Southern Alabama and the Florida Panhandle were slammed by a severe storm, bringing death and destruction across the South.
Drivers on Interstate 10 at the Alabama-Florida state line were forced to abandon their vehicles and walk to safety after officials shut it down due to high water.
The flooding also kept fire rescue crews from being able to respond to calls for help in the Pensacola area.
“It’s gotten to the point where we can’t send EMS and fire rescue crews out on some 911 calls because they can’t get there,” Escambia County spokesman Bill Pearson said. “We’ve had people whose homes are flooding and they’ve had to climb up to the attic.”
Alabama was hit with 11.5 inches of rain overnight. Officials were calling people living south of Interstate 10 warning them not to travel.
Drivers in Pensacola, Florida were stranded when the cross country storm pummeled the town with more than 2 feet of water.
More rain fell in a single hour during Tuesday’s storm “than during the entirety of Hurricane Ivan” according to The Weather Channel’s lead meteorologist, Kevin Roth.
Forecasters believe that Tuesday’s rain in Pensacola set a record, but no official data could be gathered due to damage to the National Weather Service’s equipment.
“It went on and on and on. It was relentless,” Cheryl Clendenon, who was stranded in her home in Pensacola Beach until a friend picked her up, told NBC News. “I used to like the sound of rain to help me get to sleep, but this was like Chinese water torture. It just did not stop.”
The current storm system hitting the country has killed 38 people in eight states.
Over 200 people attending an Easter concert in Florida were stunned when a car smashed through the side of the church building leaving 21 injured.
Second Haitian Baptist Church was preparing for their final Easter event of the day around 8 p.m. Sunday when a car slammed through the brick outer wall of the building and rammed through several rows of pews before coming to a stop.
Fort Myers police say the car’s driver claimed the brakes in the vehicle failed as she was trying to find a place to park for the event. Officials are calling the incident “an unfortunate traffic accident.”
The congregation was seated and waiting for the concert to begin when the car came through the wall. Members of the church manually lifted the vehicle and then used car jacks to lift the car off people who were trapped beneath it.
Lee Memorial Health Systems reported 18 people were taken to area hospitals and none required surgery.
A woman who has been attempting to become self-sufficient and live “off the grid” has been targeted by officials of Cape Coral, Florida by shutting off her sewage system.
Robin Speronis has been working for years to reduce her need for government services. She has been using solar energy to power her home for a year and a half. She has a system in place to capture rainwater to use for cooking, drinking and bathing. She survives on mostly non-perishable food.
A day after a Fox affiliated TV station aired a story on her efforts; the city ordered her to vacate her home because of code violations. The city later told the TV station that they don’t have the power to evict but wanted access to the home to “provide suggestion” for her to live “off the grid in Cape Coral.”
Speronis was convicted in front of a judge last week for violating a code related to a city approved water supply. She was ordered by the judge to hook up to city utilities. The city then capped her sewage access saying that she had past due bills for using the system. Government officials say Speronis told the she wouldn’t pay for using the sewage system.
Speronis said she has a way to do without the sewer system and doesn’t need it.
A woman who was forced to spend a night in jail after recording a police officer on her phone has filed suit over wrongful imprisonment.
Brandy Berning, 33, was stopped for driving in the HOV lane at the wrong time and then began to record Lt. William O’Brien as he approached her vehicle. When Berning said that she was recording the stop, O’Brien said she had committed a felony and demanded the phone.
The officer then argued with the woman over the next few minutes before reaching into the car to take the phone and spraining her wrist.
In Florida, both sides of a conversation are required to know that a conversation is being recorded. It is legal for third parties to record a law enforcement officer performing duties.
The ACLU says it’s very likely the law will be on Berning’s side in the lawsuit.
An earthquake struck off the coast of Cuba on Thursday, shaking buildings both in that nation and in the Florida straits.
The quake struck just before 4 p.m. local time about 100 miles east of Havana. The U.S. Geological Survey said that the closest city to the epicenter was Corralillo.
The quake was so strongly felt in Old Havana that buildings had to be temporarily evacuated because of the shaking. The quake reportedly shook buildings for over 30 seconds.
“Everything was moving,” NuriaOquendo told Fox. “You could really feel it, very clear, very defined.”
The USGS said that the quake was only six miles deep and not strong enough to develop tsunami.
The associate director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) told PBS that the age of antibiotics has come to an end.
Dr. Arjun Srinivasan told PBS’s series Frontline that humans and livestock have been so overmedicated that bacteria have simply become resistant to the antibiotics currently on the market.
‘For a long time, there have been newspaper stories and covers of magazines that talked about “The end of antibiotics, question mark?”‘ Dr.Srinivasan said. ‘Well, now I would say you can change the title to “The end of antibiotics, period.”’
Dr. Srinivasan said that hospitals are now having patients admitted with infections that could be easily treated with antibiotics five years ago who have no effective treatment available. He also mentioned the increase in infections among places that in the past were not common places. For example, MRSA recently broke out in the locker room of the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Until about a decade ago, MRSA was mainly seen in hospitals.
The blame for the increase in antibiotic resistant bugs was attributed partially to overuse and abuse of antibiotics and drug manufacturers not creating new antibiotics because they are not a profitable line of research.
A struggling single mother who made a desperate attempt at shoplifting food for her three hungry children found her arrest lead to an outpouring of grace from the community.
And it started with the officer who arrested her.
Jessica Robles said she made the decision to shoplift $300 in groceries from a South Florida Publix store because she had no money to feed her three children. Miami-Dade Police Officer Vicki Thomas, after hearing Robles’ story, took an unusual step. Instead of arresting her, she ran Robles’ background and found nothing major. So Officer Thomas gave Robles a misdemeanor and notice to appear in court.
And then gave her $100 so that Robles could get food for her children.
“I made the decision to buy her some groceries because arresting her wasn’t going to solve the problem with her children being hungry,” Officer Thomas told 7News.
When the TV station ran the story, the grace shown to Robles increased exponentially. A local business took the single mother to Walmart for a shopping spree to get items her family needed and a second viewer who owned a business installing phone systems hired her for a customer service job.
“There’s no words I could tell you right now,” Robles told the TV station. “I’m grateful that you took the time and helped somebody out, especially somebody like me.”
A Florida man is dead after a killer bacteria swept through his body in just 28 hours. Continue reading →
A controversial abortion clinic in Orlando, Florida has started offering a discount to women who come in Sundays to kill their babies via abortion.
The Orlando Women’s Center, which was shut down in June after their former head physician failed to settle a $36 million medical malpractice lawsuit, is offering multiple deals on their website. The clinic had their equipment seized in June in connection to the debts of Dr. James Pendergraft. Continue reading →