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7PM News on WRAL - Friday, July 12, 2024
At WakeMed MyCare 365, we deliver convenience others only talk about every day of the year. Primary care and urgent care under one roof. Multiple locations, virtual visits, walk in or schedule an appointment online. From annual physicals and routine care, to sinus infection strep or the flu, we couldn't be more convenient. Learn more about our kind of care at www.arcanicconvenience@wakemed.org [TAKE VO] Several threats make today a W-R-A-L weather alert day. Lightning heavy rain and flooding. What your neighborhood could see and win. The crane needed to pull a car out of the creek here in Durham. Relive on the scene with what we know about the driver who died in the crash. And inches of rain causing flooding and crashes. From roads to businesses where we're seeing the highest totals and the worst damage. Right now, here at 7 o'clock, look at all that green on the radar. Our area got drenched today. Heavy rain, scattered storms, definitely caused some flooding out there. Brought down trees made a mess of the roads. It was quite a day and it's not over yet. Thank you for joining us. I'm Dan Hagerty on this W-R-A-L weather alert day. As we take a live look outside at North Hills. The clouds are still filling the sky. Some places got more than three inches of rain today. We have live team coverage of the impacts. And we want to begin with meteorologist Kat Campbell in the W-R-A-L severe weather center. Tracking all of this, Kat. Our highest rainfall totals today came out of Fuqua, Arena. So rainfall winners right there in southern Wake County. We continue to follow heavy rain that's moving through Wilson right now, headed up toward Elm City and Rocky Mountain. And also some pretty heavy rain falling in North Hampton County. All of this should stay in the eastern half of our viewing area as we begin to dry out in the Triangle Fayetteville. And we're staying fairly dry around the Sand Hills. But Rhonoch Rapids, the heaviest rain, is to your E, some of that heavy rain in Wilson and Rocky Mountain. Could arrive a little bit later in the evening. The radar estimated rainfall totals are pretty significant here. Henderson just under two inches. About two and a half inches in Lewisburg. Just under an inch and a half there in Rocky Mountain. And to the south point eight five inches for Fayetteville. And Sanford, the radar estimate there two and a half inches. Future counts continues to show that band of rain in the eastern part of our area. But after about nine o'clock tonight we could see a second more scattered band try to push through the area. I think the bulk of the steady widespread rain is over for tonight. It'll be more scattered after this. Your weekend forecast is coming up soon. Talk to you again soon. Thank you, Kat. Now to some breaking news we have been following a sad situation. A person is dead after a car slid off a Durham road and overturned into a creek. Crews had to use a crane as you can see here in this picture to pull that car out of the water in the last hour and a half or so. WRL's Willie Danley is live. This is near the scene. Midland terrorist Willie officials have had that road closed for a long time at this point. What a situation out there. Yes it is, Dan. This road is still closed. Right now a lot of those fire trucks have left this area but there's family and friends of this victim who've gathered here and they're working to learn more information about what happened to their loved one. Take a look at this video that we captured here and you can actually see that crane removing that vehicle from the creek. That is L.R.B. Creek here on Midland terrorist. We're told by Durham police that that car was traveling down Midland terrorist when it slid off of the road into the creek and overturned. Take a listen to this. This is what first responders heard when that call first went out. Vehicle thinking or in floodwater, east flood of Boulevard and Midland terrorist. There are cars that are cars for everyone into the water. Cars are going to have a vehicle to return. Police have it trapped in the water. When this scene was active, I can't even describe to you how many fire trucks and police officers we saw lining this street working to get that vehicle out of the water. We're still working with Durham police to find out more information about the person who was behind the wheel and also the circumstances that led up to them sliding off the road. We're going to get those answers and keep you updated. Durham, Willie Dannelly, WRL News. Sad story there. Brian Schrader here in the WRL Live Center. I want to show you some video we just got in from Moncure, which is between Apex and Sanford of some rushing water there. Kelly Wallace says that she got