Covid patient goes from ‘invincible’ to hospital-bed vaccine advocate
Suzanne Ciechalski
An unvaccinated Virginia man who’s been hospitalized with Covid-19 is using social media to urge others to go out and get the shot.
Travis Campbell, 43, has been in the hospital for more than a week with complications from the virus, which also infected his wife and two of their children.
Image: Travis Campbell has been making Facebook videos and posts asking people to get vaccinated against Covid-19 after testing positive and being hospitalized for the virus. (Travis Campbell)
“We just thought we were invincible and we weren’t going to get it,” said his wife, Kellie Campbell. “And we’ve just been so busy, and we just moved, and we prolonged getting the vaccine.”
Kellie Campbell said her husband tested positive on July 22 and got progressively worse. Eventually, he was hospitalized. She worries that he will be placed on a ventilator to help his breathing.
“I mean, he couldn’t catch his breath … had fever, just lethargic, he ached, just one thing after another,” she said. “He started in a regular room, and then he went to a Covid ICU room, and now he’s in the pulmonary ICU.”
Despite his condition, Travis Campbell is adamant about making videos to share on Facebook encouraging others to get vaccinated now, his wife said.
“I’m testifying to all my bulletproof friends that’s holding out, it’s time to protect your family, it’s not worth getting long term lung damage or death please go get the vaccine,” Travis Campbell wrote in a July 25 Facebook post.
Kellie Campbell said her husband is “all about other people” and doesn’t want others to have to deal with what he’s going through.
“He just doesn’t want anyone to have to endure the pain that he has, and if a vaccine will help them, that’s what they need to do,” she said.
In a video posted from his hospital bed Tuesday night, Travis Campbell asked followers to consider whether they’d rather plan their own funerals and goodbyes or get vaccinated.
“I hope to God that all my friends and family would not say, ‘Somebody hand me a piece of paper and a pen.’ That’s a sobering thought, of which I have done,” he said.
As her family and doctors take her husband’s condition day by day, Kellie Campbell said her advice to others is to go out and get vaccinated immediately.
“If you have to take time off work, if you have to miss out on something, you need to go get the vaccine, because we didn’t, and look where we are now,” she said. “I mean, that should be your top priority. Especially not just for you, but your family members.”
Column One: In drought-plagued northern Mexico, tens of thousands of cows are starving to death
Kate Linthicum
Marco Antonio Gutierrez, a cattle rancher in Buenavista, in Mexico’s Sonora state, stands among the carcasses of livestock who died of starvation. (Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
In the parched hills of southern Sonora, Marco Antonio Gutierrez paced around a clearing, counting the dead.
There were seven rotting carcasses — jutting ribs and shriveled hides — and two sun-bleached skulls. Nine cows, felled by heat and hunger.
“There’s nothing for them to eat,” said Gutierrez, a wide-brimmed hat shading his downcast eyes. “There used to be big ranches here. Now it’s pure sorrow.”
Two years of extreme drought have turned large stretches of northern Mexico into a boneyard. Between starvation and ranchers forced to prematurely sell or slaughter their livestock, officials say the number of cattle in Sonora has dropped from 1.1 million to about 635,000.
It’s an unimaginable loss for a state that is world-famous for its high-quality cows, and where beef is not just a central part of the diet and economy but also a tradition that binds families together.
This is a place, after all, with a bull on its state flag, and where families gather every Sunday around their charcoal grills. Red meat is considered a birthright: It’s not uncommon for folks here to eat beef three times a day — machaca scrambled with eggs for breakfast, arrachera for lunch and carne asada for dinner.
Rancher Manuel Bustamante Parra with one of his heifers. (Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
Gutierrez, 55, and pretty much everyone he knows was born ranching. By the age of 10, he and his friends had all learned from their fathers how to lasso, brand and even pull a calf from the womb.
Now, as they desperately watch the skies for rain, they wonder if there’s any future in it.
Gutierrez doesn’t use the phrase “climate change” to describe what’s happening, but he laments that every year seems drier and hotter than the last. In recent months, he has watched helplessly as 70 of his 100 cows have starved to death.
Over coffee and machaca at a restaurant owned by fellow rancher Julio Aldama Solis, the two friends mulled whether it was finally time to auction off their remaining cattle — or whether they should keep struggling.
Selling would be heartbreaking, Aldama said, a surrender not only of their cowboy identity but also their family legacy.
“Imagine the sadness — all the sacrifices of your grandparents and your parents for nothing,” said Aldama, the 56-year-old scion of a prosperous ranching family in the largely rural county of Cajeme.
Gutierrez sipped his coffee. There was a reason he had held on to his herd during the worst of the drought, even as the animals wasted away in front of him.
It was his father, long dead, who had taught him the arduous but rewarding ways of ranch life.
Healthy livestock drink water from a trough at Rancho La Ventana on La Noria de Cuco, Sonora. (Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
And Gutierrez had come to love his cattle, even giving names to some: Coyota, La Venada, Vellota.
They had lived alongside his own family, and had helped sustain it financially. Every year the cows birthed calves that he could sell for about $600 each at auction.
