NC residents urged to conserve energy as emergency order issued amid heatwave
The order, which is in effect until 10 p.m. June 25, was requested by Duke Energy on June 23 to "preserve the reliability of the bulk electric power system." It authorizes Duke Energy Carolinas to operate certain electric generating units at maximum generation output levels during the extreme heat to avoid blackouts and preserve the reliability of the power system.
"As electricity demand reaches its peak, Americans should not be forced to wonder if their power grid can support their homes and businesses. Under President Trump's leadership, the Department of Energy will use all tools available to maintain a reliable, affordable, and secure energy system for the American people," said U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright in a news release.
North Carolina power outages
As of 12:45 p.m. Tuesday, there were 187 active power outages across all counties within the Duke Energy Carolinas region, leaving 1,015 customers without power including 678 in N.C. and 337 in S.C.
Duke Energy requests customers reduce energy use during heat wave
On June 23, Duke Energy released a statement urging customers in the Carolinas to reduce energy use during periods of peak demand from 3-8 p.m. to "lessen the energy demand on the power grid and reduce the potential of isolated power outages."
'We deeply appreciate our customers' cooperation, patience and understanding as we work to help ensure the stability and reliability of the system,' said Duke Energy spokesperson Ben Harrison in the release. 'We understand that reducing electricity use during these hours can be inconvenient, but our customers' actions make a significant difference for all.'
The company suggested the following methods of reduction:
As of around 1 p.m. on June 24, the company had not yet released a further statement.
What to expect in the Wilmington area
Inland areas of Brunswick, New Hanover and Pender counties are under an extreme heat warning until 8 p.m. Wednesday, June 24, according to the National Weather Service in Wilmington. Heat-related illnesses increase during extreme heat and high humidity, so the weather service is urging residents to drink plenty of fluids, stay in air conditioning, stay out of the sun and check on relatives and neighbors.
Here's the upcoming forecast for Wilmington:
Iris Seaton is the trending news reporter for the Asheville Citizen Times, part of the USA TODAY Network. Reach her at iseaton@citizentimes.com.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
All Praise Shade
The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here. Every year, heat takes more lives than floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes combined. The fatalities can sometimes go unnoticed, perhaps because the danger is invisible: There's no twister that uproots a neighborhood and no flood that sucks it underwater, nor billions of dollars in property damage. Instead, heat's imprint is seen in empty streets, work slowdowns, cognitive decline, and hospital bills. When autumn arrives and temperatures relent, heat leaves no discernable trace. The Earth is getting hotter. In many places on the planet, summer is already two to three weeks longer than in the 1950s. By the end of the century, the warm season in the United States could last six months, and extreme temperatures could force us to spend much of it indoors. Supercharged heat waves will settle over cities for weeks at a time and cause many people to die. Others will suffer heart attacks, kidney disease, and brain damage. What we now call winter will be a brief, two-month interregnum that feels more like spring. Reducing society's consumption of fossil fuels is necessary for preventing worse-yet climate change. But even if every single power source becomes a renewable one and we stop emitting carbon, the planet's surface won't start cooling. The temperature will continue to rise for a few years before gradually leveling off. It will take 'many, many centuries,' NASA estimates, to end the global-greenhouse effect. It is a sobering truth that cutting emissions isn't enough. We also need to figure out how to live on a new Earth. What if the key to that life is older than civilization itself? We need to manage heat to live. And we have an effective and democratic way of doing it: shade. [Read: Shade will make or break American cities] Shade makes long waits for the bus more comfortable. Shade helps keep farmworkers safe when they harvest fruits and vegetables under an unforgiving sun. And shade cools urban environments, improving residents' chance of surviving blazing summers. 'We all know that cities are cooler when we have shade, but we're not really planning for it,' V. Kelly Turner, an urban-planning and geography professor at UCLA, said on CNN. 'In the future, that's something that cities are going to need to do, is intentionally think about: What does shade infrastructure look like?' Turner believes that shade could be America's next long-term investment in public health. What safe drinking water and clean air were to the 20th century, shade could be to the climate-changed 21st. Scientific models bear her out. If we can get emissions under control and put the planet on a path to moderate warming, then by 2050, getting out of the sun could be the difference between unsafe heat and a livable environment. One obvious way the planet can get more shade is more trees. We evolved in forests, and some of our oldest myths and stories unfold under their canopies. Hippocrates taught medicine under a plane tree, and Ovid found bittersweet beauty in a laurel's leaves. The Mesopotamian goddess Inanna slept under a miraculous poplar whose shadow never moved, and Buddha found enlightenment by meditating under a ficus tree. Christian and Muslim heavens alike are cooled