(WASHINGTON) — The Supreme Court on Wednesday gave itself more time to decide whether to wade into a legal challenge to FDA’s approval of the abortion pill, a case that could restrict access to the drug mifepristone nationwide – even in states where abortion is legal.
The court, which was expected to act by the end of the day Wednesday, extended a temporary stay of a lower court ruling until 11:59. p.m. Friday.
If the Supreme Court agrees to take up a Texas judge’s ruling that threatened to pull the drug from the market, it would be the second time in less than a year that the high court will deal with limits to abortion access, potentially paving the way for another blockbuster ruling this summer that could dramatically change how drugs are approved in the U.S.
“It is not a stretch to say that a judge can wake up in the morning and decide that they want to take a certain medication off the market,” including vaccines or anti-depressants, if the lower court rulings stand, said Josh Sharfstein, former principal deputy commissioner at the FDA.
The case has deeply divided the country, with Republican governors and lawmakers lining up behind the conservative plaintiffs in the case.
“Fundamentally, chemical abortion drugs pose serious health and safety risks to women and girls,” states a brief filed with the Supreme Court, signed by nearly 150 Republican lawmakers including Senate Minority Whip John Thune of South Dakota, Senate Republican Conference Chairman John Barrasso of Wyoming, and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise of Louisiana.
On the other side are Democratic governors, lawmakers and the nation’s largest medical associations, as well as hundreds of pharmaceutical executives and companies. They note mifepristone has been widely available for 23 years — used by an estimated 5 million women and accounting for more than half of all abortions in the US.
“There is a greater risk of complications or mortality for procedures like wisdom-tooth removals, tonsillectomies, colonoscopies, and plastic surgeries, than by any abortion method (medication or procedural),” the American Medical Association and American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, wrote in a court brief.
Mifepristone is the sole drug approved by the FDA to end early pregnancies, typically given along with second drug misoprostol that helps empty the uterus.
Since the drug’s 2000 approval, the FDA later expanded access, greenlighting a generic version of the drug and allowing it to be given up to 10 weeks of pregnancy instead of seven and provided via telehealth and the mail.
The drug’s rise in popularity and widespread accessibility has made it a target of the anti-abortion rights movement. Last fall, the conservative legal group Alliance Defending Freedom sued the FDA, insisting that federal regulators ignored critical safety concerns during the drug’s 23 years on the market.
Earlier this month, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the FDA to roll back its rules on the drug — only allowing the drug to be given to patients up to seven weeks of pregnancy instead of 10 after three in-person doctor visits and prohibiting it from being mailed.
The Biden administration appealed, and Justice Samuel Alito’s original administrative stay of the ruling last Friday – keeping FDA’s current rules on the drug in place — was intended to give the high court a chance to consider how to address the case.
If the Supreme Court decides to weigh in, it is expected the justices also would decide by Friday whether to keep the 5th Circuit ruling on hold — preserving the status quo — while the legal challenge plays out.
Depending upon what the Supreme Court decides, access to the abortion pill could potentially be severely restricted or even eliminated, including in states where abortion is legal – at least until the case has a chance to wind its way through the legal process.
Complicating the issue is an opposing ruling by a federal judge in Washington who ordered the FDA to keep the drug on the market under its current rules. Danco Labs, which makes the brand-name version of the drug Mifeprex, said the dueling rulings if left unaddressed would create “regulatory chaos.”
The company also warns that if left in place, the 5th Circuit ruling would result in all doses of mifepristone being “misbranded” because the labeling would no longer comply with the approval standard.
Adjusting the drug’s labeling “could take months,” they say, resulting in a stop of production.
The 5th Circuit ruling also would invalidate the 2019 FDA approval of the generic version of the drug — an estimated two-thirds of the market.
(WASHINGTON) — Top Trump adviser and lawyer Boris Epshteyn is scheduled to meet Thursday with special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecutors as part of the probe into former President Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, sources familiar with the matter told ABC News.
The interview, requested by the special counsel’s office, comes as multiple other top Trump advisers have appeared before a grand jury investigating Trump’s actions leading up to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
It’s not immediately clear why investigators are not seeking Epshteyn’s testimony before the grand jury probing the matter, or whether that’s a step they will ultimately take.
Epshteyn could not be reached for comment by ABC News.
