Hurricane Harvey is posing an unprecedented, catastrophic flood risk to Texas. As of Sunday morning, it had downgraded to a tropical storm. But it’s the storm surge and rains Harvey will continue to bring to the Texas coast that will cause the most destruction to life and property. Already two people are reported dead and up to are 14 injured, with significant damage to buildings and trees.

Right now, emergency managers are advising many coastal communities in the storm’s path to stay put — because once roads are flooded, driving actually becomes one of the most dangerous things you can do. Most people who die in heavy flooding, it turns out, die in their cars.

Almost two out of every three flood-related deaths between 1995 and 2010 (not including Hurricane Katrina) occurred in motor vehicles, according to Greg Forbes, a severe weather expert for the Weather Channel. Here’s how that happens.

Driving injuries and deaths occur in floods when:

• Drivers hit pools and spin off the road
• Drivers hit water, stall, and get stuck as water is rising
• Drivers get carried off by moving water
• Drivers hit trees in the road
• Drivers drive into collapsed sections of the road

These conditions can cause fatal accidents on their own but can also lead to (horrifically) drivers or passengers drowning while trapped in or attempting to escape their vehicles.

Repeated public health warnings have not been able to prevent people from driving during storms

“As little as six inches of water may cause you to lose control of your vehicle,” warns the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Not to mention, two feet of water — or one foot of fast-moving water — can sweep away most cars, according to the CDC and the Department of Homeland Security.

A 2003 study in Traffic Injury Prevention found that many of the people who died in 1999’s Hurricane Floyd had received warnings but still either deliberately drove into flooded roadways anyway or unexpectedly encountered flooded roadways while driving in severe-weather-affected areas.

And even in 2016, after Hurricane Matthew, a CDC mortality surveillance report found that repeated public health warnings still resulted in drowning associated with a motor vehicle as the most common cause of death.

PSA: just don’t drive if the street is flooded

The best advice, according to the Weather Channel, is to never drive when you don’t know how deep water is. And if the water is covering the surface, you probably don’t know how deep it is. It’s easy to misjudge the depth of water, they say, especially at night.

Recently, in response to Hurricane Harvey, the National Weather Service, FEMA, and other local and federal government officials and departments have been pushing the message “turn around, don’t drown” on Twitter to discourage people from driving on flooded roads.

If you’re in the affected region, please heed their advice.

After a massive public outcry about a review of national monuments on federal lands that might have led to their elimination, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has decided not to seek the removal of any monument designation, according to a draft report he submitted to the White House on Thursday. But reports suggest that Zinke may still make significant changes to the monuments that could strip them of protections.

Some 2.4 million public comments, nearly all of them supporting the national monuments — which include the dazzling and historically important geological formations of Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears in Utah — were submitted in the past 60 days. And they seemed to have had a big impact on the administration’s review.

The victory for supporters of the monuments, however, is only partial. Zinke has still recommended shrinking some of the monuments as well as changing what activities are allowed on the federal lands. And Lisa Friedman of the New York Times reports that the monuments that could be shrunk include Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante, and two others.

Alex Taurel of the League of Conservation Voters released the following statement in response:

If these reports are true, it’s even clearer that Secretary Zinke’s assertion that he wouldn’t ‘eliminate’ any of our national monuments was just shallow spin. Any changes to monument boundaries threaten to open up our treasured public lands to drilling, mining and other special interests who want to pad their profits. It’s no coincidence that shrinking Bears Ears by nearly 90 percent could coincide with the 90 percent of the monument that has potential for oil, gas and coal speculators — further proof that the Trump administration’s sham review was a pretext for selling out our public lands and waters to the highest bidder.

The hullabaloo over the monuments began in April, when President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing Zinke to review 27 specific land and marine national monuments — all designated over the past two decades. Zinke was tasked with submitting to the White House a report of recommendations for what to do with them within 120 days.

At the April signing ceremony, Trump described the federal designation of large areas of land as national monuments (a power given to presidents by the authority of the Antiquities Act of 1906) as a “massive federal land grab” and declared that “it’s time we ended this abusive practice.”

But environmental groups and other defenders of the monuments saw the Trump administration’s gestures at eliminating the monuments as an unwise concession to the oil and gas industry, which covets these lands for drilling and development.

