More than 700,000 Americans were without power and about 6 million were at risk for extreme weather on Sunday, as severe thunderstorms, a suspected tornado and a heat dome battered different parts of the country.
The outages were concentrated in the south-eastern states, where storms in the Ohio valley as well as Arkansas, Tennessee and Mississippi caused damage to power lines and transformers. In Bargersville, Indiana, just south of Indianapolis, a suspected tornado ripped through roofs and trees. There were also reports of large hail in northern Kentucky and southern Indiana.
Meanwhile, roughly 50 million Americans, including people living in Arizona, Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee, faced heat alerts as temperatures soared above 100 degrees. A heat dome, caused by hot ocean air that becomes trapped in the atmosphere, settled over Mexico and parts of the U.S. southwest. The high temperatures are expected to continue into the Fourth of July holiday weekend.
The extreme weather events are not isolated incidents, but part of a larger pattern of climate change that is making them more frequent and more intense, according to scientists. At least half of the U.S. population has faced an extreme weather alert since May 1, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), which has been tracking the alerts sent by the National Weather Service.
“About 1 in 10 of the alerts have a clear signal linking them to the climate crisis,” said Juan Declet-Barreto, a senior social scientist for climate vulnerability at UCS. “The system we have right now was not built in a time and climate we’re experiencing now. It is not prepared for the climate that we have now, and the climate we’re going to see in the future.”
The U.S. experienced 20 separate billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in 2021, putting it in second place for the most disasters in a calendar year, behind the record 22 separate billion-dollar events in 2020, according to NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). The damages from the 2021 disasters totaled approximately $145 billion, with the costliest events being Hurricane Ida ($75 billion), the mid-February Winter Storm / Cold Wave ($24.0 billion), and the Western wildfires ($10.9 billion).
The U.S. Climate Extremes Index (CEI), which quantifies observed climate changes in temperature, precipitation, and drought within the contiguous United States, was more than twice the average value in 2021.
The power outages have not only caused inconvenience and discomfort for millions of Americans, but also posed serious health risks and even fatalities. An average of 702 heat-related deaths occur each year, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In February, a winter storm and cold snap left millions of Texans without power for days amid freezing temperatures. In May, a heat wave knocked six natural-gas power plants offline in Texas. The state’s grid operator asked residents to limit electricity use.
“AI-driven applications are focusing on reducing the growing problem of power outages,” said David Wagman, editor-in-chief of Transmission & Distribution World. “But there is much more to do to strengthen and modernize the U.S. power grid systems.”
Some states have faced challenges in coping with the high temperatures and power outages. In Louisiana, about 100,000 residents in Shreveport lost power last weekend because of storms that hit the Texas panhandle and moved into Louisiana. The crisis left them facing extreme temperatures as high as 107 degrees without electricity to power air conditioning and other methods of cooling down.
Amid those searing temperatures, the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, signed a new law last week that will block Austin and Dallas from implementing measures that would require construction workers to get a 10-minute water break every four hours.
Relevant articles:
– About 6m across US at risk of extreme weather as over 700,000 without power, The Guardian, Mon 26 Jun 2023
– Extreme Weather Leaves Over 500K Without Power In Southern US, Millions Under Heat Advisories, International Business Times, Sun 26 Jun 2023
– Weathering Expanding Power Outages, Transmission & Distribution World, Sun 26 Jun 2023