At least now they were free from the misery of drought.
“They passed on to a better life,” he said.
‘THEY’RE DRY. COMPLETELY’
The cicadas were humming. That was a good sign.
Some people in these parts believe the buzz of cicadas — like the tambourine shake of a rattlesnake — means a thunderstorm is rolling in.
Gutierrez and Aldama scanned the sky. The sun was beating down, hot as ever, but a few cotton-like clouds loomed on the horizon.
“We’re all praying to the Virgin of Guadalupe that it rains,” Aldama said.
A malnourished cow forages for food along the roadside in Buenavista. (Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
They were touring the region’s ranches with another friend, Ricardo Alcala, who is the president of the Local Livestock Assn. of the Yaqui Valley. All three wore jeans with silver buckles and white cowboy hats.
There had been a couple of big storms in other parts of the state — enough to cause flooding in the border city of Nogales. Yet 97% of municipalities in Sonora remained officially in drought, and while sporadic rain here in the south had greened up the mesquite trees that dotted the landscape, it had not been enough to make grass grow.
A worker loads alfalfa in Cocorit, Sonora. (Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
It wasn’t even noon yet, and the thermometer on Alcala’s truck read 104 degrees. As the friends drove, they passed people shielding themselves from the sun with umbrellas, and dogs and horses hugging the sides of buildings, desperate for shade.
And then there were the cattle, thousands of them, some so skinny they looked like skeletons wandering the hills.
For months, ranchers had depended on alfalfa grown in fields irrigated with water from private wells or a nearby dam. But when the dam levels fell dangerously low, authorities had cut off the supply to ranches and farms to conserve water for drinking, cooking and bathing. The price of alfalfa had doubled — putting it out of reach for many.
Alcala’s organization had pleaded with authorities to drill wells in the region so ranchers could grow their own food for their cattle. But water table levels have fallen too, making it clearer each day that wells are at best a temporary solution.
A fisherman tosses a net at Agua Caliente reservoir in Cajeme, Sonora. The drought has lowered the water level to below normal. (Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
Alcala pumped the brakes of his Ram truck when he saw a member of his association, Jesús Arvizu Valenzuela, cutting hay in a field that stood out for its lushness. But Arvizu, 68, told him the pasture would soon lie fallow — brown like the unirrigated land that surrounded it.
“They won’t give us water anymore,” he said.
“The wells aren’t working either?” Alcala asked.
Arvizu shook his head. “They’re dry. Completely.”
‘A MATTER OF IDENTITY’
Five hundred years ago, there were no cattle here.
The first cows were brought to Mexico by Spanish conquistadors in the 1500s. In Sonora, Jesuit missionaries encouraged Indigenous tribes, who had subsisted mostly on beans, corn and squash, to raise them.
By the second half of the 20th century, livestock had become big business here, with cattle roaming over 85% of the state. Tens of thousands of ranchers raised steers to sell at auction, many for export to the United States. Ranchers here say Sonora’s mix of native grasses give their beef a distinctive texture.
“Very juicy and soft,” Alcala proudly explained.
Ranch hand Ernesto Flores Morales tends to healthy livestock at Rancho La Ventana in La Noria de Cuco, Sonora. (Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
There were always periods of drought that ranchers had to endure — but in recent decades, climate change has made things worse.
Average rainfall has been decreasing for years. By the second half of this century, climate experts predict that Sonora will receive 20% to 30% less rain than today and regularly see temperatures as high as 122 degrees.
América Lutz Ley, a social scientist at El Colegio de Sonora who studies land use, is one of a growing number of people in the state who believe cattle ranching in its current form is not sustainable, largely because of the huge amount of water required to grow food for the herds.
“We live in a desert yet we are in the business of exporting water in the form of livestock,” she said.
Then there’s the fact that cattle emit significant levels of methane, a major driver of global warming. Mexico’s 34 million cattle are responsible for about 10% of the nation’s total greenhouse gas emissions.
Lutz wishes there was more political will to promote alternatives to ranching. But she acknowledges that major changes are unlikely as long as prices for steers remain high and beef continues to be “a matter of identity” in Sonora.
She grew up spending weekends at carne asadas eating flour tortillas stuffed with salsa, guacamole and thin cuts of charred beef. It’s a family ritual so beloved here that even Lutz still indulges in it.
Rosendo Godinez, left, and his brother Cesar Godinez, remove the meat from cooked cows heads to later sell tacos de cabeza, or tacos made with the meat. (Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
Manuel Medina, foreground, cuts carne asada for a customer at Carniceria Chihuahua in Ciudad Obregon, Sonora. (Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
It’s not easy changing culture.
Gutierrez knows that. For him and his friends, ranching is more than a livelihood — it’s a way of life.
As they drove on, the sky began to darken. A few fat raindrops hit the truck’s windshield. It seemed the cicadas had been right.
Alcala optimistically turned on his wipers. But a minute later, the rain stopped and he turned them off.
A PAINFUL DECISION
Early the next morning, Gutierrez and his two friends crowded into a different pickup, this time to check on Aldama’s ranch.
The sky was pink with sunrise. The radio was playing an accordion-heavy corrido about three brothers on horseback setting off at dawn to a party on a ranch.