about three inches of rain in her gauge. There are a lot of runoff in that part of town. I do want to talk about a power outage we've learned about here in the past couple of minutes. This is in Fayetteville. PwC customer is about 4,400 of them now without electricity. Over on the west side of Fayetteville, PwC officials say they are still assessing the situation. No word on whether this is weather related or when the power will be back on. All right. Thank you. Brian, thank you to Willie. We always tell you when we get this type of weather moving through, the WRL News app will help you out. You can track updates until the rain starts. It allows you to take that radar with you anywhere, right in your pocket. It is free to download. So 24 years later, a volunteer may have a new lead in the disappearance of Tristan Buddy Myers. His disappearance received national attention at the time. The four-year-old walked out of the front door of his rural Sampson County home in October of the year 2000 while his aunt was taking a nap. He had two dogs with him at the time. The dogs returned a short time later, but Buddy did not. There was an exhaustive search. It lasted months. Still no sign of him, though. Raleigh resident Al McNatchy has made it his mission, though, to find this boy for the last two decades. He says Buddy may still be alive. It was birthday. It's coming up on the 16th. And I still want him to be remembered. I don't want him to be forgotten. If you have any information on Buddy's whereabouts, please call the SBI or the Sampson County Sheriff's Office. A Raleigh-based business faces a number of civil lawsuits after a cyber attack released the personal information of millions of people. A data breach hit advanced auto parts back in April. The company says more than two million people are affected. Other companies have announced similar attacks. That includes AT&T, Ticketmaster, CDK, even the town of April. The town of Apex got hit. Cybersecurity educator Brian McGonin says you hold the final key, though, to access your data. Enable two-factor authentication on any important sites like your banking, especially your email, and then set up your banking site so that they notify you any time that there's a new transaction. Any time your credit card or debit card is swiped. Advanced Auto Parts says it is providing complementary credit monitoring and identity theft protection now to those people who were affected by this most recent breach. A major milestone today from Medicaid expansion in North Carolina. Half a million people who didn't have health care coverage before are now enrolled. A celebration today honored the advocates who helped make that happen sometimes in the middle of their own pain and their own loss. WRO Capital Bureau Chief Laura Leslie has one mother's story. For Robin Jordan, today's milestone celebration was especially poignant. She couldn't help but think about her daughter Jessica and what might have been if Medicaid expansion had come sooner. Robin Jordan's daughter Jessica struggled for years with addiction and mental health problems. She had no insurance. She didn't qualify for Medicaid. She was too sick to work and she fell into the coverage gap because she was considered a healthy adult in her 30s, but she was far from healthy. Jessica died of an accidental overdose, fentanyl at just 32 years old. Robin, who's a public health nurse, believes that if her daughter could have had access to Medicaid, she could have gotten the life-saving care she truly wanted. She couldn't put two nickels together to help herself to get into, you know, a recovery center to get help for her mental illness, for her dual addictions, but she would write in her journal about how she wanted to save money and when she saved X amount of money, she was going to start making phone calls to X, Y, and Z places. After Jessica died, Robin learned about the push for Medicaid expansion. She became an advocate for it, telling her daughter's story all across the state. Governor Roy Cooper singled her out for thanks at a ceremony Friday, celebrating the enrollment of 500,000 people in just the first few months of expansion. Even though my Jessica's not here any longer to speak for herself, there are 500,000 other Jessica's today that have insurance and have hope for their health and hope for their futures, and I'm very proud to be a part of this. Jessica would have been proud too. Laura Leslie, WRAL News, Raleigh. A warning tonight not to swim or eat any fish from rivers along the Virginia border. This can be traced back to last weekend's fire at a fertilizer warehouse there, runoff carried chemicals to the Meherin and Roanoke rivers. This has a direct impact on waterways in Warren, Northampton and Halifax counties. People and pets should avoid all recreational