A spokesperson for the special counsel declined to comment.
(SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico) — Some Puerto Ricans are worried about the safety of their drinking water.
Over the last few decades, some residents and advocates on the island have become skeptical about the water that comes out of their faucet, deciding to drink only bottled water.
“I buy bottled water,” Bruneli, a resident of Barceloneta, told ABC News. “I’ve found that the water isn’t reliable.”
The issue stems from a combination of factors, including a failing infrastructure at treatment centers and pollution from the booming manufacturing industry, Erik Olson, a senior strategic director at the National Resources Defense Council, told ABC News.
Puerto Rico also does not get the same amount of resources allocated to other jurisdictions in the U.S. and budget cuts have been made to all government agencies on the island, including environmental quality and protection agencies, Ruth Santiago, an attorney and environmental health advocate with Earth Justice, told ABC News.
The issues, which also include decades of violations at water utilities, leave residents feeling like not enough is being done to ensure the quality of their water.
Barceloneta, a town on the northern coast of Puerto Rico known for housing many manufacturing plants, is also the site of a 33-acre plot full of toxic waste that has been there for decades, Julio Lopez Varona, the co-chief of campaigns at the Center for Popular Democracy, told ABC News.
The landfill, where many hazardous wastes were disposed of from the 1970s to the 1990s, has been established as a superfund site by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and has been monitored for 30 years, Carmen Guerrero Perez, director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Caribbean Environmental Protection Division, told ABC News.
“At this moment, based on the five-year reviews that have been conducted, there hasn’t been any migration from contamination at that specific area,” Perez said.
The EPA is tasked with enforcing the Clean Water Act and overseeing local enforcement of the Safe Drinking Water Act. The most common violations include failure to test the water and failure to report problems, Olson said. Health-based violations, such as contamination with bacteria and failure to treat the water in accordance to EPA guidelines and chemical contamination issues, have also occurred, Olson said.
While Perez said the EPA has “a number of different enforcement strategies,” enforcements are akin to “a slap on the wrist,” Santiago said.
Both the local and federal government need to “step up” on enforcements, Olson said.
“Puerto Rico cannot continue to be the place where the U.S. extracts wealth and harms people because that’s just wrong,” Varona said.
Poorer communities are the demographic most likely to live near the sites that need the most cleanup and monitoring, advocates said. In Barceloneta, there is an “active community” near the waste site, Varona said.
“That’s sort of one of the elements of environmental injustice, right? The overburdening of communities that are poor,” Santiago said.
On April 4, the EPA said more than $62 million in funding is being dedicated to essential drinking water infrastructure upgrades in Puerto Rico.
Luiz C. Ribeiro for NY Daily News via Getty Images
(NEW YORK) — The Manhattan district attorney’s office will investigate the partial collapse of a parking garage that killed one and injured five others, a spokeswoman for the office confirmed Wednesday.
More than 50 cars were parked on the roof of the four-story Lower Manhattan building when it collapsed Tuesday afternoon, sending cars plummeting and killing one worker whose body remains trapped in the debris, officials said Wednesday.
The New York City Fire Department is slowly and methodically taking down the building. Gas tanks and electric vehicles in the debris are complicating the deconstruction process.
“This is an incredibly complex operation,” emergency management commissioner Zach Iscol said during a press briefing Wednesday. “The building is not structurally sound.”
The city is working to “safely demolish” the building while also removing the vehicles, he said.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams confirmed Wednesday that the deceased garage worker, who has not been publicly identified, also remains in the collapsed building. The man was a 59-year-old manager of the garage, sources said.
Four workers were treated at local hospitals following the collapse, while a fifth refused medical treatment, officials said. The New York Fire Department said it appears most if not all of the patients have since been released.
Department of Buildings acting Commissioner Kazimir Vilenchik said the building “pancaked,” and that the ceiling collapsed “all the way to the cellar floor.”
Firefighters went inside the building to search for victims but it was continuing to collapse so they evacuated. A robotic dog and a drone were brought in to continue to search the building. Officials believe that everyone is accounted for and there is no reason to believe this is anything but a structural collapse.
The exact cause of the collapse remains under investigation.
“There’s a thorough investigation that is going to happen with this building. And we’re going to learn from it,” Adams said.