As they turned off the highway onto Aldama’s property, Gutierrez exclaimed with delight.
“It rained, Julio!”
The storm they had driven through the day before had been more generous in this region. Butterflies flitted about orange and pink wildflowers that appeared to have bloomed overnight.
“It’s green and fresh and I’m happy because it rained,” said Aldama as his Chevy splashed through scattered puddles.
But he knew that one decent rain wouldn’t be enough.
Manuel Bustamante Parra walks through a field of bones from dead livestock that died of starvation on the dry and barren ground. (Gary Coronado/Los Angeles Times)
“The ranch is still in crisis,” Aldama said. “There’s no grass.”
He signaled to a field where a month ago his son and some friends had planted sorghum for his animals.
Weeks later, the field was barren except for the empty cans of Bud Light the young men had downed after finishing their work.
“It should have been a foot high by now,” Aldama said. “We planted sorghum but only beer has grown.”
They came to a pen where a ranch hand was milking cows. During the hottest months of the drought, Aldama had kept most of his cattle alive by feeding them carrots he had grown on another plot he owned.
He proudly appraised the half dozen calves, some just a few weeks old, that were competing with the ranch hand to get milk from their mother.
But selling all of the calves in a few months wouldn’t make up for the costs of keeping his herd alive, he said.
His grandparents founded this ranch, growing it from just a few cattle to a lucrative business. Lately their descendants had been talking, and had recently come to a painful decision.
Unless there are recurring, penetrative rains in August, the family will sell half of its herd. Where the cow pastures once grew, they are thinking about planting agaves — which require little water and are used to make a stiff local liquor called bacanora.
“I don’t see a future in ranching,” Aldama said, his voice cracking. “It’s a really good business when it rains, but lately it’s all losses.”
But the power of tradition is strong. Stronger, sometimes, than reason.
Fishermen clean their catch of tilapia on Agua Caliente reservoir. (Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
Gutierrez did everything he could to keep feeding his cows. To raise money, he started buying and selling tilapia and carp caught from the local dam. But that business tanked as the dam nearly went dry.
He and his wife, who works at a hospital, have decided that their two children should not have to endure such hardships. They are studying in Ciudad Obregon, the nearest city.
“I suffered a lot and I don’t want them to suffer,” Gutierrez said.
He still doesn’t know what he’ll do — try to rebuild his herd or give up.
On a recent hot afternoon, he was commiserating with Manuel Bustamante Parra, a 58-year-old friend in similar straits.
Bustamante used to have 28 cattle, but now has 19. He did his best to save the hungry animals in their final days — using a rope-and-pully system to haul them upright to eat when they were too weak to stand — but it wasn’t enough.
Every few days, Bustamante rides his horse to a different small chapel in the region. He asks for rain as he lights candles to the Virgin of Guadalupe. He and Gutierrez have been traversing these hills on horseback for as long as they can remember.
“I’m too old to learn something new,” Gutierrez said.
“We’ll keep ranching until all the cows die,” Bustamante told him. “Or we do.”
Manuel Bustamante Parra has seen his livestock die of starvation because of the drought. (Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)
Cecilia Sánchez in The Times’ Mexico City bureau contributed to this report.
Global Warming Will Kill 83 Million People in the Next 80 Years
Jonathan Tirone
(Bloomberg) — A population equivalent to that of Germany — 83 million people — could be killed by 2100 because of rising temperatures caused by greenhouse-gas emissions, according to a new study that might influence how markets price carbon pollution.
The research from Columbia University’s Earth Institute introduces a new metric to help companies and governments assess damages wrought by climate change this century. Accounting for the “mortality cost of carbon” could give polluters new reasons to clean up by dramatically raising the cost of emissions.
“Based on the decisions made by individuals, businesses or governments, this tells you how many lives will be lost or saved,” said Columbia’s Daniel Bressler, whose research was published Thursday in the journal Nature Communications. “It quantifies the mortality impact of those decisions” by reducing questions down “to a more personal, understandable level.”
Read More: Life and Death in Our Hot Future Will be Shaped by Today’s Income Inequality
Adapting models developed by Yale climate economist and Nobel Prize winner William Nordhaus, Bressler calculated the number of direct heat deaths that will be caused by current global-warming trajectories. His calculations don’t include the number of people who might die from rising seas, superstorms, crop failures or changing disease patterns affected by atmospheric warming. That means that the projected deaths — which approximate the number of people killed in World War II — could still be a “vast underestimate,” Bressler said.
Every 4,434 tons of carbon spewed into the Earth’s atmosphere in 2020 will kill one person this century, according to the peer-reviewed calculations that see the planet warming 4.1º Celsius by 2100. So far the planet has warmed about 1.1º C, compared to pre-industrial times.
The volume of pollution emitted over the lifetime of three average U.S. residents is estimated to contribute to the death of another person. Bressler said the highest mortality rates can be expected in Earth’s hottest and poorest regions in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.
