Latest news with #Moran
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Climate
- Yahoo
Goodland National Weather Service office exempt from hiring freeze
WICHITA, Kan. (KSNW) — With Kansas in the middle of severe weather season, there has been a lot of concern over staffing cuts at the National Weather Service. Friday morning, U.S. Senator Jerry Moran said he has reassured the Goodland NWS office that it can hire more people. 'The Goodland NWS office is short-staffed and has been unable to fill vacant positions due to the hiring freeze, resulting in the office being closed overnight,' he said on social media. 'I spoke with NWS Director Ken Graham about the impact of these vacancies, and next month he plans to implement a temporary, rotating staff to keep the office open 24/7.' Earlier this year, the Trump administration mandated cuts and a hiring freeze that affected more than 1,000 jobs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Lawmakers in Washington said the layoffs included NWS meteorologists. National Weather Service staffing impacts Kansas KSN's Chief Meteorologist Lisa Teachman has noticed how the cuts have affected the Goodland office. 'The last couple of weeks, due to the staff shortage, they have not been updating certain products like they did, which is the result of the office being closed overnight,' she said. Despite the staff cuts, Teachman said the Goodland NWS did an incredible job on the tornado warnings the day of the Grinnell and Plevna tornadoes. 'Goodland, Dodge City and Wichita all did fabulous jobs of issuing timely and accurate warnings, even with all the staffing issues as seen here in Goodland,' Teachman said. 'We had no deaths and very few injuries. Considering the number of tornadoes and of EF-3 intensities that day, this was a job well done for Kansans under the 'Weather enterprise,' as I call it, including government, media, emergency management, and other safety support entities. This is a partnership built and grown together over decades.' Moran said the Goodland office can begin hiring meteorologists and weather forecasters. Rainfall amounts across Kansas 'While it will take time to re-open these job applications and hire the needed staff, this is a positive step in returning the Goodland NWS Office to 24/7 weather forecasting,' he said. Hundreds of people have responded to Moran's Facebook post. Many applaud the announcement, but others say that the cuts should never have happened and that all of NOAA's staff and funding should be fully restored. For more Kansas news, click here. Keep up with the latest breaking news by downloading our mobile app and signing up for our news email alerts. Sign up for our Storm Track 3 Weather app by clicking here. To watch our shows live on our website, click here. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Irish Examiner
3 days ago
- Business
- Irish Examiner
Renewable energy, a sure route to ensuring the lights stay on
'Just imagine for a second that there was no climate emergency,' says Justin Moran. 'The globe isn't warming, everything is fine, there is no threat to life. You would still be insane not to be accelerating the development renewable sources of energy. It is the cheapest form of new electricity. The price drops in solar over the last couple of years have been incredible. Even if there was no climate emergency, you'd be doing this anyway and doing it as fast as you can.' Moran, a self-confessed 'energy nerd' is Director of External Affairs at Wind Energy Ireland (WEI), the body that represents Ireland's wind industry, with over 200 affiliated members. Their goal is neither simple nor trivial. Individually and collectively, they are on a mission to transform windy weather and odd day of Irish sunshine into the million blessings that a supply of electricity brings to civic society. Passionate in his advocacy of the urgency of renewable energy and the replacement of fossil fuels in the power chain, Moran sounds slightly bewildered that there are still people among us yet to grasp the importance of this transformation. He sits his argument on a stool with three legs — climate mitigation, energy security and the inarguable cost benefits of change. 'Onshore wind is the most affordable source of new energy — it helps consumers in that it drives down the price of electricity,' says Moran. 'Since 2020 onshore wind has saved over €1.7 billion in consumer bills. We spend about one-million euro every hour importing fossil fuels into Ireland for energy and there is absolutely no reason why we should be doing that. What we should be doing is putting in an energy system that ensures that money stays at home and that we have energy security and energy independence.' Ireland is doing quite well when it comes to producing electricity from onshore wind sources. Over a third of our energy demand is satisfied by this source, a higher proportion than any other country in Europe, which would come as a surprise to anyone who has walked across a Donegal beach on a blustery day. 