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In eastern Montana and Wyoming, massive floods destroyed bridges, took homes and forced the evacuation of more than 10,000 visitors from Yellowstone National Park. Half a million households in the Great Lakes and the Ohio Valley lost electricity earlier this week after thunderstorms. A record heat wave has pushed temperatures to triples from Nebraska to South Carolina, leaving more than 100 million Americans under heat warnings and killing at least 2,000 cattle in Kansas.
The official first day of summer has not even come, and the country is already overheated, soaked and suffering. Extreme weather is early here, testing the nation’s readiness and proving once again that overlapping climate disasters are now becoming more common and changing the lives of Americans.
“Summer has become a dangerous season in which you see such events happen earlier, more often and at the same time,” said Rachel Licker, chief climatologist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, Research and Advocacy Group. “It just shows you how vulnerable our infrastructure is and that it’s just going to get more and more problematic.
The Midwest is at the center of this change. Affected by an unusually early heat wave in May that broke records, the region has since been hit by more heat, as well as strong thunderstorms and tornadoes. Hundreds of thousands of people in the Midwest lost electricity earlier this week as temperatures rose to the 1990s.
Liqueur, who lives in Madison, Wisconsin, sought refuge in the library. But some of her elderly neighbors had to be helped out of their hot homes, where they were trapped after discovering they could not open their garage doors without electricity.
The electricity returned the next day, but by Wednesday, Liqueur was struggling with the harsh weather again, hiding from a tornado in his basement. That same afternoon, the National Meteorological Service issued 10 different meteorological reports and notices for the region, including a warning of excessive heat.
“It was really wild,” she said.
The flood was deadly: a 10-year-old boy was swept into a Milwaukee drainage ditch after thunderstorms there.
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Several experts say these co-occurring disasters reveal the extent to which Americans remain unprepared for the escalating effects of climate change. Broken power lines, flooded homes and congested rainwater systems underscore how little progress governments have made in providing communities with extreme weather conditions.
Still, they warn, there are limits to how much a nation can adapt. The world has already warmed between 1.1 and 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) above the pre-industrial average. If countries continue to emit historically high levels of carbon pollution, the future will be hotter and harder to bear.
“We can’t take one of these dangers alone, forget about three or four of them at once,” said Camilo Mora, a climatologist at the University of Hawaii in Manoa who studies cascading disasters. “The idea that we can continue to emit greenhouse gases and buy a way out of them later with adaptation simply doesn’t make sense.”
Research by Mora and other scientists shows that by 2100, unless people take swift action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, some parts of the world could experience up to six climate disasters at a time. Coastal areas are likely to be hit hardest, as they are affected not only by extreme heat and intensifying forest fires, but also by rising sea levels and increasingly devastating hurricanes.
In the United States, climate change is already exacerbating the effects of extreme weather. Between 2017 and 2021, more than 8 million acres burned on average each year – more than twice the average between 1987 and 1991, the Congressional Budget Office said in a report released Thursday. While much of the West has endured an unprecedented drought, a study published last year found that the Northeast has seen a 53 percent increase in extreme rainfall since 1996.
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President Biden on Thursday approved Montana’s request for a major disaster, a move that provides federal aid to three counties devastated by the floods this week. At a briefing Wednesday, White House spokeswoman Karin Jean-Pierre said the administration was also closely monitoring record temperatures affecting much of the country.
A significant heat dome has crowded weather charts in the lower 48 states in the past week, bringing high temperatures that broke records. Maximum temperatures have risen by 10 to 20 degrees above average in some parts, and in some places the hottest and wettest weather ever observed in June.
In Montana and Wyoming, heavy rains over the weekend were combined with rapid snowmelt, which led to devastating floods that destroyed miles of roads and bridges in Yellowstone National Park and damaged hundreds of homes in surrounding communities. No one was reported injured or killed.
Because the Yellowstone River flows at historically high levels, Billings, Montana’s largest city, has been unable to operate its own treatment plant, which pumps water from the river. The plant closed late Tuesday, but is back in operation by Thursday morning. Further east in Livingston, the city hospital was evacuated after its driveway was flooded, leaving no safe way to enter or exit the facility.
Meteorologists said the flood had been brewing for months. While most of the country has been warmer than normal for the past 60 days, cooler air has swept over the northwestern and northern Pacific cliffs, slowing the melting of snow in the high mountains. An unusual late storm in May threw even heavier snow into the region.
Then, late last week, a 3,000-mile stream of moisture, called an atmospheric river, began to soak the northwestern Pacific Ocean, delivering record rainfall. When it reached the Yellowstone River Basin, it released a burst of rain and a pulse of warm air, flooding the region while melting the equivalent of an additional 2 to 5 inches of water from the snow, according to the National Weather Service.
On a scale of 1 to 5 for such atmospheric river events used by the Center for Western Meteorological and Water Extremes, this was 5.
Marty Ralph, who runs the center in San Diego, said it was “remarkably unusual” to see an atmospheric river so intense in June. Atmospheric rivers are most common in the West between late fall and early spring.
Business owners in Gardiner, a gateway community north of Yellowstone National Park, face the possibility of a summer without tourists. Yellowstone remained closed on Thursday. Although parts of the park may reopen next week, the northern part of the park, which has suffered most damage, is not expected to reopen to visitors for months.
“Gardiner’s long-term health will depend on gaining public access to the Yellowstone ring road,” said Richard Park, owner of Parks’ Fly Shop. With large sections of the road between Gardiner and Mammoth right in Yellowstone, businesses serving tourists will be strangled, he said.
For Alexis Bonogofsky, a sheep ranger and program manager for the World Wildlife Fund, an advocacy group, the floods are just the latest in a series of catastrophic events that have hit her family farm south of Billings.
The severe drought left her land dry last summer. Swarms of locusts devoured the little overgrown grass, and she had to sell some of her cattle because there was not enough food. Earlier this week, the Yellowstone River flooded 80 acres of Bonogofsky’s pastures, damaging hundreds of feet of a fence that kept 30 ewes and 10 goats locked up.
Bonogofsky said he feared residents were getting used to wave after wave of crises.
“People are quick to adapt to such events and become normal for us, instead of seeing what is happening,” she said. “We will see these forms of natural disasters more often, and I hope that at some point people will realize what is happening and begin to address the root cause.”
Phillips reported from Washington. Howard reported from Billings, Mont. Jason Samenou contributed to this report.
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