The Grand Canyon gets smashed by a flash flood. Texas gets hit by a tropical storm and tens of thousands lose power. Then the heat wave moves into the East and the government is telling the biggest grid in the country to prepare for emergency conditions.
Deep in Grand Canyon, the rain left them nowhere to go…
Hikers thought they’d prepared for the reality of a flash flood, but they never imagined that they’d be trapped in the deepest, narrowest part of the canyon.
Jessica Buscher pressed her face against the sharp, wet rock and realized she might never see her three children or wife again. The knowledge that her family could get a call that her body had been found along the Colorado River, or perhaps never found, sank so heavy inside her that it was hard to breathe.
Trop Storm brings flooding, power outages to Texas…
Tropical Storm Edouard made landfall near Johnson Bayou, Louisiana, on Tuesday afternoon after intensifying as it approached the Gulf Coast, bringing flooding rain, gusty winds and storm surge to southeastern Texas and southwestern Louisiana.
Edouard rapidly organized from a tropical rainstorm Sunday into a named storm Monday, putting coastal communities on alert for flooding and power outages. The storm strengthened in the hours leading up to landfall, with maximum sustained winds reaching 60 mph, with locally higher gusts.
Edouard is the third tropical storm to make landfall along this part of the Gulf Coast in 2026. Arthur was the first storm of the season and made landfall near Matagorda Bay, Texas, in mid-June. One month later, Tropical Storm Bertha made landfall east of New Orleans before drifting back over the Gulf, followed by a second landfall near the border of Texas and Louisiana.
Blackout risk rises as heat wave stresses largest electric grids…
Sept 2 (Reuters) – The risk of power outages is expected to escalate across a broad swath of the United States on Wednesday as intense heat will test the capacity of electricity supplies serving millions of homes and businesses from the Midwest through the Mid-Atlantic.
The U.S. Department of Energy warned of the potential for heightened blackout risks in the PJM Interconnection, the largest U.S. electric grid, which serves 67 million people in a territory stretching from Washington D.C. to Chicago.
Late on Tuesday night, DOE Secretary Chris Wright authorized PJM to direct backup generation resources to operate as a last resort before declaring a level 3 energy emergency alert, which can be one of the last steps before rotating blackouts are ordered.
The DOE said the move was part of a plan “to stabilize the Mid-Atlantic grid and mitigate the risk of blackouts.”