EXTREME WEATHER: More Signs Of Increasing Magnetic Polar Migration - Florida's Palm Beach County Hit By 1,700 Lightning Strikes in Just Two Hours! [VIDEOS]

(Thinkstock/iStock)

April 3, 2016 - FLORIDA, UNITED STATES - Florida's Palm Beach County saw 1,700 lightning strikes in just two hours during Tuesday's storms, according to the National Weather Service.

Lightning storms of this magnitude are only seen a few times each year, on average, meteorologist Robert Molleda told the Palm Beach Post.

During Tuesday's storms, some 2,500 lightning strikes were measured in the county.

A lightning strike knocked three Boca Raton firefighters off their feet as they put out a backyard fire that had been ignited by a previous bolt.

One of the firefighters was flung about 15 to 20 feet, and began having a seizure.

The other two remained conscious.

All three have recovered.

Florida ranks tops nationally for the number of cloud-to-ground strikes per square mile, with 1.2 million bolts per year. - Weather.


WATCH: Lightning strikes in Florida.

INFRASTRUCTURE COLLAPSE: More Plane Crashes As Effects Of Magnetic Polar Migration Increases - No Injuries In Clermont Plane Crash In Florida; One Person Killed In Plane Crash In Highlands County, Florida; Minor Injuries From Plane Crash At Wheeler Downtown Airport In Kansas And Two Killed In Palm Beach County Plane Crash In Florida!

March 3, 2015 - UNITED STATES - The following constitutes several of latest reports of plane crashes, as the effects of magnetic polar migration continue to wreak havoc on transportation services.

No injuries in Clermont plane crash in Florida

A single-engine plane crashed in a residential area in Clermont Sunday afternoon.

Clermont Police said the owner of the plane said he was attempting to land on his property located behind the 1700 block of Nature Cove Lane when a tail wind caused the pane to continue through a wire fence, then a wood fence.

The plane stopped in the backyard and crashed into a tree, according to a report.

Police say the owner had no injuries, and there was minor damage to the plane.

The Federal Aviation Administration will investigate the crash Monday. - MyFOX Orlando.

One person killed in small plane crash in Highlands County, Florida

One person is dead after a plane crashed in Highlands County.

The small, experimental aircraft crashed in a creek in the Spring Lake Subdivision, near Sebring. Authorities have not released the victim's name at this time.

A small plane crashed in Highlands County on Monday(Photo: Sky 10)

Sky 10 video shows the plane crash is not far from several homes.

The National Transportation Safety Board and Federal Aviation Administration will investigate the cause of the crash.

Initial reports indicated the plane was an ultralight aircraft, but the FAA describes it as an experimental, amateur-made plane. - WTSP.

Plane’s ‘hard lands’ and crash at the Wheeler Downtown Airport in Kansas, causing minor injuries

At least one person suffered minor injuries after a Piper single-engine aircraft apparently landed hard Sunday night at Wheeler Downtown Airport in Kansas
City. One of the aircraft’s two occupants suffered a broken arm, said Joe McBride, a Kansas City Aviation Department spokesman.
Keith Myers The Kansas City Star

At least one person suffered minor injuries after an aircraft experienced a “hard landing” Sunday night at Wheeler Downtown Airport.

One of the aircraft’s two occupants suffered a broken arm, said Joe McBride, a Kansas City Aviation Department spokesman.

The Piper single-engine aircraft lost power and went down on the north side of the airport on or near a gravel maintenance road, McBride said.

Kansas City fire and police personnel responded to the accident, which occurred just before 7 p.m.

The aircraft had left an airport near Mosby, Mo., in Clay County and had flown over the Country Club Plaza before its pilot flew to Wheeler airport and practiced a “touch and go” landing, McBride said.

The plane soon lost power and came down north of the airport, coming close to going into the Missouri River, McBride said. Although the aircraft’s landing gear was damaged, the plane did not turn over, he said.

The Federal Aviation Administration probably will investigate the incident, McBride said. - Kansas City.

UPDATE: Two killed in Palm Beach County plane crash in Florida

A single-engine plane crashed in a marshy area within a Palm Beach County wildlife refuge Monday, killing its two passengers and sending rescue workers trudging through knee-high mud and dense brush to reach it.

The victims had not been identified late Monday, and Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office spokeswoman Teri Barbera said authorities did not immediately know their genders.

