Latest news with #Lauderdale
NBC News
27-05-2025
- NBC News
11 hospitalized, including 2 kids, after boat explosion in Florida
Nearly a dozen people, including two children, were hospitalized after a boat explosion and fire in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on Memorial Day evening, officials said. The incident was reported around 5:45 p.m. Monday near the New River Triangle, not far from the Lauderdale Yacht Club on Southeast 12th Court. U.S. Coast Guard officials said there were 13 people on board the boat when there was an explosion. 'For reasons that we don't know yet, a boat exploded, it tossed people into the water, good Samaritans came over right away and started rescuing them,' Fort Lauderdale Fire Rescue spokesman Frank Guzman said. 'It's too soon to know how this happened. We have a fire investigator on scene, as well.' Footage from a surveillance camera captured the moment the fireball erupted on the boat, and showed multiple people spilling into the water. Guzman confirmed there were 11 patients, including two children, who were initially taken to Broward Health Medical Center. 'A number of the patients had significant burns and are being transported to Jackson Memorial Hospital, where they have a burn unit,' Guzman said. 'A lot of them had burns to much of their body.' Officials at Jackson Memorial said they received 10 patients, including eight adults who were in good condition and two children who were in fair condition. One patient had to be intubated. Antonio Rivero said he was with family members on the boat when it went up in flames. 'Tried to fuel up the boat, and must have been a gas leak and, you know, spark went off and explosion,' Rivero said. 'One of the guys' pants were blown off, so it was bad.' Rivero, 32, suffered burns to his arm, but his wife, Cassandra, and their two children remained hospitalized Monday night. 'They're OK because they're on a lot of meds, but other than that they're fine,' he said. At least one witness reported seeing an explosion and said they saw multiple people with burn injuries who were brought to the yacht club docks. The victims had burned legs and bathing suits that appeared ripped and burned to shreds, the witness said. Two other witnesses said they were on a dinghy at the sandbar when the boat exploded. 'When they went to start their boat up, it just exploded. There was a huge fireball and people were kind of falling off the boat,' Bret Triano said. 'We were at the sandbar too and we just tried to go help out.' Triano and Marisa Toomesn were able to rescue some of the victims. 'There were a couple boats trying to pick people up and one guy just didn't get picked up so we went over to him,' Triano said. 'He was screaming.' 'He was burned pretty badly,' Toomesn said. 'He was saying, 'Save me. Please, don't let me die. I'm so hot, I need water,'' Triano said. 'He just kept repeating, 'I want water, I want water.'' Aerial footage from Chopper 6 showed Fort Lauderdale Police, the U.S. Coast Guard, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the Broward Sheriff's Office assisting Fort Lauderdale Fire Rescue. Crews were seen examining the boat involved, which was tied up to a nearby sea wall. Guzman said crews also rescued a dog that had been on the boat that wasn't injured. The FWC and fire officials will investigate the cause of the explosion.
Yahoo
15-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
California Nuclear Power Plant Deploys Generative AI Safety System
America's first nuclear power plant to use artificial intelligence is, ironically, the last operational one in California. As CalMatters reports, the Diablo Canyon power plant is slated to be decommissioned by the end of this decade. In the interim, the plant's owner, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), claims that it's deploying its "Neutron Enterprise" tool — which will be the first nuclear plant in the nation to use AI — in a series of escalating stages. Less than 18 months ago, Diablo Canyon was hurtling headlong toward a decommissioning that would have begun in 2024 and ended this year. In late 2023, however, the California Public Utility Commission voted to stay its execution for five years, kicking the can on the inevitable to 2029 and 2030, respectively. Just under a year after that vote, PG&E announced that it was teaming up with a startup called Atomic Canyon, which was founded with the plant in mind and is also based in the coastal Central California town of San Luis Obispo. That partnership, and the first "stage" of the tool's deployment, brought some of Nvidia's high-powered H100 AI chips to the dying nuclear plant, and with them the compute power needed for generative artificial intelligence. Running on an internal server without cloud access, Neutron Enterprise's biggest use case, much like so-called AI "search engines," is summarizing a massive trove of millions of regulatory documents that have been fed into it. According to Atomic Canyon CEO and cofounder Trey Lauderdale, this isn't risky — though anyone who has used AI to summarize information knows better, because the tech still often makes factual mistakes. Speaking to CalMatters, PG&E executive Maureen Zalawick insisted that the AI program will be more of a "copilot" than a "decision-maker," meant to assist flesh-and-blood employees rather than replace them. "We probably spend about 15,000 hours a year searching through our multiple databases and records and procedures," Zalawick explained. "And that's going to shrink that time way down." Lauderdale put it in even simpler terms. "You can put this on the record," he told CalMatters. "The AI guy in nuclear says there is no way in hell I want AI running my nuclear power plant right now." If that "right now" caveat gives you pause, you're not alone. Given the shifting timelines for the closure of Diablo Canyon in a state that has been painstakingly phasing out its nuclear facilities since the 1970s over concerns about toxic waste — and the fact that Lauderdale claims to be talking to other plants in other states — there's ample cause for concern. "The idea that you could just use generative AI for one specific kind of task at the nuclear power plant and then call it a day," cautioned Tamara Kneese of the tech watchdog Data & Society, "I don't really trust that it would stop there." As head of Data & Society's Climate, Technology, and Justice program, Kneese said that while using AI to help sift through tomes of documents is worthwhile, "trusting PG&E to safely use generative AI in a nuclear setting is something that is deserving of more scrutiny." This is the same company whose polluting propensities were exposed by the real-life Erin Brokovich in the 1990s, after all. California lawmakers, meanwhile, were impressed by the tailored usage Atomic Canyon and PG&E propose for the program — but it remains to be seen whether or not that narrow functionality will remain that way. More on AI and energy: Former Google CEO Tells Congress That 99 Percent of All Electricity Will Be Used to Power Superintelligent AI