Read More: How Biden Is Putting a Number on Carbon’s True Cost: QuickTake
The new metric could significantly affect how economies calculate the so-called social cost of carbon, which U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration set at $51 a ton in February. That price on pollution, which complements carbon markets like the European Union’s Emissions Trading System, helps governments set policy by accounting for future damages. But the scale revealed by Bressler’s research suggests the social cost of carbon should be significantly higher, at about $258 a ton, if the world’s economies want to reduce deaths caused by global warming.
A higher cost on carbon pollution could immediately induce larger emission cuts, which in turn could save lives. Capping global average temperature increase to 2.4ºC by the end of the century, compared with modest emissions reductions that would warm the planet 3.4ºC, could save 74 million people from dying of heat.
“People shouldn’t take their per-person mortality emissions too personally,” said Bressler. Governments need to mobilize “large-scale policies such as carbon pricing, cap and trade and investments in low carbon technologies and energy storage.”
While Covid-19 has shaken much of human society, the threat posed by global warming has not gone away.
Human activities have increased carbon dioxide emissions, driving up temperatures. Extreme weather and melting polar ice are among the possible effects.
What is climate change?
The Earth’s average temperature is about 15C but has been much higher and lower in the past.
There are natural fluctuations in the climate but scientists say temperatures are now rising faster than at many other times.
World is getting warmer
This is linked to the greenhouse effect, which describes how the Earth’s atmosphere traps some of the Sun’s energy.
Solar energy radiating back to space from the Earth’s surface is absorbed by greenhouse gases and re-emitted in all directions.
This heats both the lower atmosphere and the surface of the planet. Without this effect, the Earth would be about 30C colder and hostile to life.
Greenhouse effect
Scientists believe we are adding to the natural greenhouse effect, with gases released from industry and agriculture trapping more energy and increasing the temperature.
This is known as climate change or global warming.
What are greenhouse gases?
The greenhouse gas with the greatest impact on warming is water vapour. But it remains in the atmosphere for only a few days.
Carbon dioxide (CO2), however, persists for much longer. It would take hundreds of years for a return to pre-industrial levels and only so much can be soaked up by natural reservoirs such as the oceans.
Most man-made emissions of CO2 come from burning fossil fuels. When carbon-absorbing forests are cut down and left to rot, or burned, that stored carbon is released, contributing to global warming.
Since the Industrial Revolution began in about 1750, CO2 levels have risen by around 50%. The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is higher than at any time in at least 800,000 years.
Other greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide are also released through human activities but they are less abundant than carbon dioxide.
What is the evidence for warming?
The world is about one degree Celsius warmer than before widespread industrialization, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
Satellite data also shows the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is losing mass. A recent study indicated East Antarctica may also have started to lose mass.
The effects of a changing climate can also be seen in vegetation and land animals. These include earlier flowering and fruiting times for plants and changes in the territories of animals.
How much will temperatures rise in future?
The change in the global surface temperature between 1850 and the end of the 21st Century is likely to exceed 1.5C, most simulations suggest.
The WMO says that if the current warming trend continues, temperatures could rise 3-5C by the end of this century.
Temperature rises of 2C had long been regarded as the gateway to dangerous warming. More recently, scientists and policymakers have argued that limiting temperature rises to 1.5C is safer.
An Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report in 2018 suggested that keeping to the 1.5C target would require “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society”.
The UN is leading a political effort to stabilise greenhouse gas emissions. China emits more CO2 than any other country. It is followed by the US and the European Union member states, although emissions per person are much greater there.
But even if we now cut greenhouse-gas emissions dramatically, scientists say the effects will continue. Large bodies of water and ice can take hundreds of years to respond to changes in temperature. And it takes CO2 decades to be removed from the atmosphere.
How will climate change affect us?
There is uncertainty about how great the impact of a changing climate will be.
It could cause fresh water shortages, dramatically alter our ability to produce food, and increase the number of deaths from floods, storms and heatwaves. This is because climate change is expected to increase the frequency of extreme weather events – though linking any single event to global warming is complicated.
As the world warms, more water evaporates, leading to more moisture in the air. This means many areas will experience more intense rainfall – and in some places snowfall. But the risk of drought in inland areas during hot summers will increase. More flooding is expected from storms and rising sea levels. But there are likely to be very strong regional variations in these patterns.
Poorer countries, which are least equipped to deal with rapid change, could suffer the most.
Plant and animal extinctions are predicted as habitats change faster than species can adapt. And the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that the health of millions could be threatened by increases in malaria, water-borne disease and malnutrition.
As more CO2 is released into the atmosphere, uptake of the gas by the oceans increases, causing the water to become more acidic. This could pose major problems for coral reefs.
Global warming will cause further changes that are likely to create further heating. This includes the release of large quantities of methane as permafrost – frozen soil found mainly at high latitudes – melts.
Responding to climate change will be one of the biggest challenges we face this century.
