PARMA HEIGHTS, Ohio (AP) — Police in northeast Ohio went in pursuit of a runaway inflatable pumpkin after receiving calls of a large, orange inflatable object on the run.

Body camera footage from the Parma Heights Police Department shows the inflatable pumpkin rolling down the street was difficult to grasp.

Officers eventually stopped and detained the inflatable pumpkin Tuesday night. The footage shows an officer holding onto the giant plastic gourd and saying to a colleague that he was “following it” but “it kept blowing away.”

After its capture, multiple officers attempted to deflate the pumpkin but they failed and had to work together to push the giant orange ball in the back of a police car.

“I’ve never seen that before,” an officer can be heard saying of the inflatable Halloween decoration packed tight in the backseat.

The officers then drove the pumpkin back to its home where it is on display “to be enjoyed by all who pass it throughout the remainder of this fall season,” Parma Heights Police Department spokesman Sgt. Eric Taylor said in a statement.

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By ANDREA ROSA and GIADA ZAMPANO

ROME (AP) — For the first time in nearly 2,000 years, visitors to Rome’s world-renowned Colosseum will have the opportunity to walk through a hidden imperial passage that once allowed Roman emperors to reach the ancient amphitheater unseen.

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The once-secret corridor — known as the “Commodus Passage” and named after the Roman emperor turned into a pop icon by Ridley Scott’s movie “Gladiator” — opens to the public on Oct. 27, marking an extraordinary milestone in archaeological preservation and access.

Archaeologists at the Colosseum Archaeological Park explained that Roman emperors would use the passage to enter the arena unseen and protected, leading them directly to their reserved honor box overlooking the games.

The passage was named after Emperor Commodus, who lived between 180 and 192 A.D., when it was initially discovered in the 1810s. Commodus was known to be passionate about gladiators’ games and history relates that while he was passing through the tunnel, someone attempted to assassinate him, but was unsuccessful.

At the passage entrance, archaeologists discovered remnants of decorative elements directly related to arena spectacles, including depictions of boar hunts, bear fights and acrobatic performances. These artistic elements provided a fitting prelude to the brutal entertainments that awaited beyond, they noted.

The corridor is shaped as an ’S’ and continues outside the Colosseum arena, but its final destination remains uncertain.

“Visitors can now have a taste of what it was like to be an emperor entering the arena,” said Barbara Nazzaro, the architect who oversaw the restoration works. “With a little effort of imagination and the help of a virtual reconstruction, they can appreciate the decorations, stuccoes, frescoes and marbles that covered the walls.”

The project — completed between Oct. 2024 and Sept. 2025 — included structural conservation, restoration of decorative stuccoes and plasters and the installation of a new walkway.

A new lighting system recreates the natural light that once filtered through small vault openings, and a digital reconstruction helps visitors visualize the passage’s original appearance.

A second restoration project, expected to begin in early 2026, will involve the section of the tunnel extending beyond the perimeter of the Colosseum.

By Holly K. Hacker, Brett Kelman, Daniel Chang, Hannah Norman Lydia Zuraw, KFF Health News

LOUISVILLE, Tenn. — When a big storm hits, Peninsula Hospital could be underwater.

At this decades-old psychiatric hospital on the edge of the Tennessee River, an intense storm could submerge the building in 11 feet of water, cutting off all roads around the facility, according to a sophisticated computer simulation of flood risk.

Aurora, a young woman who was committed to Peninsula as a teenager, said the hospital sits so close to the river that it felt like a moat keeping her and dozens of other patients inside. KFF Health News agreed not to publish her full name because she shared private medical history.

“My first feeling is doom,” Aurora said as she watched the simulation of the river rising around the hospital. “These are probably some of the most vulnerable people.”

Peninsula Hospital, a psychiatric hospital southwest of Knoxville on the edge of the Tennessee River, could be surrounded by 11 feet of water in an intense storm, according to flood simulations by Fathom. (Brett Kelman/KFF Health News/KFF Health News/TNS)

Covenant Health, which runs Peninsula Hospital, said in a statement it has a “proactive and thorough approach to emergency planning” but declined to provide details or answer questions.