'We've the best wind conditions anywhere in Europe,' explains Moran. In parts of the West of Ireland, the onshore winds are as good as offshore. Government has focused on the support schemes, the policies, the frameworks that have allowed us to build this capacity. Passengers wait before boarding their train at Sants railway station in Barcelona in April, a day after a massive power cut affecting the entire Iberian peninsula and the south of France. But there is an uncomfortable structural wrinkle lurking in the data. Ireland went all in on onshore wind farms in the early days of the 'rush to renewable' while other countries adopted more blended energy strategies, diversifying into solar, nuclear and offshore to supplement and balance their onshore output. Ireland cannot meet its net-zero targets in the coming decades through a disproportionate reliance on onshore wind farms and accelerating delivery from disparate sources is critical to meeting Ireland's international obligations. Justin Moran says that his members at WEI stand ready, willing and able to rise to the challenge. 'Our plan is to produce nine-thousand megawatts of onshore wind energy by 2030 and we are currently at about five, either built or in build,' he continues. 'We believe that there is enough land in Ireland suitable for onshore wind that could get us to about fifteen megawatts. One of the things we are asking of government is to set us a target of 11k megawatts by 2035 and fifteen by 2040. We are asking that we be given us those targets, and they will enhance our possibilities.' Moran acknowledges that there are real and valid social and community barriers in the way of these goals and that targets aren't met just by writing them on a piece of paper. A harmonious coalition of suppliers, government, local administration and the citizenry has yet to fully form on the pace and nature of the solution. In view of this, if his fairy Godmother made him supreme leader for a day and granted him one public policy credit, where would he spend it? He mulls the question long and silently, and then greedily chooses two options. 'Planning and Grid. We need to work with the regions and the county councils to identify land for wind energy. We estimate about 1.8% of the land in Ireland is available for wind farm development. Each county council tends to have its own approach for zoning, but if we could get to the point where we had national approach on how to identify land and understand how much power you could generate from it the planning system would be transformed. "A lot of the cost is in how long the project has to stay in the planning system. We need to develop winds farms more affordably. This is the government's direction of travel, but it needs to happen, much, much faster.' The criticality of a robust infrastructure to harness and distribute electricity is to the front of his mind and at the top of his concerns. Electrical power is like an unsold airplane seat — once the plane takes off the asset perishes, and it can never be sold again. It is the same with electricity that cannot find a route to the grid. At times in Ireland, up to 14% of electricity can be wasted because the grid is not strong enough to process the power and onshore wind is instructed to shut down temporarily. It's a frustration that Moran wears heavily. 'We know that we can provide far more electricity than we will ever need in this country,' he maintains. 'The resource is astonishing; it boggles the mind, but one of the questions is what do we do with that surplus wind? First thing we could do is export it, one of the challenges is that we are a small, isolated island of an electricity grid, in mainland Europe, there is always somewhere for your power to go. "Another challenge is that Ireland is an expensive place to build a wind or solar farm which means that the prices in Britain or France are cheaper than us. So not only do you need an enormous amount of the resource, but you also need to be able to sell more cheaply than your competitors.' Moran is speaking less than a month after Spain and Portugal had gone dark for almost a day with an as yet clearly unexplained catastrophic grid failure. Sixty million people in first-world modern economies without power and the sum of all fears for 'energy-nerds' had come to pass. We Irish often run ourselves down, but where we have got to now with onshore is something we can be proud of. But if we want to fully get to that clean energy future, we need to get the projects through planning and we need a stronger grid. There is no sense in building a wind farm in Donegal or a solar farm in Spain if it cannot get the power to your house. The new renewable systems will have hundreds of generators, and they are not going to be located necessarily beside the bigger cities. You need a system to move that electricity, and this only works if you have a strong grid. Onshore wind farms reduce more carbon emissions than every other energy technology combined in this country, but decarbonisation is only the number two issue. The number one issue is that when you press your light switch something happens. The lights cannot go out.