Rescuers had to navigate the Arthur R. Marshall Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge's inhospitable conditions, west of U.S. 441 about 1.5 miles north of the docks off Lee Road, to reach the wreckage and pull the bodies from it.

According to the Federal Aviation Administration, the aircraft took off from the Palm Beach County Park — also known as the Lantana Airport — a general aviation facility west of Lantana. It was charred in the crash, which happened just before 1 p.m.

Investigators had not determined its type or registration number by the end of the day.

Ron Bradshaw, who was fishing for bass in the 145,800-acre park on Monday, said he heard a "whirring" sound before the plane went down, but didn't see it happen.

"I heard the props go 'whiiiirrrrrrr' and then it must have nose-dived in," he said. "And boom, that was it."

From the crash site about a mile away, Bradshaw could see smoke billowing. He said he was the first one there and ran up a levee to try to help, but was stopped by the thick mud and a wall of cattails.

"There was nothing I could do," Bradshaw said. "Because I couldn't get to it."

One of the wings of the plane had been torn off and was lying about 20 feet away from its body, he said. He looked for possible survivors in the area but didn't see any. And he called 911, struggling to describe the location because it was "the middle of nowhere."

Help arrived in force. First responders came from the Sheriff's Office, Palm Beach County Fire Rescue and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. Helicopters flew overhead and fire trucks and patrol cars streamed into the park.

Juanita Longwell watched them pull in from a dock she was sitting at within the refuge, where she came for a visit while on vacation from Spencer, Mass.

"You name it, it went in there," she said. "We didn't see anything except all the rescue things going in."

Firefighters used airboats and the ladder of a fire engine to reach the burned wreckage, which they sprayed down with a hose.

It was not the first time a plane crashed in the wildlife refuge. In 2013, a man flying from the Fort Lauderdale Executive Airport to the Leesburg International Airport died after his plane crashed in it.

And in 2011, two men on their way from the Stuart Air Show to the North Palm Beach County General Aviation Airport met the same fate.

The circumstances of Monday's crash were not known by the end of the day. The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating and the National Transportation Safety Board will determine the cause. - Sun Sentinel.

INFRASTRUCTURE COLLAPSE: Plane Crash At Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge In Palm Beach County, Florida - Unknown How Many People Were On Board!

An aircraft crashed in the Loxahatchee Wildlife Refuge Monday.

March 2, 2015 - FLORIDA, UNITED STATES - A small plane crashed in the Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge in Palm Beach County Monday, officials said.

The single-engine plane went down just before 1 p.m. in a marsh area near Lee Road and State Road 7 in Boynton Beach, according to Palm Beach County Fire Rescue.


PBCFR Tweeted at around 1:15 p.m. that a plane went down at that location, and that Palm Beach County Sheriff officials responded.

Footage showed firefighters at the scene spraying water on the wreckage. Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission officials were also at the scene.

The FAA and NTSB have been notified, fire rescue officials said.

It's unknown how many people were on board. No further details were immediately available. - NBC Miami.

PLAGUES & PESTILENCES: "You Feel It In Your Bones, Fingers And Hands" - Rapid, Painful Chikungunya Virus Sweeping The Caribbean; Fourth Case In Florida; Spread By Mosquitoes!

May 22, 2014 - CARIBBEAN - They suffer searing headaches, a burning fever and so much pain in their joints they can barely walk or use their hands. It's like having a terrible flu combined with an abrupt case of arthritis.

Hospitals and clinics throughout the Caribbean are seeing thousands of people with the same symptoms, victims of a virus with a long and unfamiliar name that has been spread rapidly by mosquitoes across the islands after the first locally transmitted case was confirmed in December.

"You feel it in your bones, your fingers and your hands. It's like everything is coming apart," said 34-year-old Sahira Francisco as she and her daughter waited for treatment at a hospital in San Cristobal, a town in the southern Dominican Republic that has seen a surge of the cases in recent days.

The virus is chikungunya, derived from an African word that loosely translates as "contorted with pain." People encountering it in the Caribbean for the first time say the description is fitting. While the virus is rarely fatal it is extremely debilitating.

"It is terrible, I have never in my life gotten such an illness," said Maria Norde, a 66-year-old woman confined to bed at her home on the lush eastern Caribbean island of Dominica. "All my joints are in pain."