Why it’s so hard and expensive to plug an abandoned well
Cathy Bussewitz
Ashley Williams Watt watches as a workover rig is used to help replug one of the abandoned wells at her ranch, Friday, July 9, 2021, near Crane, Texas. Some of her wells are leaking chemicals such as benzene, a known carcinogen, into fields and drinking water. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)
Ashley Williams Watt looks at an abandoned well wrapped with locks and chains on her ranch, Friday, July 9, 2021, near Crane, Texas. Some of her wells are leaking chemicals such as benzene, a known carcinogen, into fields and drinking water. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)
In this June 2021 photo provided by rancher Ashley Williams Watt, the Estes 24 well leaks on the Antina ranch near Crane, Texas. Chevron, which is responsible for the abandoned well, has been working to re-plug it. Buried under the sand, it became unplugged and started leaking produced water, a byproduct of oil production that is considered a toxic substance. The rancher’s biggest worry is that it will get into her drinking water supply and the watershed, which flows into the nearby Pecos River. (Ashley Williams Watt via AP)
An oil well worker helps to re-plug an abandoned well on the ranch of Ashley Williams Watt, Friday, July 9, 2021, near Crane, Texas. The wells on Watt’s property seem to be unplugging themselves. Some are leaking dangerous chemicals into the ground, which are seeping into her cattle’s drinking water. And she doesn’t know how long it’s been going on. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)
Forgotten Wells Unplugged and Leaking
An estimated 2 million abandoned oil and gas wells across the country, forgotten or ignored by the energy companies that drilled them, are believed to be leaking toxic chemicals. Many of the wells are releasing methane, a greenhouse gas containing about 86 times the climate-warming power of carbon dioxide over two decades. Some are leaking chemicals such as benzene, a known carcinogen, into fields and groundwater.
Here are some questions and answers.
WHAT IS AN ABANDONED WELL?
An oil or gas well is considered abandoned when it’s reached the end of its useful life and is no longer producing enough fuel to make money. If the company that owned the well went bankrupt, or there’s no owner to be found to plug or maintain it, then the abandoned well is considered “orphaned.”
WHAT DANGER DOES AN ABANDONED WELL POSE?
Over time, the amount of oil and gas a company can extract from a well declines. At that point, many operators will cap a well to seal it temporarily. Sometimes, wells sit in that “idle” or “inactive” state for months or even years. But to prevent chemicals from leaking into the air or soil, a well must be properly plugged with cement. Left unplugged, oil and gas wells are at risk of leaking methane into the atmosphere and toxic chemicals into groundwater.
HOW DO YOU PLUG AN OIL AND GAS WELL?
The idea is to fill certain parts of the well with cement, to stop toxic chemicals from leaking into aquifers or the air, and to eventually bury the well underground.
First, crews must remove any pumpjacks or other equipment that might have been left at surface. They then examine the well for problems: leaks, deteriorated casings, cracked cement. They fish out random sticks or debris that might have wedged over time into the wellbore — the vertical shaft that is drilled to extract oil and gas.
“If you leave a well ignored for a long enough time, the casing begins to deteriorate inside,” said Luke Plants, chief operating officer at Plants and Goodwin, a company that plugs oil and gas wells throughout Appalachia. “Every kid that walks by and sees this open pipe throws a rock down in there.”
Next, the pluggers must measure the wellbore and determine to what depths they must pour cement to keep the well from leaking into water tables or other underground geologic formations.
The older the well is, the trickier the operation. When a well is orphaned, detailed records of how the well was drilled might be missing. The crews must try to determine, based on records of nearby wells, what is occurring underground. If a well had been abandoned decades ago, crews might have to build roads to move heavy equipment needed for the job. If a well is found under a driveway or a parking lot, crews must operate carefully around homes, schools or electric wires.
WHAT DOES IT COST?
The cost to plug an orphaned well varies depending on its age, depth and location. In North Dakota, where some wells are drilled to depths of more than 20,000 feet, it can cost $150,000 to plug a single well and restore the land around it. In Pennsylvania, the state budgets about $33,000 to plug each well.
Many states require companies to post bonds to pay for well plugging. But the bond amount is generally far lower than the cost of plugging. On federal lands, the average amount the government held in bonds was just $2,122 per well in 2018, according to the Government Accountability Office. Some groups are pushing states to tighten rules on how long a well can remain idle or to raise the bond amounts required of operators.
An effort in 2005 to obtain funding from Congress for a federal well-plugging program failed to secure much money. Many states, including Texas, Pennsylvania, New Mexico and North Dakota, fund their plugging operations through fees or taxes paid by the oil and gas industry. But that money isn’t enough to plug all the wells that need it. And state lawmakers often face pushback from groups that would rather have that money go to education or other community needs.
In Pennsylvania, plugging all the known orphaned wells could cost $250 million to $300 million, said Seth Pelepko, the environmental program manager at the Bureau of Oil and Gas Planning and Program Management in the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. But his office has secured only enough money to spend about $1 million annually. Pelepko estimates that plugging all the wells there — including those of unknown location — could range into the billions of dollars.
In Colorado, state regulators spent $14.4 million over three years to plug and reclaim wells after operators had set aside only $1.3 million, according to the Western Organization of Resource Councils, a network of grassroots groups involved with land stewardship. Colorado would need about $5.3 million a year for five years to address the current inventory of orphaned wells, the group said.