“Zinke and the Trump administration want to gut the power of the Antiquities Act to shore up the fossil fuel industry,” May Boeve, executive director of the environmental organization 350.org, said in a statement in April. “On top of all the attacks on our climate, now we’ll have to defend our parks and monuments from Big Oil as well.”

But over the past two months, environmentalists, outdoors enthusiasts, and others have come out in force in defense of the national monuments under review, inundating the Interior Department with comments.

The report is not yet publicly available, though the DOI has published a summary of the draft on its website. In the summary, Zinke acknowledges that the vast majority of the 2.4 million responses received during the comment period “were overwhelmingly in favor of maintaining existing monuments.” Early analyses in May and July by the Center for Western Priorities suggested as much too.

But the fight for the protection of these federal lands is far from over.

It was doubtful anyway whether it is in the executive’s authority to remove national monument designations bestowed by previous presidents. And in an interview with the Associated Press published Thursday, Zinke explained that his report will instead recommend certain changes — which could potentially include adjusting the borders to make monuments smaller and easing restrictions on what can be done on the lands — to a “handful” of monuments.

Environmental organizations remain concerned by Zinke’s vagueness. As Jacqueline Savitz of Oceana said to AP, “A change can be a small tweak or near annihilation.”

In a statement, Ben Schreiber of Friends of the Earth said that if Zinke attempts to shrink or allow mineral extraction on national monuments, “he can rest assured that his latest giveaway to corporate polluters will be litigated in the courts.”

Further reading:

• Trump’s executive order to remove protections for national monuments, explained (Sarah Frostenson/Vox)
• Video: What is the Antiquities Act? (E&E News)
• Here are the national monuments being reviewed under Trump's order (LA Times)
• Obama Conserved 1.3 Million Acres in Utah — Can Trump Undo That? (Robinson Meyer/the Atlantic)

“This is who we elected president of the United States, a man who is so petty that he has to go after people who he deems to be his enemy, like an imaginary friend of a 6-year-old,” Lemon said in an under-two-minute monologue.

“His speech was without thought. It was without reason. It was devoid of facts. It was devoid of wisdom. There was no gravitas. There was no sanity there. He was like a child blaming a sibling on something else. ‘He did it. I didn’t do it.’”

Here’s are Lemon’s full remarks:

I’m just going to speak from the heart here. What we have witnessed is a total eclipse of the facts: Someone who came out onstage and lied directly to the American people and left things out that he said in an attempt to rewrite history, especially when it comes to Charlottesville.

He’s unhinged. It’s embarrassing. And I don’t mean for us, the media, because he went after us — but for the country. This is who we elected president of the United States, a man who is so petty that he has to go after people who he deems to be his enemy, like an imaginary friend of a 6-year-old. His speech was without thought. It was without reason. It was devoid of facts. It was devoid of wisdom. There was no gravitas. There was no sanity there. He was like a child blaming a sibling on something else. ‘He did it. I didn’t do it.’

He certainly opened up the race wounds from Charlottesville. A man clearly wounded by the rational people who are abandoning him in droves, meaning those business people and the people in Washington now who are questioning his fitness for office and whether he is stable. A man backed into a corner, it seems, by circumstances beyond his control and beyond his understanding.

That’s the truth. If you watched that speech as an American, you had to be thinking, ‘What in the world is going on?’ This is the person we elected as the president of the United States? This petty? This small? The person who is supposed to pull the country together? It certainly didn’t happen there.

Later on in CNN’s post-rally coverage, former director of national intelligence James Clapper called Trump’s speech “downright scary and disturbing.”

Lemon went on to suggest that Trump’s rhetoric could inspire more violence. “He has given oxygen to racists,” Lemon said, referencing Trump’s frequent reticence to condemn the alt-right and white supremacist groups. “He is clearly trying to ignite a civil war in this country.”

More than a dozen charities have pulled their events from President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in a continued backlash to how Trump responded to the fatal violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, last week.

Trump initially cast blame for the violence at a white supremacist rally on “many sides,” before he walked back his statement and condemned white supremacists and neo-Nazis. But he subsequently doubled down on his first remarks, saying there were “very fine people on both sides.” Trump’s comments were so controversial that CEOs began to abandon his business councils, causing Trump to disband them, and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle rushed to denounce his comments and issue their own rebukes of racism and other types of discrimination.

