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Here’s a few updates on Winter Storm Neptune, which will hit the northeast U.S. on Friday, but the impact will be felt on Saturday and Sunday.
New England, including hard-hit Boston, will get slammed by the blizzard, says Accuweather.com.
“A storm passing through the Northeast riding a tidal wave of frigid air will evolve into a blizzard over New England before departing during the Valentine’s Day weekend,” the site says. “The worst of the storm will target the central and northern New England coast Saturday night into Sunday with wind-driven snow.”
Meanwhile, the “major cities in the path of the burst of snow that can cross hundreds of miles include Cleveland, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York City, Washington, D.C., and Richmond, Virginia,” says Accuweather.
The Weather Channel urged northeast residents to “prepare now” for the storm, which it dubbed Winter Storm Neptune. “Areas far removed from the center of the storm in the mid-Atlantic can experience life-threatening cold, the risk of power outages from high winds, and the possibility of road closures and flight cancellations,” it said.
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‘This could be a storm the likes of which we have never seen before,’ says NYC mayor
Residents of the U.S. Northeast are girding for a “crippling and potentially historic” storm that could bury communities from northern New Jersey to southern Maine in about 60 centimetres of snow.
The National Weather Service said the nor’easter would bring heavy snow, powerful winds and widespread coastal flooding starting Monday and through Tuesday. A blizzard warning was issued for a 400-kilometre stretch of the Northeast, including New York and Boston.
Government officials began to activate emergency centres on Sunday as professional sports teams, schools and utilities hastily revised their schedules and made preparations.
“This could be a storm the likes of which we have never seen before,” New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio told a news conference in a Manhattan sanitation garage where workers were preparing plows and salt for the massive cleanup on about 9,600 kilometres of city roadways.
In Massachusetts, Gov. Charlie Baker warned residents to prepare for roads that are “very hard, if not impossible, to navigate,” power outages and possibly even a lack of public transportation.
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MIUSYNSK, Ukraine — Natalia Shevchenko, 57, doesn’t know if she and her husband are going to survive the winter. Her last pension check arrived in June, and since then, she and her husband have eaten through most of the pickled tomatoes and canned food on their shelves. “Now we understand that no one needs us,” she said.
Shevchenko lives in Miusynsk, a village in eastern Ukraine of fewer than 2,000 people that hugs the border between Luhansk and Donetsk, the two regions controlled by pro-Russian rebels fighting Ukrainian forces.
Elsewhere across the region, some help has trickled in. Russian Cossack commanders have set up a soup kitchen for the elderly and distributed a one-time payment of 1,000 hryvnia, about $63, to pensioners in other cities. Russian and international aid groups have delivered food, clothing and basic medical supplies to the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk. Ukrainian aid trucks made a delivery to other parts just before the New Year.
But it appears that no humanitarian help has reached Miusynsk. With no money and no food aid to speak of, many villagers here say they feel forgotten in the 10-month conflict that has left more than 4,700 dead.
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Ukraine Fighting Flares After Gas Deal as Winter Nears – Bloomberg.
Fighting flared in Ukraine’s easternmost regions hours after the conclusion of a natural gas deal with Russia, highlighting the challenges in reaching peace as theRed Cross warned about winter’s onset.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko called on his parliamentary party yesterday to support Arseniy Yatsenyuk as prime minister, saying the country needs to be united “as never before” following Oct. 26 elections.
“Despite the cease-fire in eastern Ukraine, acts of indiscriminate shelling and security incidents continue to put civilians at risk,” the International Committee of the Red Cross said in a statement. “The approaching winter makes the situation of both residents and displaced people even more difficult.”
While the pact brokered by the European Union on Oct. 30 is designed to keep homes warm through the winter, rebels still hold large chunks of Ukraine’s east and are planning a controversial election tomorrow. Crimea remains under Russian control and the Kremlin, bristling at an EU accord Ukraine signed, is testing NATO with daily airspace violations.
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Ukraine gas supplies in doubt as Russia seeks EU payment deal | Reuters.