Irish Post
4 days ago
- Business
- Irish Post
A taste of Ireland, served fresh in London
WHEN Emma Moran moved to London 12 years ago, she didn't realise she was planting the seeds for what would become a haven for Irish expats and curious Londoners. Emerald Eats, the nostalgia-fuelled food venture, has quickly gained popularity because it brings a slice of Ireland's beloved deli culture to the streets of London, one chicken fillet roll at a time. 'I'm from Dublin,' Moran said, recounting the winding road that led her to start Emerald Eats. 'When I finished college, I lived in Whistler for a year, then lived in New York for a year. Then I went back to Dublin, but there were no jobs at the time, so I decided to move to London.' Moran settled into corporate life in Britain, working in national account management for various wineries and a gin distillery. But something kept pulling at her. 'I just thought I really wanted to do something for myself,'. The idea for Emerald Eats was born out of a noticeable gap in the London food scene. 'In Ireland every deli shop, every petrol station, every newsagent, every shop at home has a fresh deli counter where you can get chicken fillet rolls and just any type of sandwich made to order, and they are amazing,' Moran explained. 'When we were over here, we'd always talk about the fact that you couldn't get them.' The realisation hit her again during a work event at the London Irish Centre in Camden. 'The staff were talking about how the one thing you couldn't get in London was a chicken fillet roll. I was like, Oh, we're all saying it. It felt really obvious.' With encouragement from family, especially memories of The Coconut, a shop in Dublin run by her aunt, uncle, and cousins, Moran finally took the plunge. 'I'd spent so long thinking about it,' she said. 'I stayed in my other job for a year after I started.' 'I basically just started cycling around to different council offices, trying to see if I could get a spot for weekends. Hackney Council gave me a spot on Broadway Market on Sundays. So we just set up a little stall, and yeah, that was kind of it.' From market stall to festival food truck (Photo by Emerald Eats) From that humble beginning a year and a half ago, Emerald Eats has grown fast. 'Even over the last couple of months, it's evolved so much,' she said. 'We used to just be a stall, then we were doing a gazebo, and then I bought a food truck last summer.' That truck has since rolled into some of Britain's biggest events. 'We did Cheltenham in March, which was incredible. Then we're doing Formula One in a couple of weeks. We started doing different football matches too – we did Chelsea Football Club.' Not content to stop there, Moran also launched an indoor catering menu, tailored to office environments where frying isn't an option. 'Our winter menu is a slow-cooked lamb stew with homemade soda bread. We've got a summer indoor menu of pulled spice bag chicken with different kinds of salad.' Despite the expansions and event bookings, the classics remain the cornerstone. 'The chicken fillet roll does very well, and we also do a spice bag as well,' Moran said. 'It seems to have taken off.' The name "Emerald Eats" came to her in a flash of inspiration. 'I just remember waking up the next day and I had it written on a napkin.' Looking to the future, Moran is cautiously optimistic. 'My hope would be for this summer to be really good, and then maybe have a bigger truck and a larger trailer so that you're able to serve more people. I'd love to do Glastonbury—that would be incredible.' For many Irish Londoners, Emerald Eats also serves a slice of home. And for Emma Moran, it's the realisation of a long-held dream, one made with soda bread, slow-cooked lamb, and of course, the famous chicken fillet roll. See More: Emerald Eats, Emma Moran, Irish Cuisine, London
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Rep. Moran reacts to Texas House passing ‘Big, Beautiful Bill'
