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Tropical Storm Hermine’s rapid formation in the Gulf of Mexico is one of the fastest on record.
Hermine went from tropical depression to tropical storm in just 21-hours over the weekend, an extremely fast intensification rate. Hurricane Humberto in 2007 holds the record at 18-hours. Impact Weather Meteorologist Chris Hebert is a hurricane expert. He says Hermine’s quick development was no surprise, since the southwestern Gulf of Mexico is prone to these types of rapid formations.
“We had been looking at that disturbance in the eastern Pacific on Thursday and Friday and some of the model guidance had been predicting for the past week, that part of that disturbance would move into the Bay of Campeche, and develop into some kind of low pressure system in the gulf that would track up toward northeastern Mexico. So a couple of days before, we had already alerted our clients to that possibility that something would be developing there and tracking up in the general direction that it did.”
Latest on Hermine (Google)
National Hurricane Center (NPR)
One of the four international bridges linking this northern Mexican city and El Paso, Texas, was closed for nearly two hours Tuesday after a bomb was found and detonated on the Mexican side of the border, a police spokesman told Efe.
The bomb was spotted just after 8:00 a.m. on the Laredo Bridge, which was immediately closed to traffic (LAT).
The Washington Posts’ investigation into the explosive growth of the privatized spy industry indicates the industry has reached every state in the U.S. While Texas is no Virginia in terms of growth of the spy industry, the Lone Star State does have a significant share of the new spy jobs.
A Texas-India water resource connection. As S2C Global Systems, a Texas water supply management company, announced last week that within six to eight months it will ship water from Sitka, Alaska to a hub in India – the question is “Has it really come down to this”? If there truly is a global water crisis – is this the answer?
Harbor at Sitka, Alaska
SITKA, ALASKA – Brett Walton of Circle of Blue reports that Sitka, a small town located on Baranof Island off Alaska’s southeast coast, will sell the water to Alaska Resource Management for one penny per gallon. S2C and True Alaska Bottling, which has a contract for the rights to export 2.9 billion gallons (10.9 billion liters) per year from Sitka’s Blue Lake Reservoir, formed Alaska Resource Management LLC to facilitate bulk exportation.
The city will earn $US26 million per year if ARM exports its entire allocation, and more than $US90 million annually if the city can export its maximum water right of 9 billion gallons. That amount of water is enough to meet the annual domestic needs of a city of 500,000 using 50 gallons per person per day.
This will be the world’s first large-volume exports of water via tanker: companies have tried unsuccessfully for more than two decades to break open the bulk water export market. Past attempts have been thwarted by daunting logistics, concerns about natural resource sovereignty and commodification as well as the availability of cheaper local sources.
With last week’s announcement, S2C appears to have found the right combination of location, infrastructure and pricing to make exports feasible.
S2C will not identify the port’s location “for security reasons,” but Terry Trapp, the chief executive of True Alaska Bottling, told Circle of Blue in an interview in May that the port is south of Mumbai.
This is part two of the discussion on how water management initiatives can help gender equity in rural Indian villages.
NESWAD, GUJARAT – Like everyone else in the village, women define water scarcity as the outcome of three interconnected factors: increase in village population, extensive irrigation, and lack of rainfall. An interview that Sara Ahmed of the Center for Environmental Education had with a grassroots woman leader in the village of Newsad reveals the vast knowledge and adaptations women have to make when it comes to water (or lack of it).:
If the rain comes then the level of water in the well increases, so we can easily get water. Due to water scarcity the water table has gone down five feet this year. About 20 years ago, during the rainy season, water used to fill the wells up and we were able to take water just with our hands. Now we need to dig somewhere between 85 to 90 feet and sometimes we encounter salt water because we are digging so deep. The people nor our animals can drink the water when it is so salty.
In addition to salt water encroachment, women and other villagers blame factories which have come up near the Newsad village for the deteriorating groundwater quality. There is a double edged sword here. While new factories provide employment for villagers, drinking water is severely affected. Villagers must make a choice in this type of tradeoff. If one well which feeds the entire village either goes dry or is contaminated, women have to travel miles to gather water from other wells. This in turn could cause conflict because those wells are typically part of another village. As this occurs, a terrible cycle of physical, social, and mental anguish continues.
Climate Change Protest (source: ANU Climate Change Institute)
Climate change is increasingly understood to be a human induced phenomenon, greatly accelerating natural cycles. By now we have heard over and over again, that in it’s latest research the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has confirmed that accelerated climate change – global warming – is taking place. No surprise there. But, what may be a lesser known fact is the impact climate change is having on sea-levels.
A 3-feet rise in sea-level will inundate 3,700 square miles in India, of which Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai will be the major cities being affected. This would mean losses of billions of dollars in infrastructural, social, physical assets and capital.
According to Indian climate scientists, 125 million people are likely to migrate in the coming century of which 75 million will be from Bangladesh. The people from Bangladesh will most likely migrate to India in addition their own 50 to 60 million people who will be displaced due to sea-level rise and resulting water source scarcities.
In this three part series I will discuss how water management initiatives can potentially help gender equity in rural Indian villages.
NESWAD, GUJARAT – “Why should we go and collect water! We have brought married women to do all this work.” This is a comment madeby the male head of household during a focus group discussion as reported by Sara Ahmed of the Center for Environment Education in Ahmedabad, Gujarat.
Let us explore some of the implications of this sometimes brutal task.
In some rural villages, domestic water collection is the responsibility of young women (daughters and daughters-in-law) and small girls. If there are no young women in the family, then older women go get the water. According to Ms. Ahmed, men typically go collect water during periods of scarcity as this usually entails going out of the village to neighboring water sources.
Women typically carry three pots of water on their head. Together these pots can weigh between 75 to 95 pounds depending on the amount of water and how much the pots weigh. Women may take between three to six trips to collect water depending on the time of year and the number of people in the household. Each trip can last betweeb one to two hours based on the distance of the water source from home, type of terrain and the availability of water.
Public Media Texas is based in Austin. We embrace our local presence in Austin with our hyper-local East Austin site 78702.org. We contribute to the discussion of the environment in the Southwest and the state of politics in Texas. We also seek to understand the dynamic between the U.S. and Mexico along our shared border. Along the way we search for artistic expressions that reflect and provide more perspective on the Lone Star state.
