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Weather: Mostly sunny with a chance of thunderstorms. A chance of showers in the morning, then showers likely in the afternoon. Highs in the mid 90s. Southwest winds around 5 mph. Chance of rain 70 percent. Heat index values up to 105. Sunday Night: Partly cloudy. Showers likely with a chance of thunderstorms in the evening, then a slight chance of showers and thunderstorms after midnight. Lows in the mid 70s. South winds around 5 mph. Chance of rain 70 percent. There are also concerns about the development of another potential tropical storm: A tropical depression is likely to form by the early part of this week while the system approaches and then moves near or over the Lesser Antilles. Interests on these islands should continue to monitor the progress of this system and watches could be required for portions of the area as soon as later today. The system is forecast to then move generally west-northwestward and could approach portions of the Greater Antilles by the middle to latter part of this week. Formation chance through 48 hours is 60 percent, through seven days is 90 percent.
- Daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
- Drought conditions here. (What is the Keetch-Byram drought index?).
- Check today’s tides in Flagler Beach here.
- tropical cyclone activity here, and even more details here.
Today at a Glance:
Election Primary Early Voting is available today from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at four locations. Any registered and qualified voter who is eligible to vote in a county-wide election may vote in person at the early voting site. According to Florida law, every voter must present a Florida driver’s license, a Florida identification card or another form of acceptable picture and signature identification in order to vote. If you do not present the required identification or if your eligibility cannot be determined, you will only be permitted to vote a provisional ballot. Don’t forget your ID. A couple of secure drop boxes that Ron DeSantis and the GOP legislature haven’t yet banned (also known as Secure Ballot Intake Stations) are available at the entrance of the Elections Office and at any early voting site during voting hours. The locations are as follows:
- Flagler County Elections Supervisor’s Office, Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell.
- Flagler County Public Library, 2500 Palm Coast Pkwy NW, Palm Coast.
- Palm Coast Community Center, 305 Palm Coast Parkway NE.
- Flagler Beach United Methodist Church, 1520 South Daytona Avenue, Flagler Beach.
See a sample ballot here. See the Live Interviews with all local candidates below.
Flagler County School Board Derek Barrs, Dist. 3 Janie Ruddy, Dist. 3 Lauren Ramirez, Dist. 5 Vincent Sullivan, Dist. 5 Flagler County Commission Andy Dance, Dist. 1 Fernando Melendez, Dist. 1 Kim Carney, Dist. 3 Bill Clark, Dist. 3 Nick Klufas, Dist. 3 Ed Danko, Dist. 5 Pam Richardson, Dist. 5 Palm Coast Mayor David Alfin Peter Johnson Alan Lowe Cornelia Manfre Mike Norris Palm Coast City Council Kathy Austrino, Dist. 1 Shara Brodsky, Dist. 1 Ty Miller, Dist. 1 Jeffrey Seib, Dist. 1 Dana Stancel, Dist. 3 Ray Stevens, Dist. 3 Andrew Werner, Dist. 3 |
Tabasco Brothers at the Golden Lion Cafe, 501 North Oceanshore Boulevard, Flagler Beach, 5:30 p.m.
Grace Community Food Pantry, 245 Education Way, Bunnell, drive-thru open today from noon to 3 p.m. The food pantry is organized by Pastor Charles Silano and Grace Community Food Pantry, a Disaster Relief Agency in Flagler County. Feeding Northeast Florida helps local children and families, seniors and active and retired military members who struggle to put food on the table. Working with local grocery stores, manufacturers, and farms we rescue high-quality food that would normally be wasted and transform it into meals for those in need. The Flagler County School District provides space for much of the food pantry storage and operations. Call 386-586-2653 to help, volunteer or donate.
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village: The city’s only farmers’ market is open every Sunday from noon to 4 p.m. at European Village, 101 Palm Harbor Pkwy, Palm Coast. With fruit, veggies, other goodies and live music. For Vendor Information email [email protected]
Al-Anon Family Groups: Help and hope for families and friends of alcoholics. Meetings are every Sunday at Silver Dollar II Club, Suite 707, 2729 E Moody Blvd., Bunnell, and on zoom. More local meetings available and online too. Call 904-315-0233 or see the list of Flagler, Volusia, Putnam and St. Johns County meetings here.