water, they say, any activities out in the water in these areas until further notice. Still ahead, we are going to go in depth on sharks. We have to look at the actual chances of getting bitten by one and how we can protect ourselves, some of the new ways that are out there to stay safe. That's next. Plus, we have a theme going here. Take a look at this rare sighting. Those are manatees off of our coast. What a cool image. We'll give you the story behind that. As we had to break though, a live look at Wake County. You have to take my word for it. That's from our tall tower cam. It has been that kind of hazy day. The rain is still falling in our area. We have the details for you after the break. Every day we rise, challenging ourselves to work for what we believe in. At U.S. Border Patrol, protecting our borders is more than a job. It's a calling. Agents answer the call, working together to keep our country and community safe. If you are ready for a new mission, join U.S. Border Patrol and go beyond. Learn more at cpp.gov/careers. This is the story of the one. As a maintenance engineer, he hears things differently. To the untrained ear, everything on his shop floor might sound fine, but he can hear gears grinding or a belt slipping. So he steps in to fix the problem at hand before it gets out of hand. And he knows Granger's got the right product he needs to get the job done, which is music to his ears. Call clickgranger.com or just stop by. Granger, for the ones who get it done. Welcome to Friday, everybody. Lots to do this weekend. If you're headed to the coast, buckle up as we go in-depth into the depths on sharks. It's safe to say it's been a very sharky few weeks with some scary headlines out there. Two attacks happened back-to-back in Florida, for instance. Three people bitten two with critical injuries. One person lost her arm. In Hawaii, a professional surfer died from a shark bite. In San Diego, a shark bit a swimmer causing the beach to close there for a few days. And here in North Carolina, just last month, a shark bit a 14-year-old boy on the leg at North Topsville Beach. My grandma was holding my hand. I was like, "I'm not going to be okay. I'm going to lose my leg." How awful, how scary for that kid and for everybody watching at home. So, how can we protect ourselves? The fire chief also says after the attacks, life guards there at the beach. We're encouraging people to stay out of the water or at least only go in knee-deep. Okay, knee-deep water. That feels safe. That's where I spend most of my time anyway. It's where my kids play. It's also where people shot this video in Florida showing a couple of sharks who didn't seem to get the knee-deep memo. Same goes for a shark that bit another teenager on Wednesday in Florida, the fourth in a week. The report says the teen was standing in knee-deep water in Daytona Beach Shores when the shark bit his left foot. So, I ask again, what can we do? Well, the odds can make us feel a little better. Experts always want us to look at the odds. So, what are the odds? Well, the odds of being killed by a shark are about one in four million. So, you have a better chance of dying by fireworks or a lightning strike. Heck, the real danger is the water at the beach and the rip currents. In the last 23 years, 184 people have drowned in rip currents at the North Carolina coast. There have been just 10 fatal shark attacks in North Carolina in the last 160 years. That is a really teeny tiny percentage when you consider the millions of people who have gone to the beach over that same 160 year time frame. If you look at the most visited beach states in the country, North Carolina is number four behind Florida, California and Hawaii. And coincidentally, the Carolina's also ranked number four in shark bites. The math is pretty simple. The more people you put in the water, the more likely it is that we're going to bump into the stuff that's out there in the water. And there are lots and lots and lots of sharks in the water. Think of it this way. Every single time you step foot in the waves, there's a shark swimming in that area. And we have dozens of species here, tigers, bulls, hammerheads, dusky, silky, sandbars, power drivers, spinners, black noses, black tips, bonnet heads. The list goes on. There are so many sharks. You didn't even realize a power driver is in a shark. We made it up. It's my favorite wrestling move. And pro wrestlers, like sharks, aren't actually trying to hurt people most of the time. Now, when you look at a shark, one of the things you'll notice right away is that they don't have hands. So they use their faces instead. They have tons of nerve endings and sensors in their nose and mouth. And in their mouth, you'll find a bunch of razor sharp teeth. You can see how that's problematic. Think