(Reuters) – Ukraine’s efforts to unblock deliveries of Russian gas as winter sets in were deadlocked on Thursday as Moscow’s negotiators were quoted demanding firmer commitments from the European Union to cover Kiev’s pre-payments for energy.
EU-hosted talks were adjourned after running late into the night, Energy Minister Alexander Novak and the head of Russian gas firm Gazprom (GAZP.MM) told Russian news agencies. They would resume later in the day if Ukraine and the EU had a firm financing deal in place, Gazprom head Alexei Miller said.
Ukrainian and EU officials were not available. A spokeswoman for Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger issued a statement cancelling a news briefing that had been tentatively set for 8:30 a.m. (0730 GMT) in the event of an agreement.
There has already been agreement on the price Kiev will pay for gas over the winter, the amount to be supplied and the repayment of some $3.1 billion in unpaid Ukrainian bills but Moscow, which cut off vital pipelines in June as the conflict with Ukraine and the West deepened, wants more legal assurances that Kiev can pay some $1.6 billion for new gas up front.
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U.K. Sees Flat Winter Gas Use Amid Minimal Ukraine Risk – Bloomberg.
U.K. natural gas demand this winter will be little changed from last year and Britain will be able to withstand a potential cut in Russian supply to Europe, according to National Grid Plc.
Gas use in the six-month period from October will be unchanged from last year on a weather-corrected basis and 1.9 percent more than actual use, the Warwick, England-based network manager said today in its Winter Outlook. Increased liquefied natural gas imports would be able to meet normal winter demand should Russian flows to the European Union be disrupted.
“Under all curtailment scenarios we have sufficient transmission network capacity” in case Russian supplies are limited, the report said. “However, it is likely that we could require increased deliveries of LNG.”
Russia, the EU’s biggest single source of gas, halted supplies to Ukraine in June in a debt and price dispute that echoed those of 2006 and 2009, when transit flows to the region were disrupted. While the U.K. doesn’t directly receive Russian gas, an escalation of the conflict that impacts supply to the region would affect flows across Europe, the grid said.
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Arctic Ice Melt Seen Doubling Risk of Harsh Winter in EU – Bloomberg.
The decline in Arctic sea ice has doubled the chance of severe winters in Europe andAsia in the past decade, according to researchers in Japan.
Sea-ice melt in the Arctic, Barents and Kara seas since 2004 has made more than twice as likely atmospheric circulations that suck cold Arctic air to Europe and Asia, a group of Japanese researchers led by the University of Tokyo’s Masato Mori said in astudy published today in Nature Geoscience.
“This counterintuitive effect of the global warming that led to the sea ice decline in the first place makes some people think that global warming has stopped. It has not,” Colin Summerhayes, emeritus associate of the Scott Polar Research Institute, said in a statement provided by the journal Nature Geoscience, where the study is published.
The findings back up the view of United Nations climate scientists that a warmer average temperature for the world will make storms more severe in some places and change the character of seasons in many others. It also helps debunk the suggestion that slower pace of global warming in the past decade may suggest the issue is less of a problem.
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Kyrgyzstan Looks to Alternative Fuels Ahead of Looming Winter Shortages.
Each winter in Kyrgyzstan the energy situation seems to worsen; blackouts last longer, and officials seem less able to do anything to improve conditions. This year is expected to be particularly difficult.
The winter heating season has not even begun and already lots of people are bracing for months of hardship. A video, posted October 12 on YouTube, depicting Kyrgyz doctors having to perform open-heart surgery amid a sudden blackout, is helping to heighten anxiety about the coming winter. In another alarming signal, Bishkek’s local energy-distribution company, Severelectro, sent out advisories with recent utility bills, describing the situation as “critical” and begging customers to conserve electricity and use alternatives to heat their homes.
Southern Kyrgyzstan has been without gas since April, when Russia’s Gazprom took over the country’s gas network, and neighboring Uzbekistan said it would not work with the Russians. That has forced residents in the south to use precious and expensive electricity to cook, or resort to burning dung and sometimes even furniture. On top of that, a drought has hampered operations at Kyrgyzstan’s main hydroelectric plant at the aging Toktogul Dam.