People walk by city fountains at sunset, at the end of a very warm day, in Bucharest, Romania, Wednesday, July 14, 2021. The Romanian weather authority has issued a heatwave warning for the next two days in the Romanian capital with temperatures expected to go above 35 degrees centigrade (95 Fahrenheit) in the shade. (AP Photo/Andreea Alexandru)
SKOPJE, North Macedonia (AP) — Authorities in several southeast European countries have issued weather warnings before a heat wave in the region expected Thursday that is set to push temperatures to as high as 43 C (109.4 F) in inland areas.
Public health officials in North Macedonia on Wednesday said all six of the country’s administrative regions would be affected by the emergency and urged a pause in construction work and called for municipal-level initiatives to help the elderly and the homeless.
High temperatures are expected through the weekend in North Macedonia and neighboring Albania, Bulgaria, and Greece, as well as parts of Romania and Serbia.
In Albania’s central Dimal region, temperatures reached 42 C (107.6 F) Wednesday.
In the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, municipal workers handed out free bottles of water at several locations in the city. Trucks were sent to water drying out sections of public parks and gardens.
Municipal authorities in Athens this week began providing air-conditioned spaces to the public, and advised residents to remain indoors at midday and the early afternoon.
The Greek capital has also appointed a chief heat officer, becoming the first European capital to do so.
Athens is part of a European network of cities created to combat the effects of high temperatures, alongside Paris, Rotterdam, Glasgow, and Seville.
“We’ve been talking about global warming for decades, but we haven’t talked much about heat,” the new Athens officer, Eleni Myrivili, said following her appointment last week.
“I look forward to raising awareness among the citizens of Athens about the grave dangers of extreme heat and helping decision-makers take action to cool the city and protect people and their communities.”
Wildfires raged for a second day in southern Greece, forcing evacuations in a mountainous area outside the western port city of Patras. Smoke from the fire was visible in the center of the city. Forest fires were also reported in Bulgaria and Albania.
Derek Gatopoulos reported from Athens, Greece. Llazar Semini in Tirana, Albania contributed to this report.
Homes lose water as wells run dry in drought-ravaged basin
Oregon residents report dried-up wells in an area struggling through a historic drought.
MALIN, Ore. (AP) — Judy and Jim Shanks know the exact date their home’s well went dry — June 24.
Since then, their life has been an endless cycle of imposing on relatives for showers and laundry, hauling water to feed a small herd of cattle and desperately waiting for a local well-drilling company to make it to their name on a months long wait list.
The couple’s well is among potentially hundreds that have dried up in recent weeks in an area near the Oregon-California border suffering through a historic drought, leaving homes with no running water just a few months after the federal government shut off irrigation to hundreds of the region’s farmers for the first time ever.
Officials have formal reports of 117 empty wells but suspect more than 300 have gone dry in the past few weeks as the consequences of the Klamath River basin’s water scarcity extend far beyond farmers’ fields.
Worried homeowners face waits of six months or more to get new, deeper wells dug because of the surging demand, with no guarantee that those wells, too, won’t ultimately go dry.
Some are getting by on the generosity of neighbors, or hauling free water from a nearby city. The state also is sending in a water truck and scrambling to ship more than 350 emergency storage tanks from as far as Oklahoma amid a nationwide shortage of the containers due to drought-induced demand across the U.S. West. The first tanks arrived Thursday.
Judy Shanks, a volunteer ambulance driver, and her husband are surviving on 5-gallon (19-liter) jugs she fills at her mother’s house, and have already sold several cows.
“Come December, if we don’t get some storms in here and we don’t see any changes, I’ll probably sell everything because we can’t hang on,” she said.
While much of the West is experiencing exceptional drought conditions, the toll on everyday life is particularly stark in this region filled with flat vistas of sprawling alfalfa and potato fields and normally teeming wetlands.
This summer’s already critical water shortages have been amplified by a mandate to preserve water levels for two species of endangered suckerfish in a key lake that’s also the primary source of irrigation water for 200,000 acres (80,900 hectares) of farmland.
“It’s kind of hard to look forward and see good things,” said Justin Grant, a farmer who lost irrigation water and whose home now also has a dry well. “I’m trying to wrap my head around how to get through the season.”
In the past, water from Upper Klamath Lake was released each spring from a dam controlled by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and flowed into a vast network of irrigation canals. That system feeds fields converted from marshy lakes to arable land by the government more than a century ago.
The amount of water allocated to farmers varies yearly based on lake levels, and already in recent years it had been reduced.
This year, however, the bureau said because of unusually low lake levels caused by severe drought it could not release any water at all without imperiling the suckerfish. Now, some farmers are drawing instead from deep wells that dot the region, depleting groundwater at the shallower depths tapped by homeowners.
“This is something that you don’t really think of having to deal with in a country like ours,” said Klamath County Commissioner Kelley Minty Morris. “It’s unimaginable to me even though it’s going on right in my community.”
Some water also leaks from the irrigation canals every growing season, superficially replenishing the groundwater. But those canals have run dry, said Brad Kirby, manager of the Tulelake Irrigation District, just south of the California border.