A focus of the investigation is the weight of the vehicles parked on the roof and the age of the building, which was built in 1925.
The parking garage, which is owned by 57 Ann Street Realty Association, currently has four active violations, according to records from the New York City Department of Buildings.
The violations that remain open were recorded between 2003 and 2013.
One of the four violations still open is from Nov. 25, 2003, and has a severity status listed as “hazardous.” In the violation details, the department recorded the discovery of cracks in the concrete on the first floor, calling the concrete “defective.”
The company did not immediately respond to a voicemail seeking comment.
ABC News’ Aaron Katersky, Mark Crudele and Victoria Arancio contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — Nearly 60 million Americans may not know they’re drinking from toxic metal in present day, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc.
The U.S. currently holds approximately 9.2 lead service lines underground, according to a recent survey released by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
As the U.S. faces crisis after crisis in the country’s water infrastructure system, lead service lines continue to be a silent and deadly consequence – a decision determined by U.S. engineers more than 150 years ago.
History
The engineering concept was originally initiated in the Ancient Roman era – lead pipes were designed to channel clean water into its city and sweep out sewage.
In the 1800s, the ancient Roman conception was later adopted by the U.S., which would also install lead pipes nationwide to provide indoor plumbing to citizens.
“It created a public health benefit because we had clean water coming into our homes to take baths and wipe out waterborne disease – and that same water could sweep away our sewage,” Marc Edwards, professor of engineering at Virginia Tech, told ABC News.
For America, the nation’s goal was to deliver water in quantity — which lead pipes helped achieve due to their inexpensive, durable, non-leaking and long-lasting benefits.
Those lead pipes later became an environmental disaster as health experts realized their poisonous dangers, including miscarriages and fetal deaths.
“Around the 1920s, many cities required if you wanted to connect your house to the water main you had to use a lead pipe by law,” Edwards said.
Yet, several cities were still installing lead pipes, including Chicago – which didn’t stop installing lead pipes until 1986 when the Safe Drinking Water Act was amended, the EPA said.
Although the 1986 revised law banned lead, the pipes already installed were not required to be replaced, according to the EPA.
Lead is a tasteless, colorless and odorless chemical element that cannot be detected in the water. Health experts have determined there is ‘no safe level of lead’ in the human body. Children are often the most vulnerable as lead exposure can lead to anemia, brain damage, and among other issues in cognitive progress, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Present day health crisis
Edwards, who testified before Congress of the dangers of lead poisoning in Washington, D.C., in 2004, also helped to discover the Flint, Michigan, water crisis and said that he knew more water crises were impending.
Nearly 1 in 4 Flint residents may have PTSD after water crisis, study finds
Following Flint and Washington, D.C. also came Chicago, Newark, New Jersey, Benton Harbor, Michigan and Detroit.
Illinois is the second largest state to have the most lead pipes with more than 1 million still in service – Chicago alone has nearly 400,000, according to the EPA survey released in early April. Florida emerged as the state with the most lead service lines in the nation, beating out Illinois with 1,159,300 lead pipes.
Gina Ramirez, a third generation East Chicago native, says she and her family have strictly drank and cooked with bottled water for the last 30 years — because their home is connected to lead service lines. Ramirez, who also serves as the Midwest Outreach Manager for the Natural Resources Defense Council, NRDC, says her family’s neighborhood is mostly low-income, people of color.
“I mean a lot of families are just trying to put food on the table. There’s a lot of undocumented residences, undocumented residents in my neighborhood as well, so they don’t want to like, bring the alarm on that situation,” Ramirez said
For Ramirez, the process of having her pipes replaced has created a growing frustration as it’s taken her family two years before being approved for Chicago’s Lead Service Line equity program.
Illinois lawmakers have given Chicago nearly 50 years to replace all lead pipes compared to other cities like Flint, Benton Harbor and Newark, that has replaced nearly all its pipes in under five years.
Michigan to replace lead pipes in Benton Harbor in 18 months amid drinking water crisis
“That’s part of what it’s like living in a community where you have a tax on your health from outside your home and within your home. What kind of anxiety that can be, being raised in a home where you have to drink bottled water where you can’t trust your tap. That has to have long-term implications on your emotional health,” Ramirez says.
