Tag Archives: dead

4th of July parade shooting, police are investigating

2Timothy 3:1-8 “Know this: In the last days perilous times will come. 2 Men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, 3 without natural affection, trucebreakers, slanderers, unrestrained, fierce, despisers of those who are good, 4 traitors, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God, 5 having a form of godliness, but denying its power. Turn away from such people.”

Important Takeaways:

  • Illinois 4th of July parade erupts into chaos after multiple shot
  • Witnesses say crowds fled the sound of gunfire, and others saw at least five bloodied people lying on the ground and another under a blanket, according to the Chicago Sun Times.
  • The number of victims remains unclear. Police have reportedly requested a canine unit to assist in finding the suspect. The suspect remains at large.
  • Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker stated to WGN that he believes there are at least nine shooting victims. The outlet reported that at least two were killed.

Read the original article by clicking here.

Ongoing investigation into Maryland shooting that left 3 dead and 1 injured

2 Timothy 3:1-5 “But understand this that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people.”

Important Takeaways:

  • Authorities: 3 Dead, Trooper Wounded in Maryland Shooting
  • An employee opened fire at a manufacturing business in rural western Maryland on Thursday, killing three coworkers before the suspect and a state trooper were wounded in a shootout, authorities said
  • The suspect fled in a vehicle before authorities arrived at the scene and was tracked down by Maryland State Police, Mullendore said. The suspect and a trooper were wounded in an exchange of gunfire, according to the sheriff.
  • Authorities declined to release a motive.

Read the original article by clicking here.

In Berlin man arrested after mowing down people shopping. 1 dead, 30 injured

2 Timothy 3:1-5 “But understand this that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people.”

Important Takeaways:

  • Moment German-Armenian man, 29, is arrested by police after repeatedly mounting pavement and ploughing his car into shoppers in Berlin leaving teacher dead and students among 30 injured
  • This is the moment 29-year-old German-Armenian man Gor H. was arrested after driving into crowds in Berlin
  • At least one person died and 30 more were hurt when he rammed shoppers around 10.30am local time
  • Dead person is a teacher, local media says, and students are among the wounded – five of whom are in critical
  • Police have confirmed the man’s arrest but have so-far refused to say whether the crash was deliberate

Read the original article by clicking here.

Now considered a mass shooting in Denver

Important Takeaways:

  • ‘It’s a shock’: Colorado police ID shooter who killed 5 people in Denver-area shooting spree
  • Six people died, including the shooter, authorities said. Two people were injured, including a police officer.
  • This was the 13th mass shooting in Colorado this year
  • The archive defines a mass shooting as four or more people shot, not including the shooter, at the same general time and location.
  • In the U.S., there have been nearly 700 mass shootings in 2021

Read the original article by clicking here.

‘Historic’ New York-area flooding in Ida’s wake leaves at least 14 dead

By Barbara Goldberg and Maria Caspani

NEW YORK (Reuters) -Flooding killed at least 14 people, swept away cars, submerged subway lines and temporarily grounded flights in New York and New Jersey as the remnants of Hurricane Ida brought torrential rains to the area.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio told a Thursday news conference there were nine confirmed fatalities in New York caused by what he had described as a “historic weather event.”

Countless rescues were made overnight of motorists and subway riders who became stranded in the flood waters, de Blasio said. “So many lives were saved because of the fast, courageous, response of our first responders,” he said.

Images posted on social media overnight showed water gushing over subway platforms and people wading through knee-deep water in their buildings.

Streets turned to rivers as flooding swept away cars in videos captured by stunned residents.

Four residents of Elizabeth, a city in New Jersey, perished in flooding at Oakwood Plaza, a public housing complex that was “flooded out with eight feet of water,” city spokesperson Kelly Martins told Reuters.

“Sadly, more than a few folks have passed as a result of this,” New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy said without elaborating on the death toll at a briefing in Mullica Hill in the southern part of the state where a tornado had ripped apart several homes.