Experts say several factors — years of paltry rain and snow, record-setting heat and raging wildfires driven by climate change — are inexorably changing the region’s ecology.
Oregon’s Water Resources Department, which monitors groundwater levels, recorded the lowest inflow of water ever into the Upper Klamath Lake this spring, setting the stage for a disastrous summer.
“In some wells, we’re seeing a drop of 40 or 50 feet (12 to 15 meters) so far this season,” said Ivan Gall, field services administrator for the agency. “It is a lot.”
And there is no guarantee the groundwater will fully recharge when it rains and snows again, he said. In 2010, another year when farmers pumped a lot of groundwater because of drought, the aquifer dropped permanently between 4 and 5 feet (1.2 to 1.5 meters), he said.
“You can see how interconnected all of this is,” Gall said, calling it a “cascade effect” of competing demands.
Irrigators drawing on groundwater have irked some homeowners, but the overwhelming focus of anger in this conservative, Republican-leaning community has been the U.S. government and the Endangered Species Act.
Some acknowledge global warming’s role, but most say they are victims of bad government policy in what’s been framed as a battle between farmer and fish. Now, homeowners are in the mix.
“I don’t want to get political about this because I understand everybody’s desire — we’re all just trying to survive. But the environmental policies have killed us here,” said Shanks, the ambulance driver. “We have a drought, I’m not denying that. But we have an even worse man-made drought.”
The two species of suckerfish have been listed as federally endangered since 1988 and are of critical cultural importance to the Klamath Tribes, which have fought for decades to preserve them. The tribes’ studies show that if nothing changes, the fish will disappear from the lake within a generation.
“Archeological evidence has us here for 14,000 years. Our world view, our traditional world view, is everything was placed here for a purpose, including us, and those fish that were created for us were to provide for our subsistence,” said Klamath Tribes Chairman Don Gentry.
With fields and now wells drying up, and the fish struggling, everyone is wondering where to go from here.
Nathan Buckley was on a camping trip on Memorial Day weekend when his wife called him to say their sprinkler had stopped running and the kitchen faucet was dry.
A pump specialist told them they had an inch (2.5 centimeters) of water left in their 180-foot (55-meter) well. The only solution, he said, was to dig a deeper well — but well-drilling companies in the rural region are few, and the wait for service is at least six months.
The Buckleys are now hauling up to 45 gallons (170 liters) of water a day from neighbors for their four horses, a miniature pony and 14 goats that their daughter shows competitively. They have borrowed a 550-gallon (2,080-liter) water tank that they use for limited showers and laundry; Nathan Buckley hauls it into town every five days on a borrowed trailer to fill it up.
Buckley has spent weeks pulling records and using Google Earth to map every well within a quarter-mile (0.4 kilometers) of his house and now knows his own well is about a quarter-mile from a dry irrigation ditch.
“What if we spend $25,000 or $30,000 right now putting a well in, and next year it goes dry again? Then what? My gut says it’s a remote possibility,” he said. “But it is a possibility.”
Some homeowners, however, take an even broader view as their lawns die and they pay tens of thousands for new wells.
“You hear the word ‘unprecedented’ so many times that it loses its impact, but really, this is not normal,” said Roger Smith, a retired fish biologist who also must dig a deeper well after his went dry this summer.
“There’s been anger in the Klamath Basin for so long,” he said. “If this goes on for a few more years, some of these small communities will cease to exist.”
Record-smashing heat extremes may become much more likely with climate change – study
Andrea Januta
Wildfires in British Columbia.
(Reuters) – Cyprus. Cuba. Turkey. Canada. Northern Ireland. Antarctica. All recorded their hottest-ever temperatures in the last two years, and according to a new study, more such extremes are coming.
In the next three decades, “record-shattering” heat waves could become two to seven times more frequent in the world than in the last 30 years, scientists report in a study published Monday https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-021-01092-9 in the journal Nature Climate Change.
Beyond 2050, if current greenhouse gas emissions trends continue, such record-breaking heat waves could be three to 21 times more frequent, the study found.
Even with the records seen in 2021, “we haven’t seen anything close to the most intense heat waves possible under today’s climate, let alone the ones we expect to see in the coming decades,” said co-author Erich Fischer, a climate scientist at ETH Zurich.
For the study, the researchers used climate modeling to calculate the likelihood of record-breaking heat that lasted at least seven days and far surpassed earlier records.
Communities preparing for climate change need to be preparing for such extremes, he said.
“Every time record temperatures or precipitation go well beyond what we’ve experienced during our lifetime, that’s usually when we’re unprepared and the damage is largest,” Fischer said.
Last month’s Canadian heat wave killed hundreds of people and reached 121 Fahrenheit (49.6 Celsius) – an eye-popping 8 degrees Fahrenheit (4.6 degrees Celsius) above the country’s previous record, set in 1937.
“We should no longer be surprised if we see records smashed by large margins,” Fischer said.
If greenhouse gas emissions are aggressively cut, the likelihood of heat waves would remain high but the chances of exceeding records would eventually fall over time, the study suggests.
The new research shows that “we must expect extreme event records to be broken – not just by small margins, but quite often by very large ones,” climate scientist Rowan Sutton at the University of Reading’s National Centre for Atmospheric Science said in a statement.
