Four people are dead and one injured after a hot-air balloon crashes in New Mexico

samboon82 (25)in #de • 4 years ago

Four people have died and one person is in critical condition following a hot-air balloon crash in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on Saturday.

The balloon crashed into a power line around Central Ave. and Unser Blvd., causing power to go out in the area, Albuquerque Police Department (APD) confirmed on Twitter.
"The balloon hit the top wires -- the gondola of the balloon skirted along the top wire, caught on fire and crashed into the intersection," APD spokesman Gilbert Gallegos told CNN. "Unfortunately when police and fire officials arrived they found four deceased on site."
Police are not publicly naming the victims at this time, but Gallegos said the deceased and injured are between 40 and 60 years old, adding that police believe the hot-air balloon pilot to be among the dead.

Of the four people that were killed, two were men and two were women, Albuquerque Police confirmed in a statement.
The injured person, an adult male, has been hospitalized and remains in unstable condition, according to Gallegos.
"They're in pretty bad shape. Doctors at the hospital are working to save that individual," Gallegos said, the Albuquerque Journal reported. "It's just a very tragic situation. Our officers who arrived first on scene had a tough time when they saw what they saw. These things are just horrible anytime they happen."
Power has been fully restored to affected customers in the area of the incident, Public Service Company of New Mexico (PNM) spokesperson Shannon Jackson told CNN.
Hot air balloon crash-lands outside Denver, injuring three passengers
Hot air balloon crash-lands outside Denver, injuring three passengers
More than 13,000 people in the area experienced outages as a result of the incident, according to PNM, which bills itself as the city's first electric and gas operations company.
"Everyone at PNM is deeply saddened by this tragic loss," Jackson said. "We are thinking about the family and friends affected by today's events. We will continue to do everything we can to support first responders in this evolving situation."
PNM was not able to re-energize the transmission line affected by the crash or restore power until the investigation was complete, Jackson said.
Albuquerque Fire and the New Mexico State Police are on the scene, and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) will investigate what caused the hot-air balloon to crash, according to police.
CNN's Chuck Johnston and Kate Trafecante contributed to this report.

"I think the problem is when the government tells you that [they] were lying to you, then that makes people naturally think, 'Are they telling us the truth now?'"
Between the lines: Much of the public interest around UAPs recently was stoked in 2017 when the New York Times published a widely read story about a Pentagon program to investigate UFOs.

Since then, new videos and eyewitness accounts have continued to stoke the public's imagination about what these UAPs could be.
After years of dismissiveness, the Defense Department has suddenly started taking UFO sightings much more seriously, at least publicly.
"I would say that from 2017 to now has been like one large, cresting wave to the present and the forthcoming report, and then within that, there are lots of little smaller, ups and downs," Sarah Scoles, author of the book They're Already Here on UFO culture, told Axios.
Reality check: There are plenty of scientists searching for life out there in the solar system and universe, but the scientific quest to find life somewhere out there has nothing to do with UFOs or UAPs.

NASA's Perseverance rover on Mars now is searching for possible signs of past life on the Red Planet, while the agency plans on sending new missions to Venus in the coming years that could tell us more about its habitability in the past and even present.
Researchers focusing on SETI — the search for intelligent life — don't assume that aliens with faster-than-light technology have visited us. Instead, they search the skies for radio waves that technologically advanced civilizations could have produced and inadvertently sent into space.

President Biden is under intense pressure to deliver on his historic climate plans, with real danger that he’ll miss his window on major goals that allies had hoped were in their grasp.

Why it matters: Only six months into his presidency, Biden has a limited amount of time to tackle what he calls "the No. 1 issue facing humanity."

Key parts of his platform are tethered to the infrastructure push underway right now. Biden and liberal Democrats want huge clean energy investments and tax incentives.
They hope a Democrats-only package would provide vastly more than energy measures in the infrastructure outline Biden unveiled with a bipartisan Senate group on Thursday.
Threat level: Republicans have a good chance of regaining one — and perhaps both — chambers of Congress in the 2022 midterms, effectively slamming Biden's window shut.

And already Democrats are having trouble locking down enough votes in their own ranks for anything resembling Biden's proposals around electric cars, renewables, efficient buildings and more.
The intrigue: The time pressure is even more intense than the electoral calendar suggests.

November brings the most important United Nations climate summit since the 2015 talks that birthed the Paris agreement.
Walking into that summit with an enacted package would help show that the White House pledge to slash U.S. emissions by 50% by 2030 is realistic.
But if the U.S. effort is foundering, winning higher ambition and tangible new steps from other nations could be a harder diplomatic lift.
The big picture: The U.S. is the world's second-largest greenhouse gas polluter behind runaway leader China.

Biden's campaign platform pledged a sweeping emissions-cutting agenda that would go far beyond that of former President Obama.
The goals include a carbon-free power sector by 2035; strong new regulations to limit tailpipe emissions; new restrictions on fossil fuel development; and massive new resources for clean energy R&D and deployment.
Big new investments and greatly expanded clean energy incentives would require approval from Congress. Another part of Biden's plan — a "clean energy standard" that forces utilities to vastly ramp up carbon-free power — also requires legislation.
Yes, but: The White House also hopes to accomplish a lot with executive actions by redirecting agencies, including the EPA and the Interior and Energy Departments, to be more climate-focused.

Just one of many examples: Biden is pushing the EPA and the Transportation Department to rewrite vehicle efficiency rules to be much tougher.
There's also a multi-agency push to accelerate the development of large offshore wind projects.
And U.S. development finance agencies — including the U.S. International Development Finance Corp. — are putting a higher priority on clean energy.
Executive actions face their own hurdles, however, including litigation that greets every major rulemaking.

This month, a federal judge issued an injunction against Biden's freeze on new oil lease sales — a move that foreshadows legal battles that will confront all his regulatory efforts.
The bottom line: "Every passing day tests [Biden's] ability to achieve an ambitious climate agenda in his first term, especially if the infrastructure bill doesn’t include the transformative investments and tax credits for clean energy," Margaret Jackson of the Atlantic Council's Global Energy Center tells Axios via email.

4 years ago in #de by samboon82 (25)

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