“Evacuations have been ordered with a dam on Hawaii’s Oahu island at risk of imminent failure as the second significant storm in a week pounds the state,” reports Yahoo News:
Catastrophic flash flooding from the storm has already destroyed homes, forced rescues and cut off towns in northern Oahu.
The Wahiawa Dam “may collapse or breach at any time,” according to an alert from the Oahu Department of Emergency Management. Residents in the towns of Waialua and Haleiwa have been told to leave immediately due to “potential life-threatening flooding” and a flash flood warning has been issued for the area until 1:15 p.m HST.
“Do not stop to pack or prepare your home. Only take items ready to go,” the alert said.
The North Shore has been under flash flood warnings since early Friday as heavy rain lashes the island.
Earlier this year, Hurricane Melissa caused over 127 deaths in the Caribbean. The death toll from weather-related disasters is higher so far in 2026 than it was in 2025, but it is still well below the death toll from weather-related disasters in the 20th century, and well below the death toll in 2008-2010.
2025 saw “the lowest number of climate-related deaths since 2000,” reported The Doomslayer. And a “recent study analyzed 22 years of heat mortality in Europe and found that adaptation is outpacing climate change, with Europeans gaining ‘the capacity to tolerate an additional 1 °C rise every 17.9 years.’”
There were 143,181 documented deaths from the weather and climate-related disasters in the first six months of 2008, and 82,103 deaths in the first six months of 2010, but only about 2,000 deaths in the first six months of 2025, according to the International Disaster Database.
On the other hand, the number of deaths grew a lot in early July 2025, during a European heat wave. In the heat wave, there were 317 heat-related deaths in Milan, 286 in Barcelona, 235 in Paris, 171 in London, 164 in Rome, 108 in Madrid, 96 in Athens, and 71 in Lisbon, according to the Guardian.
Air conditioning could have prevented most of those heat-related deaths in Europe.
“Heat waves kill more people in Europe than the number of Americans killed by guns,” notes historian Paul Matzko of the Institute for Humane Studies. Most homes do not have air conditioning in countries like Germany, the United Kingdom, and France, although air conditioning is found in a growing percentage of European hotels and shops. “I will never understand the European preference for dying in heat waves rather than installing air conditioning,” Matzko says.