TYLER, Texas (KETK) — Rep. Nathaniel Moran, R-TX, said 'House Republicans delivered on the promises we made to the American people' in a statement on Thursday after the Texas House passed President Donald Trump's 'Big, Beautiful Bill'. Lindale ISD employee celebrated after dedicating 35 years to the district The 'Big, Beautiful Bill' is a fiscal package bill from Trump with the goal of cutting $1.5 trillion from the the government's budget in an effort to establish different tax laws, overtime pay and more. Moran released this message in statement following the bill's passage in the Texas House. 'With today's passage of the One, Big, Beautiful Bill, House Republicans delivered on the promises we made to the American people,' Moran said. 'This legislation puts working families, small businesses, and rural communities back at the center of our economic future—right where they belong.' Moran expressed that without the 'Big Beautiful Bill', families would see a major tax increase by 2026. He said families earning the median income of $62,182 would see a 22% increase amounting to $1,142 on their tax bill. Tyler mayor outlines vision for city's growth and upgrades According to a release from Moran's team, the bill aims to strengthen small businesses by making the 199A small business deduction permanent, which would reportedly produce $750 billion in economic growth and aid 1 million new jobs. This bill is not just for small businesses, it will also support families, rural America and the boarder economy. Families could see tax relief on car loan interest, overtime pay and tips along with getting an increase on the Child Tax Credit, according to the release. The release said rural family farms could see growth with expensing for new factories and agricultural improvements. The boarder economy could also see expensing for new factories with more 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Yahoo
Youngstown police honor fallen officers with new grave markers
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio (WKBN) — City police officer Joe Moran doesn't like seeing things fall through the cracks. He knows, sometimes, it can't be helped but when he noticed that the grave markers of officers who lost their lives in the line of duty were falling apart, he decided to do something about it. Moran, with help from Detective Sgt. Dave Sweeney and a civilian employee, Clerk Laura Cruickshank, spearheaded an effort to have new markers placed on the graves of all 12 officers who lost their lives in the line of duty — from 1891 with the death of Patrolman William Freed to 2003 and the death of Patrolman Michael Hartzell. The 12 markers are spread across six local cemeteries — Belmont Park, Calvary, and Oak Hill in Youngstown; Resurrection Cemetery in Austintown; Lake Park in Boardman; and Hubbard Union Cemetery. Lt. Frank Rutherford, who is in charge of the dayshift for the Patrol Division, first alerted Moran to the condition of the markers. Moran, who has been an officer for 25 years and now patrols an East Side beat on dayshift, said one of the markers was found at a flea market. When looking for something to replace them that would be more permanent and would stand up to the elements for a long time, he turned to Chip Kovach of City Machine Technologies, a manufacturing business based in the city. The markers made by CMT are duplicates of the originals but with improved all-weather material that should be able to withstand the change of seasons in Youngstown — where sometimes all seasons can be experienced within a 24-hour period — for years to come. 'They came out really well,' Moran said. Kovach, whose company has worked with police on other projects, said he was given an original marker that he estimated was 100 years old made out of cast iron. Having a design to work with, he used materials he said are similar to those used in outdoor advertising signs and signs at national parks that are designed to hold up in all kinds of weather. He cut the signs himself, he said, at home. The time and materials were donated to the police. 'They should hold up pretty well,' Kovach said. Cruickshank was in charge of research. She called the local cemeteries to make sure the graves were there and to get their exact locations. She also used internet searches to help find them, Cruickshank said. Sweeney and Cruickshank then went to each grave to place a new marker on them. They did the work late last fall but wanted to wait until this month, when Police Memorial Week is held, to unveil them. The department will join other departments in a memorial service at 10 a.m. Friday at Our Lady of Mount Carmel to honor local officers from the Mahoning Valley who have died in the line of duty. Moran said he understands how the markers may have deteriorated over the years because no one regularly checked on them, but with 165 officers dying in the line of duty last year, he said he wants to make sure they are not forgotten. 'Sometimes things go by the wayside, but these guys need to be remembered for their sacrifices and what they did for their community,' Moran said. Kovach said he was glad to help out but added he hopes his help is not needed again. 'I don't want to have to make any more,' he said. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