Now the Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold reports that since Trump’s controversial comments last week, a total of 16 charities have canceled events that were planned at Mar-a-Lago.

The photos of Fahrenthold’s notepad, which he posted on Twitter Monday, are already out of date, as additional charities have ditched the venue since.

The full list as of Tuesday afternoon is: American Cancer Society; American Friends of Magen David Adom; American Red Cross; Autism Project of Palm Beach County; Big Dog Ranch Rescue; Cleveland Clinic Florida; Hearing the Ovarian Cancer Whisper; Leaders in Furthering Education; MorseLife; Palm Beach Zoo; Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach; Raymond F. Kravis Center for the Performing Arts; Ryan Licht Sang Bipolar Foundation; Salvation Army; Susan G. Komen; and Unicorn Children’s Foundation.

Sharon Alexander, executive director of the Unicorn Children’s Foundation, an international nonprofit focused on special needs children, issued a statement on the foundation’s decision to cancel a fashion show luncheon at Trump’s property. It read in part: “Due to the political turbulence associated with this choice of venue it would be a disservice to our supporters and our children to hold our event at Mar-a-Lago.”

The Palm Beach Post reported last Friday that Big Dog Ranch Rescue, a national animal welfare organization co-chaired by the president’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump, decided to move its annual luncheon.

Canceled events at Mar-a-Lago will likely result in quite a bit of lost revenue for the Trump family. Fahrenthold reports, “Charities hosting large galas can pay Trump’s club between $125,000 and $275,000 for a single night’s revelry. Even lunchtime events can cost charities between $25,000 and $85,000.”

But he also suggests that some of the charities may be taking a hit for making this choice. According to Fahrentold, the Unicorn Children’s Foundation is expecting to lose out on about $160,000 in donations from its canceled luncheon event.

Though some charities insist that this move is not a political statement, others made clear that they were taking a stand.

In an announcement that the American Cancer Society would be moving a dinner for its sponsors as well as an anniversary gala from Mar-a-Lago, spokesperson Miriam Falco said in a statement, “Our values and commitment to diversity are critical as we work to address the impact of cancer in every community.”

Monday’s solar eclipse was truly an American experience, visible as a partial eclipse from all 50 states and as a total eclipse from a 70-mile-wide sliver of 14 states. While total solar eclipses occur somewhere on Earth about every 18 months, it has been 38 years since the last total solar eclipse passed through the United States, and 99 years since the last coast-to-coast eclipse.

And this eclipse was certainly historic. While it’s impossible to know exactly how many people saw it, the Associated Press is reporting that it was the most observed and most photographed eclipse in history. That squares with what Rick Fienberg of the American Astronomical Society predicted last week.

At a NASA briefing in June, Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of the agency’s Science Mission Directorate, said that it is ultimately impossible to judge the relative audience of the 2017 eclipse.

“My personal feeling is that it will be the most watched,” Zurbuchen said at the time, citing the many ways it would be available both in person and online, “but I can’t prove that scientifically. We don’t have really hard numbers on any [previous eclipses].”

What we do have is these numbers:

• A CNN poll earlier this month indicated that about half of the US population (323.1 million in 2016) planned to watch the eclipse.
• About 12 million people live in the solar eclipse’s 70-mile-wide path of totality, which stretched from the Northwest in Oregon to the Southeast in South Carolina. There were predictions that 2 million to 7 million of the 200 million people who live within a day’s drive to the path of totality would make the trek to see it there too.
• Others suggested that even 20 million might be a conservative estimate for how many people would watch from the path.
• NASA reported that at the midpoint of its live stream today, 4.4 million people were watching, making the eclipse the most viewed event in the agency’s history.

(We’ll be updating this post as more estimates roll in.)

Chief among those excited and engaged in the eclipse were young people. CNN’s poll found people’s excitement about the eclipse to be consistently inversely correlated with age.

Hundreds of students participated today in an array of citizen science projects to photograph and document the event. This is an “incredible opportunity to excite and inspire future scientists as so many of these volunteers and students are just getting introduced to science,” France Córdova, director of the National Science Foundation, wrote for HuffPost.

Rick Yeames, an amateur astronomer from New Hampshire who traveled to Casper, Wyoming, to view the eclipse, likened the event to the Apollo space program in its potential to inspire young people with science. “Millions of American children just had a life-changing experience that could inspire them to get into STEM,” he said.