by trees' perpetual shade. Tree shade is where public space was born and civic identities are forged. In hot climates, people naturally prefer to confer, conduct commerce, and gossip out of the sun's permanent glare. They spend far more time in shady parks or temple courtyards than in sunny ones. They linger and relax, and that engenders more interactions, and possibly even stimulates social cohesion. It's true in arid cities, humid regions, and even temperate zones with short summers. People want to be in shade. They muse longer, pray more peacefully, and find strength to walk farther. [Read: How climate change is killing cities] Perhaps because we've become so adept at cooling inside spaces with air conditioning, we've forgotten the importance of cooling outside spaces, too. There is no technology that cools the outdoors as effectively as a tree. These communal parasols are also misting machines that dissipate heat. It's hard to feel that effect under one or two of them, but get enough trees together and an urban summer can be as fresh as a rural spring, a feat with major implications for energy use and public health. Where tree-planting isn't viable, cities must invest in other types of public infrastructure that cast shade. Throughout Los Angeles, on streets that are too cramped and paved over to support green canopies, the preferred protections aren't arboreal but artificial, such as the pop-up tents of taqueros and the cheerful rainbow umbrellas of fruit vendors. In Phoenix, a desert city that struggles to nourish an urban forest, common tools include sidewalk screens, frilly metal filters, and soaring photovoltaic canopies. These interventions are more effective than many might expect. Ariane Middel, an Arizona State University urban-climate researcher who runs the school's Sensable Heatscapes and Digital Environments (SHaDE) Lab, surveyed students and staff as they strolled through the shadows that solar panels cast on a Tempe campus thoroughfare. More than any change in ambient temperature, humidity, or wind, the mere presence of shade was the only significant predictor of outdoor comfort. Shade's effectiveness is a function of physics. It depends on the material properties of the sun-blocking objects that cast it—how they reflect, absorb, and transmit different wavelengths of energy in sunlight. It depends on the intensity of that light and the extent of the shade thrown. (A telephone pole that casts a perfect shadow on your body does nothing to stop the solar heating of the surfaces around you.) And it depends on the biology of the person who receives it. Middel has come as close as anyone to adding up all these factors. She praises humble umbrellas and plastic sails, because their shade feels like taking 30 degrees off the afternoon sun, which is about as good as shade cast by a tree. Ultimately, she finds that a city itself can offer the most relief in the shadows of arcaded sidewalks and looming skyscrapers. The Greek philosopher Onesicritus taught that shade stunts growth, a belief that presaged a modern fixation on the healthiness of sunlight. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, doctors and public-health advocates feared that darkness itself caused the poor health of urban slum-dwellers. It was a vector of disease, where contagions bred and spread, and the murkiness also encouraged licentiousness and other urban vices. Some literally believed sunlight was the best disinfectant. Solar codes were written into urban plans, and new materials and technologies allowed architects to design brighter buildings flooded with natural light. [Read: America's climate boomtowns are waiting] Now we're beginning to see how a solar fetish may be maladaptive. In New York, a recent summer saw a throng of neighborhood activists protest the construction of a 16-story office tower, with signs to Save Our Light. They did this while huddling in the shadow of another building. As intense heat bears down, we have to see shade as a basic human right. We have forgotten that shade is a natural resource. We don't grasp its importance, and we don't appreciate its promise for a better future. Loggers and farmers cut down forests, forcing animals to flee and land to turn fallow. Engineers ignore time-honored methods of keeping out heat, locking us into mechanical cooling systems that fail during blackouts. And urban planners denude shady parks and pave neighborhoods with heat-sucking roads, only to drive us mad with the infernal conditions. But shade is a path to a better future—if we just learn to value it again, and design for it in the places we live. This article was adapted from Sam Bloch's new book, Shade: The Promise Of A Forgotten Natural Resource. Article originally published at The Atlantic Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Century-old dam under strain as floods increase in US and federal funds dry up
More than 18,000 properties that sit downstream of a series of a century-old Ohio dam are at risk of flooding over the next three decades, according to climate data, as the Trump administration continues to roll back investments that would aid in keeping the waters at bay. In a part of the US that's largely flat, the view from above the Huffman dam in south-west Ohio is rare. From the bike trail atop the dam, the shimmering lights of downtown Dayton appear to the south. Cargo planes from a nearby air force base circle overhead and water from the 66-mile-long Mad River gushes underfoot. But the dam serves a far more pressing purpose: holding back up to 54bn gallons of water – enough to fill 82,000 Olympic-size swimming pools – during flooding events. Nearby, more than 21% of all properties downstream are at risk of flooding over the next three decades, according to First Street, a climate risk data modeling organization. That percentage accounts for 18,596 properties in Dayton. The five massive dry dams and 55 miles of levees west and north of Dayton were built in the aftermath of catastrophic destruction that befell the Ohio city in 1913, when 360 people died and flooding in three rivers that meet in the city center wiped out the downtown area. But today, it and many other communities around the midwest are once again at risk of flooding. 