The hit to the Middle Atlantic region came three days after Ida, one of the most powerful hurricanes to strike the U.S. Gulf Coast, devastated southern Louisiana. Reconnaissance flights revealed entire communities destroyed by wind and floods.

Ida’s remnants brought six to eight inches (15 to 20 cm) of rain to a swath of the Northeast from Philadelphia to Connecticut and set an hourly record of 3.15 inches for Manhattan, breaking the previous one that was set less than two weeks ago, the National Weather Service said.

The 7.13 inches of rain that fell in New York City on Wednesday was the city’s fifth highest daily amount, it said.

The number of disasters, such as floods and heat waves, driven by climate change has increased fivefold over the past 50 years, according to a report released earlier this week by The World Meteorological Organization, a U.N. agency.

One person died in Passaic, New Jersey, due to the flooding and the search continued for others, the city’s mayor, Hector Lora, said in a video posted to Facebook on Thursday.

“We are presently still making efforts to identify and try to locate other individuals that have not been accounted for,” Lora said.

NBC New York reported at least 23 fatalities, including a toddler and said that most “if not all” deaths were flood-related.

The governors of New York and New Jersey, who had declared emergencies in their states on Wednesday, urged residents to stay home as crews worked to clear roadways and restore service to New York City subways and commuter rail lines serving millions of residents.

“Right now my street looks more like a lake,” said Lucinda Mercer, 64, as she peered out her apartment window in Hoboken, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from New York.

Mercer, who works as a crisis line fundraiser, said flood waters were lapping halfway up the hub caps of parked cars.

Subway service in New York City remained “extremely limited” while there was no service at all on commuter rail lines to the city’s northern suburbs on Thursday morning, the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) said. Janno Lieber, the MTA’s acting chair and CEO, told local media it was going to take until later in the day to restore full service.

The Long Island Railroad, which is also run by the MTA, said early on Thursday that services on most of its branches had been restored but commuters should expect systemwide delays of up to 30 minutes.

‘HUMBLED BY MOTHER NATURE’

Michael Wildes, mayor of Englewood, a city in New Jersey located just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, said the city’s central business district was under water and some residents had to be evacuated to the library overnight.

“We are being humbled by mother nature in this last year and a half,” Wildes told Reuters by phone.

He said there were no known deaths in Englewood, although police, fire and other emergency responders had extracted several people trapped in their cars.

Mark Haley of Summit, New Jersey, said getting back home after a 15-minute drive to a bowling alley to celebrate his daughter’s sixth birthday on Wednesday night became a six-hour slog through flood waters that often left him trapped.

“When we got out, it was a war zone,” said Haley, 50, a fitness trainer, who got home to find almost two feet (0.6 m) of water in his basement.

All New Jersey Transit rail services apart from the Atlantic City Rail Line were suspended, the service said on its website.

Amtrak said on Thursday morning that it canceled all passenger rail service between Philadelphia and Boston.

New Jersey’s Newark Liberty Airport warned about flight disruptions and said about 370 flights were canceled as of Thursday morning.

More than 200,000 electricity customers were without power early on Thursday in five northeastern states that got most of the rains overnight, mostly in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, according to PowerOutage.US, which gathers data from utility companies. There were also outages in New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts, it said.

(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Bengaluru, Maria Caspani and Peter Szekely in New York, Barbara Goldberg in Maplewood, New Jersey, and Nathan Layne in Wilton, Connecticut; Additional reporting by Doina Chiacu and Susan Heavey in Washington, Ann Maria Shibu and Akriti Sharma in Bengaluru and Sarah Morland in Gdansk; Editing by Christopher Cushing, Shri Navaratnam, Hugh Lawson, Frances Kerry and Steve Orlofsky)

‘Painful days ahead’ as Haitians struggle to count lives lost in quake

By Laura Gottesdiener

CAVAILLON, Haiti (Reuters) -Haitian officials slowly tallied the dead and disappeared in remote villages on Thursday, after the toll from last weekend’s devastating earthquake passed 2,000 and Prime Minister Ariel Henry warned the Caribbean nation faced painful times ahead.