In late 2021, President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan infrastructure bill totaling $1.2 trillion, $15 billion of which will be targeted towards replacing lead water pipes and $50 billion will go toward fixing the nation’s water infrastructure system. As the Biden administration prioritizes lead pipe replacements nationwide, many Americans like Gina suggest the damage is already done.
Newark residents still aren’t convinced their water is safe to drink after lead water crisis
“This is a public health crisis,” Ramirez said. “I’m hopeful for these infrastructure dollars to go to lead service line replacements — we need the money to come into these communities who are disproportionately suffering health impacts and replace those lead service lines first.”
(BOWDOIN, Maine) — A 34-year-old man allegedly shot and killed his parents and their two friends at a home in Bowdoin, Maine, days after his release from prison, authorities said.
Around 9:21 a.m. Tuesday, four people were found shot dead at the home: 72-year-old Robert Eger, 62-year-old Patricia Eger and 62-year-old Cynthia Eaton were found inside, while 66-year-old David Eaton was found in the barn, Maine State Police said at a news conference Wednesday.
The Eatons’ son, Joseph Eaton, had been released from the Windham Correctional Facility in Maine on April 14 after serving a sentence for aggravated assault, according to police. His mother picked him up from prison and brought him to Bowdoin to stay with the Egers, who were family friends, police said.
Shortly after the four bodies were found, around 10:30 a.m. on Tuesday, Joseph Eaton allegedly shot three people as they drove south on Interstate 295 in Yarmouth, about 25 miles south of Bowdoin, police said.
One of the interstate shooting victims, a 25-year-old woman, is in critical condition, police said. The other two victims, a 51-year-old man and his 29-year-old son, suffered non-life-threatening injuries, police said.
Joseph Eaton was taken into custody and “confessed to killing his parents and their friends in Bowdoin,” state police said. Joseph Eaton allegedly “believed that the vehicles he had shot on the interstate were police vehicles that were following him.”
He has been charged with four counts of murder, police said.
ABC News’ Darren Reynolds and Ben Stein contributed to this report.
RJ Sangosti/MediaNews Group/The Denver Post via Getty Images
(LAS VEGAS) — The Colorado River, one of the most important river systems in the country, is drying up at an alarming rate.
The issues surrounding depleting water levels along the Colorado River basin have become as heated as the arid climate contributing to the moisture-sapping megadrought persisting in the region for decades.
Despite an extremely wet winter that eased the effects of the longstanding drought, regional officials and environmental experts are expressing concern over future severe dips in the water supply and other ramifications dwindling water levels could have on local economies and human health.
An ample water supply is a “critical component” of human health and public safety, Sinjin Eberle, Southwest region communications director for the nonprofit American Rivers, told ABC News.
“If there’s not a healthy environment, we don’t have healthy drinking water supplies, and we don’t have healthy ecosystems and we don’t have habitat for wildlife,” Eberle said. “We don’t have sustainability and we don’t have certainty in the water supplies.”
The Colorado River is one of the most important systems in the country
The Colorado River Basin supplies drinking water to 40 million people in the U.S., as well as two states in Mexico, according to the Bureau of Reclamation. It also fuels hydropower resources in eight states and remains a crucial resource for 30 Tribal Nations and agriculture communities across the West.
The river system supports $1.4 trillion of the annual U.S. economy and 16 million jobs in California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming– equivalent to about 1/12 of the total U.S. domestic product, economists at the University of Arizona found in 2015. More than 90% of the country’s winter leafy greens and much of its vegetables are grown in Yuma, Arizona — the state that would experience the most drastic water cuts under current regulations.
Lake Mead was producing 25% less hydroelectricity as its elevation reached a record low at 1,067 feet in December 2021. The reservoir was dangerously close to hitting dead pool status, when water levels are too low to flow downstream to generate power, last June as surface elevation measured in at just 1,043 feet.
This past March, water levels in Lake Mead measured at 1,046 feet, according to the Bureau of Reclamation.
Dead pool status is “not far in the future,” and could possibly happen this decade, in the event of five or six consecutive dry winters, Zach Zobel, risk scientists at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, told ABC News.
If the West is not diligent in learning to live within the water system, it could have “serious ramifications” on other sectors, such as the semiconductor industry in Phoenix, a billion-dollar industry that provides tens of thousands of jobs in Arizona, Eberle said.