'Our system has experienced 2,170 storage events. The flood in April ranked 12th,' says MaryLynn Lodor, general manager of the Miami Conservancy District, the authority overseeing the regional flood prevention system that includes the Huffman Dam. The flooding early last April saw five to seven inches of rain inundate homes, roads and parks, and caused power outages for thousands of people across hundreds of miles. Extreme precipitation events are happening with increasing regularity at a time when, across a region that's home to the country's two major, high-discharge waterways – the Ohio and Mississippi rivers – decades-old flood prevention infrastructure is falling apart. From Indiana, where authorities in charge of a dam at a youth camp that sees 15,000 visitors annually warned of failure during last April's flooding, to Illinois and Minnesota, reports are appearing with increasing regularity of '100-year' floods threatening the integrity of, and in some cases destroying, dams. Five years ago, the Edenville Dam in central Michigan failed following days of heavy rain, prompting the evacuation of 10,000 people and the failure of another dam downstream. The dam is situated at the confluence of two rivers, and in 2018 its owner temporarily had its license taken away due to fears it couldn't pass enough water at high flood levels. Lawsuits and an expense report of $250m followed the dam failure. Data from Michigan's department of environment, Great Lakes and energy, found that of the state's recorded 2,552 dams, nearly 18% were rated as in 'fair', 'poor' or 'unsatisfactory' condition. Despite this, little change has been enacted in Michigan. 'The reason this is popping up everywhere in the country is because it's a massive ageing infrastructure problem,' says Bryan Burroughs, a member of a now-closed state taskforce that sought to investigate the status of dams across Michigan following the Edenville incident. He says the taskforce's recommendations have largely not been enacted. 'To date, the only ones that have been taken up and addressed to any level are the ones that our state department of environment, Great Lakes and energy are able to oversee themselves. Regulatory changes have not been picked up legislatively,' Burroughs continued. Through the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration had made investing in America's ageing infrastructure over the course of many years a priority, with $10bn dedicated to flooding mitigation and drought relief. An additional $3bn was allocated in 2021 through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act for dam safety, removal and related upgrades. Since Donald Trump entered the White House in January, the administration has vowed to roll back much of those investments. Hundreds of dam safety and other staffers working at dams in 17 western states have been laid off in recent months. Before the 4 July flood disaster in Texas, the Trump administration had pledged to close the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema). With more than 92,000 dams across the country, the Society of Civil Engineers estimates the cost of repairing the country's non-federal dams at $165bn. In Ohio, the Miami Conservancy District has been outspoken in highlighting that the dams it is responsible for are in need of repair – in particular, the upstream walls of two north of the city of Dayton. Levees it manages 'are subject to the costly, federally mandated Fema accreditation process, but there is no adequate funding source.' Last year, the district said it needs $140m to bring the region's dams and levees up to safe levels over the coming decades. Over the past 80 years, the organization has seen a 228% increase in the volume of water its dams store, meaning the structures today must work harder than they did in the past to hold back the water. 'As we're looking at having to make reinvestments, we are looking to try to secure some funding through the state and federal governments,' says Lodor. 'We have not gotten much support and federal dollars or state money to be able to do the system. It's already been invested in by the local communities; it would be very difficult for this to be on the backs of the locals.' Many dams hold back water that's used by fishers and recreators – an issue that's creating tension in many communities. In White Cloud, Michigan, authorities have had to draw down much of the lake water behind a 150-year-old dam due to fears for its structural integrity, angering locals. As in Texas, dozens of youth groups and Christian camps across the midwest use lakes and waterways downstream of ageing lowhead and other dams for programming and outdoor activities. Emails and messages left by the Guardian with the owners of an at-risk dam at a camp in Indiana used by thousands of children every year received no response. While compared with other parts of the US the midwest does not have a lot of dams whose main purpose is for flood control due to geological and topographical reasons, Ohio and much of the wider midwest have seen 'record-setting rain' this year. 'The weather has changed,' says Burroughs. 'What used to be a one-in-100-year flood event might have happened three times in the last 40 years.' Solve the daily Crossword
2 hours ago
Americans on alert for new rounds of flash floods
ABC News' Chief Meteorologist Ginger Zee is tracking the deadly flash floods and extreme heat for tens of millions of Americans.