In the small town of Cavaillon, local officials huddled over pieces of paper where they recorded the number of damaged houses, schools and churches in each of the surrounding villages, along with the number of dead and missing.

“We think there are still bodies in the ruins because we can smell them from underneath the rubble,” said Jean Mary Naissant, one of the officials of Cavaillon, which is near the southern city of Les Cayes, one of the areas worst hit by the earthquake.

Haiti’s civil protection agency said late on Wednesday the death toll from Saturday’s powerful 7.2 magnitude earthquake had risen to 2,189, with most of the fatalities in the country’s south, and that the number of wounded stood at 12,200.

Les Cayes residents were jolted from their beds by a fresh aftershock overnight, but there were no immediate reports of damage, a police officer said. Families slept on mattresses on the streets across the city, nervous about the state of buildings.

The poorest country in the Americas, Haiti is still recovering from a 2010 quake that killed over 200,000. The latest disaster struck just weeks after President Jovenel Moise was assassinated on July 7, plunging the nation of 11 million people into political turmoil.

According to the tallies for Cavaillon and the small villages that belong to it, there were 53 fatalities and more than 2,700 wounded in the area. But there were still 21 people unaccounted for six days after the quake, local officials said.

Residents had staged a protest on Monday to demand more assistance to dig out the collapsed buildings, Naissant said, but government help had yet to arrive from the capital, some 180 km (110 miles) to the east.

A village market and hotel nearby were bustling with people when the quake struck on Saturday morning, reducing the area to a great heap of shattered cement and twisted iron rods.

Residents had managed to recover two bodies from the site, said Jimmy Amazan, another local official, but the stench that emanated from underneath the pile during the rescue efforts suggested there were more that were beyond reach.

Prime Minister Henry said late on Wednesday the whole country was physically and mentally devastated.

“Our hearts are tearing apart; some of our compatriots are still under the rubble,” he said, appealing for the troubled nation to come together at a time of crisis. “The days ahead will be difficult and often painful.”

In Boileau, a farming village about a 20 minutes’ drive from Cavaillon, residents said that officials had not arrived yet to document the victims or destroyed buildings, leaving them to wonder whether the damage there was part of the official record.

Renette Petithomme, a police officer, stood in the grass outside her partially collapsed home with her toddler daughter.

She was worried: her father had departed earlier in the day for the capital Port-au-Prince to seek medical care for the head wound he sustained when the home’s walls fell in, but the public bus had broken down en route.

“Since the earthquake, he’s been losing his senses, having trouble speaking and walking,” she said, adding that the family finally decided to send him to the capital for treatment after learning that all the nearby hospitals were full.

Several days since the earthquake, scant aid has arrived in remote areas across the country’s south, according to residents and Reuters witnesses.

In Camp-Perrin, another rural town inland from Les Cayes, more than 100 displaced people, including children and disabled residents, were camped out in a field under the cover of trees after their homes were destroyed by the quake.

A mudslide from two nights of heavy rain earlier this week had partly blocked the main road leading to the area. Any more precipitation could lead to it being impassable, locals said.

(Reporting by Laura Gottesdiener in Cavaillon and Gessika Thomas in Port-au-Prince Additional reporting by Henry Romero in Camp-Perrin; Editing by Ana Nicolaci da Costa and Nick Zieminski)

At least 112 dead in India as rains trigger floods, landslides

By Rajendra Jadhav

MUMBAI (Reuters) -At least 112 people have died in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, authorities said on Friday, after torrential monsoon rains caused landslides and flooded low-lying areas, cutting off hundreds of villages.

Parts of India’s west coast received up to 594 mm (23 inches) of rainfall over 24 hours, forcing authorities to evacuate people from vulnerable areas as they released water from dams that were threatening to overflow.