Without water from the Colorado River, Arizona’s gross state product would drop by more than $185 billion in a year and the state would lose more than 2 million jobs, the 2015 report found.
In addition, electricity bills and water bills have the potential to skyrocket, and the region will need to consider building infrastructure for other power sources, such as solar and wind, Eberle said.
“Even more alarming” is that water could get so low that it can not be pumped and delivered to the states, communities and agricultural industries that rely on it, Richard Frank, professor of environmental practice at the University of California Davis School of Law, told ABC News.
The dip in water levels is widely due to climate change
Over the past 20 years, the West has been undergoing a substantial period of drought, much of it driven by anthropogenic, or human-caused, climate change, according to experts.
For every 1 degree Celsius in temperature rise, flow along the Colorado River has dipped 9.3%, scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey announced in 2020. This has led to the depletion of 1.5 billion tons of water, much of is lost to evaporation or lack or melting snowpack, according to the study.
The Colorado River has about 19% less volume than in the year 2000, Eberle said. By 2050, that number is expected to drop to 30% less than in 2000 if temperatures continue to rise, he added.
The Colorado River is over-allocated, experts say
In 1922, the Colorado River Compact divvied up the river’s water — as to how the water supplies from the Colorado River and its tributaries would be allocated — among the seven states that rely on it. The upper basin states were established as New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming and Colorado, while the lower basin consists of California, Nevada and Arizona. Two states in Mexico — Baja California and Sonora — were added to the Compact in the 1940s.
However, the amount of water that was apportioned “was not consistent” and “exceeded significantly” the amount of water that was actually available, even by 1922 standards, Frank said.
“There were overestimations of how much water there would be to allocate among the states,” Frank said. “So it was a flawed premise to begin with.”
At the time of its inception, those in charge of dividing the water resources assumed they were working with a 17-million acre-foot river, based off an extremely wet period in the beginning of the 20th century, Eberle said. These days, the river is closer to 12 or 11 million acre-feet, he said.
When the contract was signed, there were only about half a million people living in the basin. Fast-forward to the 21st century, and a population explosion in the region with three of the largest cities in the country that rely on the Colorado River — Phoenix, San Diego and Los Angeles — has grown that number to more than 40 million, Eberle said.
Climate change over the past century has only worsened the inevitable problem, Frank said.
“So we have an additional challenge of less water availability at a time when we are we’re attracting more people who want to reside in the Southwest,” Frank said. “That’s a problem.”
Even in the absence of climate change, the Colorado River would likely be in decline due to the population growth, Zobel said.
1 year of heavy precipitation isn’t enough to solve problem
At the start of the fall, the visual evidence of overallocation, combined with years of severe drought, was striking along the Colorado River system. Prominent bathtub rings showing where water levels once were could be seen in Lake Mead and Lake Powell. Parts of Lake Mead were so dry that human remains began to emerge in riverbeds once covered in freshwater.
Then, as winter rolled in, an “amazing and completely unpredicted series of events” occurred, Eberle said.
A series of atmospheric rivers — essentially rivers in the sky that collect moisture from tropical areas and redistribute the water to other latitudes — have been pummeling the West Coast with an influx of precipitation since December, bringing round after round of heavy rain and snow to the parched region.
“The snowpack is amazing, and in some ways it kind of takes the foot off the gas in terms of how dire things could be,” Eberle said, but added that water levels could just as easily dip to record lows a year from now if urgent measures aren’t taken to conserve water.
In the future, the trend will be for greater, longer, more protracted droughts interrupted occasionally, by periods of plentiful rainfall, scientists say.
This year will be an “important case study” on how much of the water that was lost in the past five years from the largest reservoirs can be recovered, Zobel said.
“If things can’t recover in the good years, then the situation is still not looking good for the future,” Zobel said.
Climate scientists don’t expect many “average” years of precipitation anymore, Zobel said. Instead, what will likely happen is either all of the precipitation will come at once, or none at all — what is referred to the “boom or bust precipitation pattern,” he said.
While atmospheric rivers are expected to occur more frequently as global temperatures continue to rise, relying on the uncertainty that these events could occur again is not an adequate management strategy, Eberle said, especially since climate scientists expect snowpacks to trend much leaner in the future.
The influx of moisture into the coast has not yet been added to the water supply in the Colorado River system, but it will once the snowpack melts, the experts said.