 Keep Their Lights On Over the Holidays: Flagler Cares, the social service non-profit celebrating its 10th anniversary, is marking the occasion with a fund-raiser to "Keep the Holiday Lights On" by encouraging people to sponsor one or more struggling household's electric bill for a month over the Christmas season. Each sponsorship amounts to $100 donation, with every cent going toward payment of a local power bill. See the donation page here. Every time another household is sponsored, a light goes on on top of a house at Flagler Cares' fundraising page. The goal of the fun-raiser, which Flagler Cares would happily exceed, is to support at least 100 families (10 households for each of the 10 years that Flagler Cares has been in existence). Flagler Cares will start taking applications for the utility fund later this month. Because of its existing programs, the organization already has procedures in place to vet people for this type of assistance, ensuring that only the needy qualify. |
Notably: Speaking of Paris: Here’s a little set of facts that should startle you. Maybe anger you. Or please you to no end, if you like urban spaces to be a wasteland of self-indulgent sprawl. The distance from Matanzas High School to Old Kings Elementary, pretty much as the crow flies–it’s a straight shot down I-95–is 11.2 miles. Travel that distance, and you haven’t crossed but maybe two-thirds of Palm Coast’s distance north to south. Now hop over to Paris. The distance from Saint Denis at the very north of Paris to the rue du Pere Corentin at the very south of Paris? 7.3 miles. If you want to travel Paris’s more portly girth, from the Place du Marechal de Lattre de Trassigny, at the far west end of the city, to the Chateau de Vincenne at the eastern end, it’s 9.3 miles. Think about that for a moment. The 2.2 million inhabitants of Paris live in a circle that adds up to 41 square miles. Palm Coast is currently 51 square miles, not including its ghastly western “expansion.” but juts north-south stretch is nothing but one long sprawl. And it’s just one example among thousands in how American cities have devoured space, so we can all have our quarter-acre lot. I could understand the old habit. But to be on the verge of repeating the mistake to the west seems criminal. Nick Lott lives in Devon at the bottom-west end of England. He wrote this letter to The Economist a few weeks ago. But for scale, he might as well have been writing about riding down Belle Terre: “I sometimes take the train into Paddington. The last 20 minutes of this journey travels through seemingly endless areas of low density, low-rise Victorian or post-war housing sprinkled with industrial parks and lonely office blocks, aka urban sprawl, exactly what the green belt was created to arrest. Rather than allowing this monotonous concrete kudzu to resume its inexorable outward creep it is much more sensible to densify and modernise the urban areas that people already reside in. The quest to build on green belts has become an end in itself and its proponents have lost sight of the real aim, which is to provide affordable housing in places where people want to live. Britain’s cities don’t need to grow wider, they need to grow taller.” So do Flagler County’s. Though as the video below suggests, this is not a uniquely local problem.
—P.T.
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The Live Calendar is a compendium of local and regional political, civic and cultural events. You can input your own calendar events directly onto the site as you wish them to appear (pending approval of course). To include your event in the Live Calendar, please fill out this form.
Free For All Fridays With Host David Ayres on WNZF
Scenic A1A Pride Meeting
Blue 24 Forum
Acoustic Jam Circle At The Community Center In The Hammock
Flagler County’s Cold-Weather Shelter Opens
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
It’s Back! Gamble Jam at Gamble Rogers Memorial State Recreation Area
For the full calendar, go here.
And even as this old guide-book boasts of the, to us, insignificant Liverpool of fifty years ago, the New York guidebooks are now vaunting of the magnitude of a town, whose future inhabitants, multitudinous as the pebbles on the beach, and girdled in with high walls and towers, flanking endless avenues of opulence and taste, will regard all our Broadways and Bowerys as but the paltry nucleus to their Nineveh. From far up the Hudson, beyond Harlem River, where the young saplings are now growing, that will overarch their lordly mansions with broad boughs, centuries old; they may send forth explorers to penetrate into the then obscure and smoky alleys of the Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth-street; and going still farther south, may exhume the present Doric Custom-house, and quote it as a proof that their high and mighty metropolis enjoyed a Hellenic antiquity.