“Unexpected very heavy rainfall triggered landslides in many places and flooded rivers,” Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray, who heads Maharashtra’s state government, told journalists.

“Dams and rivers are overflowing. We are forced to release water from dams, and, accordingly, we are moving people residing near the river banks to safer places.”

The navy and army were helping with rescue operations in coastal areas, he added.

At least 38 people were killed in Taliye, 180 km (about 110 miles) southeast of the financial capital Mumbai, when a landslide flattened most of the small village, state government officials said.

In nine other landslides in other parts of Maharashtra 59 people died and another 15 were killed in accidents linked to the heavy rainfall, they said.

A few dozen people were also feared to have been trapped in landslides in Satara and Raigad districts, said a state government official who asked not to be named.

“Rescue operations are going on at various places in Satara, Raigad and Ratnagiri. Due to heavy rainfall and flooded rivers, we are struggling to move rescue machinery quickly,” he said.

Thousands of trucks were stuck on a national highway linking Mumbai with the southern technology hub of Bengaluru, with the road submerged in some places, another Maharashtra government official said.

Meanwhile, hundreds of villages and towns were without electricity and drinking water, he said.

Rivers were also overflowing in the neighboring southern states of Karnataka and Telangana where authorities were monitoring the situation, government officials there said.

Seasonal monsoon rains from June to September cause deaths and mass displacement across South Asia every year, but they also deliver more than 70% of India’s rainfall and are crucial for farmers.

(Reporting by Rajendra Jadhav; Editing by Joe Bavier and Giles Elgood)

One dead, hundreds evacuated in German freak floods

BERLIN (Reuters) – A fireman drowned and the army was deployed to help stranded residents on Wednesday after heavy rain triggered once-in-25-year floods in parts of western Germany, disrupting rail, road and river transport in Germany’s most populous region.

The German Weather Service issued an extreme weather warning for parts of three western states, while Hagen, a city of 180,000, declared a state of emergency after the Volme river burst its banks.

With Germans voting in September to choose a successor to Chancellor Angela Merkel, the extreme weather could heighten awareness of global warming, a topic with which the Greens, running second to Merkel’s conservatives, have so far failed to dominate the agenda.

The city’s crisis team warned that water would reach levels seen not more than four times a century in coming hours and warned everyone who lived near the town’s rivers to move to higher ground immediately, public broadcaster WDR reported.

“We see this kind of situation only in winter ordinarily,” Bernd Mehlig, an environment official from North Rhine-Westphalia, the most affected region, told WDR. “Something like this, with this intensity, is completely unusual in summer.”

Parts of Hagen were described as being isolated by high waters and all but inaccessible. Soldiers had to be sent to clear some areas of the city. Residents were also told to leave one district of regional capital Duesseldorf, a major business center.

One old people’s home in Hagen had to be evacuated, while across the region firemen were busy pumping out hundreds of cellars. In one hospital, floodwaters caused lifts to fail.

The fireman died when he lost his footing in floodwaters and was swept away, authorities told WDR. Two men, aged 53 and 81, were missing elsewhere in the region.

Armin Laschet, the premier of North Rhine-Westphalia and the conservatives’ candidate to succeed Merkel, was due to visit the region on Thursday.

(Reporting by Thomas Escritt; Editing by Sandra Maler)

One dead, six rescued and a dozen missing after boat capsizes off Louisiana coast

(Reuters) – One person has died and six others have been rescued after a commercial “lift boat” used to service oil rigs capsized in hurricane force winds several miles south of Port Fourchon on the Gulf of Mexico, the U.S. Coast Guard said on Wednesday.

A dozen people were still missing after the 129-foot commercial vessel capsized in rough seas about 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday, officials said.

Two Coast Guard cutters, a military helicopter, airplane and a small fleet of volunteer private vessels were involved in the searched operation, said Coast Guard Captain Will Watson.

“Unfortunately one person was recovered deceased on the surface of the water,” he said, adding that the winds were about 80 miles per hour (129 km per hour) to 90 mph at the time of the accident.