In the sub-basin near Durango Colorado, the snowpack is about 180% above normal levels, Eberle said.
“That will bring a lot of water into Lake Powell and Lake Mead eventually,” he said.
The immediate steps needed to maintain water levels
It will be up to the federal government to step in and encourage a tightening of water usage and address the imbalance between supply and demand, especially as the population in the Southwest, the fastest-growing region in the country — continues to implode, the experts said.
The policy needs to include “major” water cuts, especially to the agriculture industry, Zobel said.
It would be “magical thinking” to assume that water from the Colorado River would be indefinitely available for the lower basin states, Frank said.
Officials may be coming to a consensus that too much water is leaving the Colorado River system.
On April 11, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation announced it was considering a landmark proposal that includes scenarios to conserve water by reducing the amount of water released from Glen Canyon Dam or cutting water allotments evenly among all the lower basin states if basin states don’t find a way to conserve 4 million acre feet of water in by 2024 — or roughly 20% of current water usage — a directive made by Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton last summer.
“We’re in the third decade of a historic drought that has caused conditions that the people who built this system would not have imagined,” Tommy Beaudreau, deputy secretary of the Interior Department, told reporters on April 11.
Conversation among states to reduce water without federal intervention have become “very fractious and difficult,” Frank said, adding that Mexico’s entitlement further complicates matters.
The Interior Department will have the “ultimate say,” Frank added.
The Biden Administration will also be providing a $15.4 billion investment to enhance the West’s resilience to drought, which will include reducing water demand, maximizing water resources and protecting the communities along the Colorado River Basin.
Some of those solutions should include the modernization of agriculture industry systems, which uses up to 80% of the water supply in several regions, the experts said.
Water concerns are so rampant in Arizona that the city of Scottsdale cut off water delivery to Rio Verde Hills, an affluent neighborhood on the outskirts of the city.
“We have to address the imbalance between how much water there is, how much water there is going to be, and how much water is demanded for various aspects of life, like agriculture, drinking water in cities, and for recreation and water for the environment — a key component of the sustainability of human health and public safety across the basin,” Eberle said.
If the problem isn’t solved, lack of adequate water supply will have a “profound effect” on communities and businesses in the West and the nation overall, Frank said.
“What does Tom Cruise say in ‘Mission Impossible?’ Hope is not a strategy,” Eberle said.
(NEW YORK) — New York City is among the most densely populated coastal communities in the world preparing for an inevitable rise in sea levels, which scientists said will amplify flooding crises from events such as thunderstorms, high tides and hurricanes.
Sea levels in New York City are expected to rise between 8 inches and 30 inches by the 2050s and as much as 15 inches to 75 inches by the end of the century, according to The NYC Panel on Climate Change.
About 1.3 million residents of New York City live within or directly adjacent to the floodplain, according to Rebuild by Design, a climate research and development group. As sea levels continue to rise, that number could increase to 2.2 million New Yorkers.
The consequences of sea level rise were displayed in 2012, when Superstorm Sandy, a Category 3 storm at its peak intensity, hit New York City as a tropical storm. The system, coupled with high tide, sent a storm surge from the East River into lower Manhattan — more than 9 feet above normal tide levels in Battery Park, while the depth of floodwaters measured at 14 feet in Staten Island, according to a report by the city.
Forty-four residents of New York City died as a result of the storm, officials said.
Since Sandy, the city has moved to flood-proof critical infrastructures, such as hospitals, power plants and major tunnels, which were impassable for both drivers and subways after the storm.
The Army Corps of Engineers has proposed the construction of giant sea gates across New York Harbor. The $52 billion proposal would involve building 12 movable sea gates across the mouths of major bays and inlets along the harbor.
Even with those massive flood barriers, smaller floods will still be able to seep in, Malgosia Madajewicz, an associate research scientist for Columbia University’s Center for Climate Systems Research, told ABC News.
“There is no single factor [that] can eliminate all of the flood risks,” she said, adding that other interventions will need to be utilized, such as smaller infrastructure along the shore and homeowners investing in retrofitting their homes and filling in their basements.
These types of preventative measures could save homeowners hundreds of thousands of dollars over the next decades, said Madajewicz, who researched the cost of damage to homes from Sandy.