–From From Melville’s Redburn (1849).
Jackson says
“Trump killed a bipartisan deal this year to improve security on the southern border and address immigration issues, with Democrats saying he did so in hopes of improving his own political odds.”
not just Democrats: “Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell that former President Donald Trump resisted accepting any bipartisan compromise to toughen border security laws.”
FlaPharmTech says
What a great cartoon! Looking forward to the “debate”. It was a great experience yesterday at the Harris rally, PC Pkwy and Old Kings. So, so many honks FOR HARRIS! There’s hope in the air.
Ray W. says
Fortune writes of a glut of natural gas being offered for sale on the Waha hub marketplace. Unlike the Henry hub, which is that national marketplace, the Waha hub is a regional hub that only sells natural gas extracted from the Permian Basin, which is the most productive shale oil formation in America. As American energy producers drill for more and more crude oil in the Permian, they extract more and more natural gas.
In 2021, there were zero days of negative pricing for natural gas, meaning that the regional price for natural gas never went under the cost of producing it.
In 2022, three days saw market forces driving the price below production cost. Last year? Nine days. This year, so far? 57 days.
The problem? The infrastructure to transport the natural gas out of the Permian Basin is at its limits. Earlier this year, one of the transport pipelines caught fire and was temporarily shut down, according to the article. While more pipelines out of the Permian field are planned and should offer relief in the future, today’s glut remains.
The author writes:
“U.S. oil production has been soaring to record highs this year, and as frackers unlock vast amounts of crude, natural gas comes out of the ground too — more than can be delivered to other areas with greater demand.”
Apparently, “blistering heat” in Texas this year has increased demand for natural gas from electricity producers in Texas that have combined cycle natural gas turbine plants. This temporary increase in demand has eased some of the bottlenecks in the pipeline network.
Please keep in mind other articles about the distribution bottlenecks that come with increased production. Crude oil pipelines to Corpus Christi are full and some of the record amount of crude oil is being transferred to Houston. Houston port facilities are at maximum, too, but dredging in the Houston channel is underway to deepen and widen the channel so that the new supertankers that can go through the widened Panama Canal can get into the Port of Houston and speed up exports of American crude. Right now, small tankers are filling up in Houston and traveling into the Gulf where they can offload oil into the supertankers that cannot enter the port. And two undersea pipelines have been approved and are under construction to create a stable deep-water port about 50 miles into the Gulf where the supertankers will be able to more safely fill with American crude without having to enter the channel.
Every step taken to increase transfer safety and efficiency should make American crude oil more attractive to foreign buyers.
Why am I commenting on this?
The gullible among us are claiming on the FlaglerLive marketplace of ideas that the current administration is anti-petroleum and anti-natural gas.
I have listened to clips during which our presidential challenger is claiming that if he is elected, America will begin to “Drill, Baby, Drill.”
We are already drilling more than the ports of Corpus Christi and Houston can handle and more than the natural gas pipeline network out of the Permian Basin can handle. We are extracting more crude oil and natural gas throughout America than we have ever produced before. The main natural gas pipeline from Louisiana to New York has many spur pipelines. One of them feeds natural gas into Florida. When the natural gas-powered combine cycle turbines went on-line at Duke Power’s Crystal River generating plant some four or five years ago, the natural gas to power the turbines was delivered through a new small spur pipeline off the main Florida pipeline. A brand-new pipeline out of the West Virginia natural gas fields now links into the Louisiana to New York pipeline. A Maryland plant that liquifies natural gas for transport to Europe is exporting more and more product, using natural gas delivered through another spur line off the New York pipeline. The Permian Basin began producing oil and natural gas over a hundred years ago. We built a vast network of pipelines throughout the Permian Basin for transport of both crude oil and for natural gas over that century, yet it isn’t enough.
Make of it what you will. Political gibberish and gobbledygook uttered by one of our presidential candidates would have you believe we are in an age of reduced energy production and that if we elect him, he will deliver us back to a golden age. Today’s American energy marketplace says otherwise; it says we are already there.