Two people were rescued by the Coast Guard and four others were pulled from the waters by people on other vessels, he said.

“My heart and the collective hearts of our team goes out to the families,” Watson said, adding that they are working to find other survivors.

The high winds, with some hail and flooding are expected to continue in southeastern Louisiana, according to the National Weather Service. There is a threat of severe weather to overnight in the region and a flash flood watch is in effect till Thursday morning.

The vessel is owned by Seacor Marine, a Houston, Texas-based transportation company, according to media reports.

A representative for the company was not immediately available for comment.

(Reporting by Aakriti Bhalla in Bengaluru; Additional reporting and writing by Rich McKay in Atlanta; Editing by William Maclean and Mike Harrison)

India glacier avalanche leaves 18 dead, more than 200 missing

By Saurabh Sharma

LUCKNOW, India (Reuters) – Rescuers searched for more than 200 people missing in the Indian Himalayas on Monday, including some trapped in a tunnel, after part of a glacier broke away, sending a torrent of water, rock and dust down a mountain valley.

Sunday’s violent surge below Nanda Devi, India’s second-highest peak, swept away the small Rishiganga hydro electric project and damaged a bigger one further down the Dhauliganga river being built by state firm NTPC.

Eighteen bodies have been recovered from the mountainsides, officials said.

Most of the missing were people working on the two projects, part of the many the government has been building deep in the mountains of Uttarakhand state as part of a development push.

“As of now, around 203 people are missing,” state chief minister Trivendra Singh Rawat said, and the number was changing as more information about people caught up by the deluge emerged from the remote area.

Videos on social media showed water surging through a small dam site, washing away construction equipment and bringing down small bridges.

“Everything was swept away, people, cattle and trees,” Sangram Singh Rawat, a former village council member of Raini, the site closest to the Rishiganga project, told local media.

It was not immediately clear what caused the glacier burst on a bright Sunday morning. Experts said it had snowed heavily last week in the Nanda Devi area and it was possible that some of the snow started melting and may have led to an avalanche.

Rescue squads were focused on drilling their way through a 2.5 km (1.5 miles) long tunnel at the Tapovan Vishnugad hydropower project site that NTPC was building 5 km (3 miles) downstream where about 30 workers were believed trapped.

“We are trying to break open the tunnel, it’s a long one, about 2.5 km,” said Ashok Kumar, the state police chief. He said rescuers had gone 150 meters (yards) into the tunnel but debris and slush were slowing progress.

There had been no voice contact yet with anyone in the tunnel, another official said. Heavy equipment has been employed and a dog squad flown to the site to locate survivors.

On Sunday, 12 people were rescued from another much smaller tunnel.

TRIGGER FOR GLACIER BURST

Uttarakhand is prone to flash floods and landslides and the disaster prompted calls by environment groups for a review of power projects in the ecologically sensitive mountains. In June 2013, record monsoon rains there caused devastating floods that claimed close to 6,000 lives.

A team of scientists were flown over the site of the latest accident on Monday to find out what exactly happened.

“It’s a very rare incident for a glacial burst to happen. Satellite and Google Earth images do not show a glacial lake near the region, but there’s a possibility that there may be a water pocket in the region,” said Mohd Farooq Azam, assistant professor, glaciology & hydrology at the Indian Institute of Technology in Indore.

Water pockets are lakes inside the glaciers, which may have erupted leading to this event. Environmental groups have blamed construction activity in the mountains.

Himanshu Thakkar, coordinator of the South Asia Network of Dams, Rivers and People, said that there were clear government recommendations against the use of explosives for construction purposes. “There have been violations.”

The latest accident had also raised questions about the safety of the dams. “The dams are supposed to withstand much greater force. This was not a monsoon flood, it was much smaller.”

(Additional reporting by Nivedita Bhattachargee and Neha Arora; Writing by Sanjeev Miglani; Editing by Michael Perry, Raju Gopalakrishnan and Giles Elgood)