However, many New Yorkers struggle to afford the investment necessary to flood-proof their homes, Madajewicz said.
More than half of the New York City residents in the floodplain zone live in areas with a median income of less than $75,120, which is considered low income for New York City for a family of three, according to Rebuild by Design.
In addition, many homeowners may rely on the economic benefits from their basements, which may not be feasible to eliminate from their budget, Madajewicz said.
Those basements turned into death traps in 2021, when the remnants of Hurricane Ida caused devastating flooding in New York City and killed at least 13 people.
While much of the attention around coastal flooding has been around investment in physical infrastructure, social infrastructure is just as important to prepare for the next big storm, Alana Tornello, director of resilience for the Human Services Council and former emergency preparedness lead for the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, told ABC News.
“There needs to be significant reform and how we get out resources to community partners and to human services organizations,” which includes more voices being brought into adaption planning, Tornello said.
The rate of sea level rise has doubled since 1993, when researchers began taking measurements from satellite images, according to NASA. Anthropogenic, or human-caused, climate change has caused about 270 billion tons of ice mass loss in Greenland per year and about 150 billion tons of ice mass loss in Antarctica per year, according to NASA.
Eight of the top 10 largest cities in the world — Tokyo, Mumbai, New York City, Shanghai, Lagos, Los Angeles, Calcutta and Buenos Aires — are adjacent to the coast, according to the U.N. Nearly 40% of Americans — about 94.7 million people — live in coastal areas, despite those regions accounting for less than 10% of the total land in the contiguous U.S., according to NOAA and the U.S. Census Bureau.
Sea level rise is not just a threat in itself — it is a “threat-multiplier,” United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said during the Security Council meeting on sea level rise in February.
Rising seas threaten lives and jeopardize access to water, food and healthcare, Guterres said. He said it could also damage or destroy vital infrastructure, such as transportation systems, hospitals and schools, especially when combined with extreme weather events linked to rising global temperatures.
High-tide flooding, or “sunny day flooding,” is becoming increasingly common due to decades of sea level rise, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in its 2022 sea level rise report. Rising sea levels are making storm surge brought on by hurricanes more destructive. And 1-in-100-year floods are now happening so often, the term may change, experts told ABC News in 2021.
As a result, coastlines are changing all over the U.S.
Minasse Wondimu Hailu/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
(CAIRO) — By 2025, Egypt is projected to be a water-scarce nation as climate change and a major dam threaten its source of survival.
Egypt has long been called the “gift of the Nile” as it has historically depended on the river for survival. But over the next two years, experts say Egyptians could approach a state of “absolute” water scarcity.
Climate change, population growth and a regional fight for water resources are all contributing to the risk of water imbalance, experts say.
About 90% of Egypt’s population lives along the Nile River, with the waterway providing nearly all Egyptians with drinking water. The country is facing an annual water deficit and is estimated to be categorized as water scarce by 2025, according to the United Nations.
Rising sea levels are prompting saltwater intrusions that are not only affecting water supply but also spoiling agricultural farmland, according to water management experts.
“The sea is rising in the Mediterranean Sea, and the land is sinking in the Nile Delta. And as a result, the Nile delta becomes the second most susceptible place on earth to climate change impacts in terms of sea level rise,” says Karim Elgendy, an associate fellow at the Chatham Institute think tank.
Egypt is not the only country that depends on the river — it’s shared by 11 African countries. The completion of a mega-dam on the river poses another significant threat to the water supply in the region, critics of the project say.
The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) has been a part of a contentious decade-long dispute involving Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia. The hydro-electricity dam is now nearly complete and has begun filling to provide direly needed energy supply to Ethiopia. The GERD is expected to make the country a major power exporter in the region.
“Folks have never actually went to war just because of water. Now, we could be at the point in history where that changes,” says Mohammed Mahmoud, a director of the Climate and Water Program at the Middle East Institute.
In 2019, Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed said his country should be ready for a war with Egypt over the dispute. In 2021, Egypt and Sudan held joint military exercises to showcase security ties between the two countries in response to the ongoing conflict, the Associated Press reported.
The dam’s impact on the water supply depends on how fast it’s filled, according to Elgendy. “It will determine the impact of this disruption and the reduction to the volumes of water that goes to Egypt,” he said.