Outbreaks of the virus have long made people miserable in Africa and Asia. But it is new to the Caribbean, with the first locally transmitted case documented in December in French St. Martin, likely brought in by an infected air traveler. Health officials are now working feverishly to educate the public about the illness, knock down the mosquito population, and deal with an onslaught of cases.

Authorities are attempting to control mosquitoes throughout the Caribbean, from dense urban neighborhoods to beach resorts. There have been no confirmed cases of local transmission of chikungunya on the U.S. mainland, but experts say the high number of travelers to the region means that could change as early as this summer.

So far, there are no signs the virus is keeping visitors away though some Caribbean officials warn it might if it is not controlled. "We need to come together and deal with this disease," said Dominica Tourism Minister Ian Douglas.

One thing is certain: The virus has found fertile ground in the Caribbean. The Pan American Health Organization reports more than 55,000 suspected and confirmed cases since December throughout the islands. It has also reached French Guiana, the first confirmed transmission on the South American mainland.

The Pan American Health Organization says seven people in the Caribbean with chikungunya have died during the outbreak but they had underlying health issues that likely contributed to their death.

"It's building up like a snowball because of the constant movement of people," said Jacqueline Medina, a specialist at the Instituto Technologico university in the Dominican Republic, where some hospitals report more than 100 new cases per day.

Chikungunya was identified in Africa in 1953 and is found throughout the tropics of the Eastern Hemisphere. It is spread by two species of mosquitoes, aedes aegypti and aedes albopictus. It's also a traveler-borne virus under the right circumstances.

It can spread to a new area if someone has it circulating in their system during a relatively short period of time, roughly 2-3 days before the onset of symptoms to 5 days after, and then arrives to an area with the right kind of mosquitoes.

For years, there have been sporadic cases of travelers diagnosed with chikungunya but without local transmission. In 2007, there was an outbreak in northern Italy, so health authorities figured it was just a matter of time before it spread to the Western Hemisphere, said Dr. Roger Nasci, of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"With the increase in travelers the likelihood that something like this would happen goes up and eventually it did," said Nasci, chief of a CDC branch that tracks insect-borne diseases. "We ended up with somebody at the right time and the right place infecting mosquitoes."

The two species of mosquitoes that spread chikungunya are found in the southern and eastern United States and the first local transmissions could occur this summer given the large number of U.S. travelers to the Caribbean, Nasci said. Already, the Florida Department of Health has reported at least four imported cases from travelers to Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Dominica.

"What we're seeing now is an increase in the number of infected travelers coming from the Caribbean, which is expected because there's a lot of U.S. travel, a lot of vacation travel, a lot of work travel," he said.

Around the Caribbean, local authorities have been spraying fogs of pesticides and urging people to remove standing pools of water where mosquitoes breed.

An estimated 60-90 percent of those infected show symptoms, compared to around 20 percent for dengue, which is common in the region. There is no vaccine and the only cure is treatment for the pain and fluid loss.

One consolation for those suffering from the illness is that unlike dengue, which has several variants, people only seem to get chikungunya once.

"The evidence suggests that once you get it and recover, once your immune system clears the virus you are immune for life," Nasci said. - Breitbart.

Palm Beach County Man Diagnosed With Chikungunya

A 66-year-old man became the first person in Palm Beach County — and the fourth in Florida — to come down with chikungunya fever after contracting the mosquito-borne virus in the Caribbean, the county Health Department announced Wednesday.

The unidentified man began feeling ill on May 15, shortly after returning home from a trip through the island of Hispaniola, Health Department spokesman Timothy O'Connor said. He was treated at a county hospital the following day and is recovering at home, where he is protecting himself from mosquitoes so as not to spread the virus.


WATCH: Palm Beach County man diagnosed with chikungunya.

Test results confirmed the chikungunya diagnosis late Tuesday. Last week, the Florida Department of Health confirmed three other imported cases of the disease in women in Broward, Miami-Dade and Hillsborough counties. All of them had been traveling in the Caribbean when infected.- Sun Sentinel.

ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE: Naked Man "High On Drugs" Shot Dead In Florida - After Biting Off The Face Of An 18-Year-Old In Random Street Attack?!

February 05, 2014 - FLORIDA, UNITED STATES - Authorities in South Florida say deputies shot a naked man after he attacked a retired police officer and bit another man on the face in Delray Beach.

Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw says the man died after the Tuesday night attack. He says it wasn't immediately clear whether he died from gunshot wounds or from a medical condition.

The man was walking on Military Trail when he attacked a retired New York City police officer. The 6-foot-3, 250-pound man then began chasing a man and a 10-year-old boy.

Bit and run: Authorities in South Florida say deputies shot a naked man after he attacked a retired
police officer and bit another man on the face in Delray Beach.

At some point he started fighting an 18-year-old, who defended himself with a box cutter.

The man then bit the 18-year-old on the face.

'He's obviously delirious on something,' Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw said. 'He is a huge guy. He takes a fighting stance. They're trying to get him on the ground. He starts charging them. The Taser did not affect him.'

Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw: He's obviously
delirious on something,' Bradshaw said. He is a huge guy.
He takes a fighting stance. They're trying to get him on the
ground. He starts charging them. The Taser did not affect him.'

A deluge of police cars arrived, and deputies shot the assailant with a Taser but it didn't faze him.

'The man then charged our deputy, and he discharged his firearm,' the spokesperson tells New Times. 'But he was not incapacitated. He was then Tased, but that also had no effect.'

'The people that he assaulted, starting with the retired NYPD guy, the people that he chased and then the 18-year-old, said this guy had like super human strength,' the sheriff said. 'But he's a big guy to start with. He's not fat, he looks like an NFL linebacker. And he basically was terrorizing people all up and down this street.'

'He takes a fighting stance. They're trying to get him on the ground. He starts charging them,' Bradshaw said.

That's when a sergeant fired three times, once to the torso and twice on the lower part of the body. The man was taken to Delray Medical Center, where he died.

Authorities say, though it wasn't clear whether it was the gunshots or the drugs that ultimately killed him. Deputies say they suspect the man was on some sort of narcotic and haven't identified him yet.

Chilling reminder: The case brings back memories of
Rudy Eugene, the man who was shot dead by police
as he ate the face of a homeless man in May 2012

The injured police officer and the teen were also taken to the hospital.

The sheriff said investigators are trying to figure out the man's identity and to get some background information on about him.

Bradshaw said the man was 'obviously on some kind of narcotics to act like this.'

'The deputies had to do what they had to do to disable this guy so he didn't get into this gated community and wreak havoc in there,' Bradshaw said.

The case has chilling similarities to that Rudy Eugene, a Miami cannibal who was shot dead by police in 2012 as he chewed off a homeless man's face.


The man, Rudy Eugene, was shot and killed by a Miami police officer. Witnesses said he had been swinging from a light pole minutes before the attack. Lab tests found only marijuana in his system.

His victim, Ronald Poppo, was attacked as he slept by a busy highway. He lost his left eye, his nose and most of the surrounding skin. - Daily Mail.

DELUGE: Historical Flooding Hits Florida - Nearly TWO FEET Of Rain In JUST 24 HOURS Hits Palm Beach County; 2 Dead; Meteorologists Are Stunned At The Rainfall Rate!

January 11, 2014 - UNITED STATES - A torrential downpour lashed Florida's Palm Beach County before dawn Friday, shuttering schools, flooding an interstate and causing at least two deaths.

Andre Francois wades through knee deep flood water in Boynton Beach, Fla., on Friday to get back to his house.
J Pat Carter / AP

More than 22 inches of rain fell on Boynton Beach over a 24-hour period, according to the National Weather Service. The Sun Sentinel newspaper said the most rain was around Interstate 95 and Gateway Boulevard, while between 12 and 18 inches fell over just a few hours in Lantana and Delray Beach.

"An incredible rainfall rate," said Robert Molleda, a meteorologist with the NWS. "There is no way we could forecast that much rain in that short a time."

Historical #flooding overview for #PalmBeachCounty through the overnight hours.
@NWSMiami

The first of the two deaths occurred just after 7 a.m. Friday in West Delray: Elsa Marquez, 56, steered her Toyota Rav 4 through a flooded intersection at Heritage Park and Via Flora into a lake, and her vehicle quickly sank.

Elsewhere in Delray Beach, a man died after drowning in a flooded ditch, according to NBC affiliate WPTV in West Palm Beach.

Several roads were closed and water gushed into homes and businesses, according to the National Weather Service in Miami. The rushing floodwater also forced the closure of Palm Beach County schools Friday, the Weather Channel reported. - NBC.