“This highlights the huge challenge to improve preparedness, build resilience and adapt society to conditions that have never previously been experienced,” Sutton said.
The study was released as scientists with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change begin two weeks of virtual meetings https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-climate-change-ipcc-idUKKBN2EW0CK to finalize their next global climate science assessment.
(Reporting by Andrea Januta; Editing by Katy Daigle and Dan Grebler)
As drought cuts hay crop, cattle ranchers face culling herds
Brittany Peterson
Rancher Jim Stanko checks the water level of an irrigation ditch, Tuesday, July 13, 2021, on his ranch near Steamboat Springs, Colo. Stanko said that due to drought conditions this year, if he can’t harvest enough hay to feed his cattle, he may need to sell off some of his herd. (AP Photo/Brittany Peterson)
STEAMBOAT SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) — With his cattle ranch threatened by a deepening drought, Jim Stanko isn’t cheered by the coming storm signaled by the sound of thunder.
“Thunder means lightning, and lightning can cause fires,” said Stanko, who fears he’ll have to sell off half his herd of about 90 cows in Routt County outside of Steamboat Springs, Colorado if he can’t harvest enough hay to feed them.
As the drought worsens across the West and ushers in an early fire season, cattle ranchers are among those feeling the pain. Their hay yields are down, leading some to make the hard decision to sell off animals. To avoid the high cost of feed, many ranchers grow hay to nourish their herds through the winter when snow blankets the grass they normally graze.
But this year, Stanko’s hay harvest so far is even worse than it was last year. One field produced just 10 bales, down from 30 last year, amid heat waves and historically low water levels in the Yampa River, his irrigation source.
Some ranchers aren’t waiting to reduce the number of mouths they need to feed.
At the Loma Livestock auction in western Colorado, sales were bustling earlier this month even though its peak season isn’t usually until the fall when most calves are ready to be sold. Fueling the action are ranchers eager to unload cattle while prices are still strong.
“Everybody is gonna be selling their cows, so it’s probably smarter now to do it while the price is up before the market gets flooded,” said Buzz Bates, a rancher from Moab, Utah who was selling 209 cow-calf pairs, or about 30% of his herd.
Bates decided to trim his herd after a fire set off by an abandoned campfire destroyed part of his pasture, curbing his ability to feed them.
Weather has long factored into how ranchers manage their livestock and land, but those choices have increasingly centered around how herds can sustain drought conditions, said Kaitlynn Glover, executive director of natural resources at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association.
“If it rained four inches, there wouldn’t be a cow to sell for five months,” said George Raftopoulos, owner of the auction house.
Raftopoulos says he encourages people to think twice before parting with their cows. Having to replace them later on might cost more than paying for additional hay, he said.
Culling herds can be an operational blow for cattle ranchers. It often means parting with cows selected for genetic traits that are optimal for breeding and are seen as long-term investments that pay dividends.
Jo Stanko, Jim’s wife and business partner, noted her cows were bred for their ability to handle the region’s temperature swings.
“We live in a very specialized place,” she said. “We need cattle that can do high and low temperatures in the same day.”
As the Stankos prepare to shrink their herd, they’re considering new lines of work to supplement their ranching income. One option on the table: offering hunting and fishing access or winter sleigh rides on their land.
The couple will know how many more cattle they’ll need to sell once they’re done storing hay in early September. They hope to cull just 10, but fear it could be as many as half the herd, or around 45 head.
Already, the family sold 21 head last year after a disappointing hay harvest. This year, the crop is even worse.
“With the heat, it’s burning up. I can’t cut it fast enough,” Jim Stanko said of the hay crop.
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The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/environment.
Arizona ER Doctor Visibly Stunned By Video Of Trump Rally: ‘Dangerous And Stupid’
Josephine Harvey
An emergency room doctor described the behavior of the people who attended a crowded, indoor rally for former President Donald Trump as extremely dangerous and stupid amid soaring COVID-19 case rates in the area.
“If you make a dumb decision about your own health, on one level you could say, ‘Well, it’s your life,’” said Dr. Murtaza Akhter, who works on the COVID-19 frontline with Valleywise Health in Phoenix. “But when it’s infectious disease that’s this contagious and affects so many people, you’re not just affecting yourself, you’re affecting everybody around you.”
Akhter made the comments after viewing footage of the packed “Protect Our Election” rally held at the Arizona Federal Theater over the weekend. Thousands of mostly maskless people crowded together as Trump and right-wing figures took the stage to continue his “stolen election” fiction and push anti-mask, anti-science rhetoric.
Footage on CNN showed MAGA merch-clad supporters yelling at the camera, “No masks! No masks! Take off the masks!”
Akhter said he had no doubt that there would be an increase in cases following the event.
In Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, just 42% of people have been fully vaccinated for COVID-19. New daily cases have more than doubled in the past two weeks as the highly infectious delta variant rapidly spreads around the state and country, predominantly infecting and causing serious illness to unvaccinated people.
Oregon residents report dried-up wells in an area struggling through a historic drought.
