Don’t look away now, the climate crisis needs you.

A voice came over the intercom: would the passengers of Flight 3935, scheduled to depart Washington DC, for Charleston, South Carolina, kindly collect their carry-on luggage and get off the plane. They went down the stairs and gathered on the hot tarmac. There they saw something unusual: the wheels of the US Airways jet had sunk into the black pavement as if it were wet cement. The wheels were lodged so deep, in fact, that the truck that came to tow the plane away couldn’t pry it loose. The airline had hoped that without the added weight of the flight’s 35 passengers, the aircraft would be light enough to pull. It wasn’t. Someone posted a picture: “Why is my flight cancelled? Because DC is so damn hot that our plane sank four inches into the pavement.”

Naomi Klein published this book nearly five years
ago, but it is still remarkably relevant today.

Eventually, a larger, more powerful vehicle was brought in to tow the plane and this time it worked; the plane finally took off, three hours behind schedule. A spokesperson for the airline blamed the incident on “very unusual temperatures”.

Read the story from The Guardian by Naomi Klein - “Don’t look away now, the climate crisis needs you.”

Hurricane Florence: more than 1m ordered to evacuate in Virginia and South Carolina

More than a million people living along the coastlines of South Carolina and Virginia have been ordered to evacuate their homes on Tuesday, as parts of America’s mid-Atlantic coast brace for what could be the most powerful storm to ever hit the region.

One million told to flee as Hurricane Florence bears down on US coast. 

Hurricane Florence is expected to bring potentially catastrophic winds, flooding and storm surge. Forecasters predict it will make landfall sometime late Thursday.

Currently rated as a category 4 storm – the second most powerful on the national weather service’s (NWS) classification system – Florence would be the first storm of that magnitude in recorded history to strike the eastern coastline so far north if it remains on its most likely track.

Read the story from The Guardian by James Lartey in New York - “Hurricane Florence: more than 1m ordered to evacuate in Virginia and South Carolina.”