AP – Heavy rain flooded an Ohio, United States (US) highway where people were rescued from their cars, covered the Las Vegas Strip with water and temporarily closed a busy airport terminal outside Detroit.
Parts of the western US have been deluged in recent weeks with rain from Tropical Storm Hilary, and much of the central US was beaten down by deadly sweltering heat. In Hawaii and Washington, emergency crews battled catastrophic wildfires.
Areas in southeast Michigan got over 12.7 centimetres (cm) of rain by Thursday morning, resulting in street flooding in the Detroit area, including tunnels leading to Detroit Metropolitan Airport in the suburb of Romulus, officials said.
Officials re-opened the airport’s McNamara Terminal on Thursday afternoon.
Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer activated the State Emergency Operations Center on Thursday evening to provide support to affected communities as they respond to the impacts of flooding. Scientists said that without extensive study they cannot directly link a single weather event to climate change, but that climate change is responsible for more intense and more frequent extreme events such as storms, droughts, floods and wildfires.
Climate change is largely caused by human activities that emit carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, according to the vast majority of peer-reviewed studies, science organisations and climate scientists.
