Sheriff Robert Luna said during the meeting Tuesday, “Being homeless is not a crime, and we will maintain our focus on criminal behavior rather than an individual’s status.”
Barger believes the pathway to permanent results for the county’s unhoused population is paved with outreach, mental health services and job training, which she says “gets lost” in the conversation.
The “Care First, Jails Last” investment is the Measure J ballot initiative approved by voters in 2020 to set aside at least 10% of existing locally controlled, unrestricted revenues to be directed to community investment and alternatives to incarceration.
Within the measure is the Care First Community Investment (CFCI), which has received $88.3 million in annual allocation from the Board of Supervisors.
Additionally, the Sheriff’s Department’s Homeless Outreach Services Team (HOST) is a group of law enforcement officers who work with homeless services agencies to help people experiencing homelessness.
Supervisor Hilda Solis told ABC News the law enforcement partnership “has been an integral partner in our Care First approach.”
“Since their establishment, HOST has never resorted to arrests to address encampments in the public’s right of way or that pose a public health concern,” Solis said.
Despite pressure at the state level, Los Angeles City has in fact seen fewer people living on the streets in the last year.
The L.A. City Controller’s office confirmed to ABC News the city saw a 10,000-person decrease in the unhoused population between 2023 and 2024.
This month, the nonprofit policy organization RAND released a 2023 study that showed that in areas with frequent encampment clearings, those encampments returned within two to three months.
After mass clearings of the homeless encampments in the Venice Beach area of Los Angeles, the share of unhoused people jumped from 20% to 46%, according to the study.
In a report released in June 2024, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) found that LA Municipal Code 41.18, which allows for encampment removal in certain areas, isn’t effective at reducing encampments or helping to house people — while costing over $3 million in two years, not including enforcement costs.
“I’ve never seen incarceration work to end homelessness, I’ve only seen that extend homelessness,” Downtown Women’s Center CEO Amy Turk told ABC News.
The Downtown Women’s Center (DWC) is a nonprofit organization in Los Angeles focused on serving women and gender-diverse individuals experiencing homelessness.
Turk has worked directly with the unhoused population in Los Angeles for two decades, providing trauma-informed outreach, shelter and helping people towards permanent housing.
“When I’ve seen people move toward criminalization, dismantling an encampment and offering no place for people to go, then what you see is people move from one plot of land to another plot of land, and you’re not solving anything.”
However, others say the county and local organizations’ efforts to keep people off the streets are not noticeable on the ground floor, where encampments, they say, continue to impede the lives of other residents.
“I think it’s very clear that the programs and policies both at the city level and the county level, have failed to reduce the number of people on the streets in a significant and sustainable way,” Paul Webster, executive director of the Los Angeles Alliance for Human Rights (LAAHR), told ABC News.
“Residents, business owners and even people experiencing homelessness themselves, have for years have been told that things are improving and that the city and the county have enacted programs that would end homelessness in Los Angeles, and for years, that has not come to pass,” Webster added.
In 2020, LAAHR sued the City and County of Los Angeles, claiming that the city’s leaders were not doing enough to address the homelessness crisis.
Webster said the lawsuit demanded an increased number of shelter beds, increased access to mental health and drug abuse treatment and a return to the intended uses of public rights of way and public spaces.
In 2022, the lawsuit was settled with the county agreeing to pay $236 million to fund increased services, outreach, and interim housing.
“We’ve seen some progress,” Webster said two years after the suit, adding, “We’re still working to actively monitor and actively hold the city and the county accountable for these commitments.”
(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.”
