Tropical Storm Elsa on Thursday carved a destructive and soaking path up the US east coast after killing at least one person in Florida and spinning up a tornado at a US Navy base in Georgia that flipped recreational vehicles upside-down and blew one of them into a lake.
Elsa’s winds strengthened to 85 kph, as the storm dropped heavy rains on parts of North Carolina and Virginia, the US National Hurricane Center said.
Elsa was passing over the eastern mid-Atlantic states on Thursday night and was expected to move near or over the northeastern US yesterday.
Photo: AFP
No significant change in strength was expected through yesterday, and Elsa was forecast to become a post-topical cyclone by yesterday night, the center said.
Tropical storm warnings were in effect along the coast from North Carolina to Massachusetts.
There was a chance that Long Island in New York would see sustained tropical storm-force winds late on Thursday night and into yesterday morning, the US National Weather Service said.
The service’s Morehead City, North Carolina, office wrote on Twitter that a tornado was spotted near Fairfield on Thursday afternoon.
A tornado warning had been issued for North Carolina’s Hyde County and surrounding counties.
Elsa seemed to spare Florida from significant damage, although it still threatened flooding downpours and caused several tornado warnings.
Authorities in Jacksonville, Florida, said that one person was killed on Wednesday when a tree fell and struck two vehicles.
A spokesperson for the US Naval Air Force Atlantic Office said that a sailor assigned to a patrol and reconnaissance squadron was killed in Jacksonville on Thursday.
Nine people were on Wednesday injured evening in Georgia’s coastal Camden County when a tornado struck a campground for active-duty service members and military retirees.
Eight people who had sustained injuries were taken to hospitals, a military spokesperson said.
The tornado flipped over multiple recreational vehicles, throwing one of them into a lake 61m away, the service said in a preliminary report early on Thursday.
Malaysia yesterday installed a motorcycle-riding billionaire sultan as its new king in lavish ceremonies for a post seen as a ballast in times of political crises. The coronation ceremony for Malaysia’s King Sultan Ibrahim, 65, at the National Palace in Kuala Lumpur followed his oath-taking in January as the country’s 17th monarch. Malaysia is a constitutional monarchy, with a unique arrangement that sees the throne change hands every five years between the rulers of nine Malaysian states headed by centuries-old Islamic royalty. While chiefly ceremonial, the position of king has in the past few years played an increasingly important role. Royal intervention was
X-37B COMPARISON: China’s spaceplane is most likely testing technology, much like US’ vehicle, said Victoria Samson, an official at the Secure World Foundation China’s shadowy, uncrewed reusable spacecraft, which launches atop a rocket booster and lands at a secretive military airfield, is most likely testing technology, but could also be used for manipulating or retrieving satellites, experts said. The spacecraft, on its third mission, was last month observed releasing an object, moving several kilometers away and then maneuvering back to within a few hundred meters of it. “It’s obvious that it has a military application, including, for example, closely inspecting objects of the enemy or disabling them, but it also has non-military applications,” said Marco Langbroek, a lecturer in optical space situational awareness at Delft
The Philippine Air Force must ramp up pilot training if it is to buy 20 or more multirole fighter jets as it modernizes and expands joint operations with its navy, a commander said yesterday. A day earlier US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said that the US “will do what is necessary” to see that the Philippines is able to resupply a ship on the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) that Manila uses to reinforce its claims to the atoll. Sullivan said the US would prefer that the Philippines conducts the resupplies of the small crew on the warship Sierra Madre,
AIRLINES RECOVERING: Two-thirds of the flights canceled on Saturday due to the faulty CrowdStrike update that hit 8.5 million devices worldwide occurred in the US As the world continues to recover from massive business and travel disruptions caused by a faulty software update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, malicious actors are trying to exploit the situation for their own gain. Government cybersecurity agencies across the globe and CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz are warning businesses and individuals around the world about new phishing schemes that involve malicious actors posing as CrowdStrike employees or other tech specialists offering to assist those recovering from the outage. “We know that adversaries and bad actors will try to exploit events like this,” Kurtz said in a statement. “I encourage everyone to remain vigilant