of Edward Scissorhands. He wasn't trying to hurt the waterbed. His hands are scissors, you see. Which is why a shark researcher at UNC told me that scientists actually prefer the term shark bite instead of shark attack. Attack implies intent. And sharks aren't swimming up and down the coast, intentionally taking little Costco samples out of people's legs. They are really quite risk-averse animals. And so when these bites happen, whether or not they're trying to sample a prey item, I doubt it, they're just trying to do what they typically do out in nature, which is feed. It's just that 99.9% of the time, and even more than that, the cues that people are giving off are not the cues a shark sure attracted to. 99.9% of the time. So you're telling me there's a chance. Well, what can we do about the other 0.1%? Well, Australia uses big mesh nets out in the water. Sounds great. Doesn't really work that well. The government there even admits nets do not create a total barrier between swimmers and sharks. And many wildlife groups complain that the nets hurt endangered species. How about some tech? We're good at tech. Ocean Guardian makes a device for surfers. It sends out an electric current targeting the sensors in a shark's snout, forcing them from the area. A 2018 study looked at the effectiveness of these, and researchers saw some great results. The sharks ate 40% of the bait, dropped in an area with the technology, compared to 96% of an area that didn't have the technology. There's also a product called shark bands. You can wear these on your wrist or on your ankle. This technology is similar. It uses those electromagnetic fields to target a shark's sensory organs. A 2022 study found the technology resulted in significantly greater avoidance and reduced feeding frequencies, but more researchers needed on those. So, you know, if you really crave that peace of mind and you got a couple hundred bucks to spare, perhaps you could try one of those out. But here is the bottom line. Watching movies and sharing videos online that they amplify that feeling we have of fear when it comes to sharks. Setting up gnats, creating a fit bit force field around you could make you feel a little safer, might even make you a little safer. We do have a few tips to live by. You don't swim at dawn or dusk. If you see some fish in the in the wake or some dolphins nearby, it probably means sharks are in that area as well. Other than that, I wish I had more to tell you. I really wish I did. I mean, sharks are here. They've been here. They're going to be here for a long time. Life is about calculated risks. And if 4 million or so people actually watch this at some point, one of you is screwed. Let me know what you think. Are you worried about sharks at the coast? Are you a nerd for Shark Week? Send me an email, Dan, at w-r-a-l dot com. What other stories should we tackle? What are we missing? What do you want to see from the local news? Tell me your thoughts and we'll go in depth. Let's go out into space instead for a moment. NASA just released a new image of the intertwined galaxies there to mark the two-year anniversary of the James Webb Space Telescope. The Space Agency calls this the penguin and the egg. It looks like a penguin. The galaxies first passed each other tens of millions of years ago, they say, causing the new star formation that you see with the penguin there. The James Webb Space Telescope is the most sophisticated infrared space telescope ever constructed, and it has been blowing our minds for two years now. It's just amazing images from space. Meteorologist Kat Campbell joining us now. We've seen some pretty amazing images from what this rain has been doing to our areas. We take a look at the radar. Boy, we needed this rain. We didn't want the flooding, but I'm just so happy that folks finally got the rain. I know it was too late for a lot of the farmers out there, but we saw some decent totals. This was beneficial for us, and we'll see this show up in our new drought monitor that will come out next Thursday and hopefully show some improvement, I believe it will. We have the heaviest rain right now falling in Elm City and Rocky Mountain. This is jumping about a quarter of an inch of rain in just a recent time period here. Northampton County also seeing some lightning still and heavy rain. We are drying out in the triangle. We still could see a few smaller bands of thunderstorms that set up over us late tonight, but that big wide area of rain that just sat over us earlier today. We're not likely to see anything like that develop again. In North Hills, you can see all the clouds lingering over the area very low. Notice how low the cloud line is. The bottom of the clouds. That'll be the case as we head into the overnight hours. 