Egypt’s population of 109 million is projected to grow significantly in decades, further straining the demand for water in the region.
“There’ll be an imbalance in terms of less water supply and inflated demand,” said Mahmoud. “Both because of climate change, and also because of socio economic conditions and population growth.”
Ethiopian officials have insisted that the dam will not impede on both Sudan and Egypt’s water supply. Negotiations over an agreement between the three nations over the filling of the dam have stalled recently.
“I believe there will come a point where some level of cooperation has to happen, because there is no other alternative,” says Mahmoud.
(WASHINGTON) — The head of the Pentagon office reviewing UFO incidents reported by military personnel told Congress Wednesday that his office is now reviewing 650 incidents, but that there is no evidence that any of them is of extraterrestrial origin.
Two new videos were released at the rare open congressional hearing on Unexplained Aerial Phenomena, or UAPs as the Pentagon calls them, to highlight how the recently established All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) can explain some incidents but not others.
“I want to underscore today that only a very small percentage of UAP reports display signatures that could reasonably be described as ‘anomalous,'” Sean Kirkpatrick, the director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, told the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities.
“The majority of unidentified objects reported to AARO demonstrate mundane characteristics of balloons, unmanned aerial systems, clutter, natural phenomena, or other readily explainable sources,” he added.
Kirkpatrick told the panel that his office is now reviewing more than 650 UAP incidents reported by military personnel an increase from the 510 the U.S. intelligence community reported in its last UAP report released in January.
As was the case in that earlier report, Kirkpatrick said the number of unresolved incidents is due to a lack of available data that could help investigators in their reviews.
“Without sufficient data, we are unable to reach defendable conclusions that meet the high scientific standards we set for resolution, and I will not close a case that we cannot defend the conclusions of,” said Kirkpatrick.
Most of the UAP reports fall follow similar trendlines, according to Kirkpatrick, with most occurring between 15,000 to 25,000 feet in altitude which is the controlled airspace for military aircraft.
Fifty-two percent of the reports involve objects that are described as “round or spheres” with the remainder fall into other shape categories. Most of the round objects range in size from one-to-four meters and are described as being “white, silver, or translucent metallic” with apparent velocities ranging from stationary to twice the speed of sound.
Kirkpatrick said no thermal exhausts are usually detected adding that “we get intermittent radar returns, we get intermittent radio returns and we get intermittent thermal signatures.”
But he emphasized that his team has still not found any non-Earthly explanations in the incidents.
“I should also state clearly for the record that in our research AARO has found no credible evidence thus far of extraterrestrial activity, off-world technology, or objects that defy the known laws of physics,” said Kirkpatrick.
“In the event sufficient scientific data were ever obtained that a UAP encountered can only be explained by extraterrestrial origin, we are committed to working with our interagency partners at NASA to appropriately inform the U.S. Government’s leadership of its findings,” he added.
Kirkpatrick urged UFO enthusiasts to submit their research ana analysis of UAP incidents to credible peer reviewed scientific journals because AARO is working to do the same. That is how science works, not by blog or social media,” he added.
Kirkpatrick played the committee two videos gathered by American military surveillance MQ-9 drones flying over the Middle East and South Asia that captured UAP’s flying across their camera screens.
He said his purpose in showing the two videos was to demonstrate one incident that cannot be explained and contrast it with another one that could be explained by data.
The first drone video was of an unexplained incident captured while the drone monitored some buildings below when what appeared to be a round silvery object suddenly flew across the screen.
“It is going to be virtually impossible to fully identify that just based off of that video,” said Kirkpatrick.
“Now what we can do and what we are doing is keeping that as part of that group of 52% to see what are the similarities, what are the trends across all these do we see these in a particular distribution do they all behave the same or not?” he said. ” As we get more data, we will be able to go back and look at these and for context.”
The second drone video showed what was described as a blob moving across the video’s field of view creating what appeared to be a propulsion wake behind it.
Kirkpatrick said the wake was actually an “artifact” captured by the drone’s sensors and he explained that after investigators reviewed the video “frame by frame” they were able to determine that it was not real.
“If you squint, it looks like an aircraft because it actually turns out to be an aircraft,” he said.
An infrared detector, he said, determined that “this is the heat signature off of the engines of a commuter aircraft that happened to be flying in the vicinity of where those two MQ-9’s were.”