78 degrees out there right now, 2.74, so still humid, but the break from the heat has been nice and you're likely to wake up to a lot of clouds during the first half of the day tomorrow. But later in the day, we'll see the clouds clear out. We should get up right around 90 for the high. It'll be upper 80s to lower 90s, which is actually normal for this time of year. Feel good to be closer to normal for the summer heat, but by Sunday we're back up to 97. The best chance of a shower storm will actually come tomorrow morning early in the day and then about a 30% chance during the afternoon. That chance goes down later in the evening. The big story after this rain tonight is the heat. It's coming right back upper 90s on the way even triple digits by the time we get to next Tuesday. We are forecasting 101, but if we look at the long range, we could see a brief break from the heat. It's still going to feel like summer. It's July and North Carolina. Let's talk about the setup. We're going to the upper levels of the atmosphere to track this pattern change. We have this upper level load, this dip in the jet stream. It's going to be wedged between this area of high pressure right here and high pressure offshore. With this setup, it's a blocking pattern that could briefly set up and just allow this upper level load to create a lot of moisture in the area. It would be more clouds to help keep temperatures down, more rain to keep temperatures down, and that should help us stay closer. Perhaps to the mid to upper 80s as we get into next weekend and a short period of time after that. It's not going to feel like fall outside, but we are expecting the heat to back off a little bit toward the end of next week. It's also going to mean above normal rainfall, which we still need. We're going to be watching that pattern change closely for you as we look ahead. Here's your 7-day forecast. It's a hot one. We've even got upper 70s furloughs looking ahead to next week. But by next Thursday and Friday, rain chances should take back up. I'm not necessarily seeing the same setup as today, but if we could get a couple more days like today, we'd just be in much better shape in the drought. Alright, thank you, Kat. Let's check in with Brian in the life center. Just a moment ago, Dan, we got word from Durham Police about the person who was killed in that crash earlier this afternoon. On Midland Terrace, 32-year-old Corey Lewis was the only person in that vehicle. Witnesses say that it went off the road and overturned in a body of water, and they say that they found Lewis dead at the scene, pronounced dead at the scene. Nobody else was in that vehicle, and Durham Police are saying if you saw that crash around 4/20 this afternoon, please give them a call as they continue their investigation. More news coming up after this. 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Here, I want to show you something you just really don't see every day here in North Carolina, a herd of manatees. There was a man who was using some drone footage. Well, that is definitely not a manatee. That is a sea turtle. Actually, that is a very rare sea turtle. We're going to talk about that in one second. Do we have the manatee video? There they are. So this is some drone video. A Raleigh native, Peyton Stamper spotted these six sea cows visiting the Topsoe beach sound yesterday afternoon. Stamper says that he visits Topsoe beach for 31 years. It's the first time he's ever seen manatees like this. The nonprofit Save the Manatee Club is far up in Massachusetts, but they work to save the manatees down here. Now let's get to the sea turtle. The most endangered sea turtle species in the world, laying eggs in North Carolina at our shore. The Mama Sea Turtle was first recorded laying eggs on Hatteras Island on June 23. This is a video of her from earlier this week. These turtles, known as the Kemp's Ridley Sea Turtles, are very unique because they nest during the day. The National Park Service says that this is the furthest north that they have ever seen. These types of turtles laying their eggs. Well done. Thank you so much for being with us here and making WRAL your choice for local news. We've got more news on Fox 50 at 10 o'clock in RAL at 11. Have a great weekend and a great night. [music] Keep watching WRAL News over the Air Channel 34. This is the story of the one. As a maintenance engineer, he hears things differently. To the untrained ear, everything on his shop floor might sound fine, but he can hear gears grinding, or a belt slipping. So he steps in to fix the problem at hand before it gets out of hand. And he knows Granger's got the right product he needs to get the job done, which is music to his ears. Call clickgranger.com or just stop by. Granger, for the ones who get it done. 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