Peninsula is one of about 170 American hospitals, totaling nearly 30,000 patient beds from coast to coast, that face the greatest risk of significant or dangerous flooding, according to a months-long KFF Health News investigation based on data provided by Fathom, a company considered a leader in flood simulation. At many of these hospitals, flooding from heavy storms has the potential to jeopardize patient care, block access to emergency rooms, and force evacuations. Sometimes there is no other hospital nearby.

KFF Health News agreed not to publish her full name because she shared private medical history. (Brett Kelman/KFF Health News/KFF Health News/TNS)

Much of this risk to hospitals is not captured by flood maps issued by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which have served as the nation’s de facto tool for flood estimation for half a century, despite being incomplete and sometimes decades out of date. As FEMA’s maps have become divorced from the reality of a changing climate, private companies like Fathom have filled the gap with simulations of future floods. But many of their predictions are behind a paywall, leaving the public mostly reliant on free, significantly limited government maps.

“This is highly concerning,” said Caleb Dresser, who studies climate change and is both an emergency room doctor and a Harvard University assistant professor. “If you don’t have the information to know you’re at risk, then how can you triage that problem?”

The deadliest hospital flooding in modern American history occurred 20 years ago during Hurricane Katrina, when the bodies of 45 people were recovered from New Orleans’ Memorial Medical Center, including some patients whom investigators suspected were euthanized. More flooding deaths were narrowly avoided one year ago when helicopters rescued dozens of people as Hurricane Helene engulfed Unicoi County Hospital in Erwin, Tennessee.

Rebecca Harrison, a paramedic, called her children from the Unicoi roof to say goodbye.

“I was scared to death, thinking, ‘This is it,’” Harrison told CBS News, which interviewed Unicoi survivors as part of KFF Health News’ investigation. “Alarms were going off. People were screaming. It was chaos.”

The investigation — among the first to analyze nationwide hospital flood risk in an era of warming climate and worsening storms — comes as the administration of President Donald Trump has slashed federal agencies that forecast and respond to extreme weather and also dismantled FEMA programs designed to protect hospitals and other important buildings from floods.

When asked to comment, FEMA said flooding is a common, costly, and “under appreciated” disaster but made no statement specific to hospitals. Spokesperson Daniel Llargués defended the administration’s changes to FEMA by reissuing an August statement that dismissed criticism as coming from “bureaucrats who presided over decades of inefficiency.”

Alice Hill, an Obama administration climate risk expert, said the Trump administration’s dismissal of climate change and worsening floods would waste billions of dollars and endanger lives.

In 2015, Hill led the creation of the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard, which required that hospitals and other essential structures be elevated or incorporate extra flood protections to qualify for federal funding.

FEMA stopped enforcing the standard in March.

“People will die as a result of some of the choices being made today,” Hill said. “We will be less prepared than we are now. And we already were, in my estimation, poorly prepared.”

‘Flood Risk Is Everywhere’

The KFF Health News investigation identified more than 170 hospitals facing a flood risk by comparing the locations of more than 7,000 facilities to peer-reviewed flood hazard mapping provided by Fathom, a United Kingdom company that simulates flooding in spaces as small as 10 meters using laser-precision elevation measurements from the U.S. Geological Survey.

Hospitals were determined to have a significant risk if Fathom’s 100-year flood data predicted that a foot or more of water could reach a considerable portion of their buildings, excluding parking garages, or cut off road access to the hospital. A 100-year flood is an intense weather event that has roughly a 1% chance of occurring in any given year but can happen more often.

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The investigation found heightened flood risks at large trauma centers, small rural hospitals, children’s hospitals, and long-term care facilities that serve older and disabled patients. At least 21 are critical access hospitals, with the next-closest hospital 25 miles away, on average.

Flooding threatens dozens of hospitals in coastal areas, including in Florida, Louisiana, Texas, and New York. Farther inland, flooding of rivers or creeks could envelop other hospitals, particularly in Appalachia and the Midwest. Even in the sun-soaked cities and arid expanses of the American West, storms have the potential to surround some hospitals with several feet of pooling water, according to Fathom’s data.

These findings are likely an undercount of hospitals at risk because the investigation overlooked pockets of potential flooding at some hospitals. It excluded facilities like stand-alone ERs, outpatient clinics, and nursing homes.

“The reality is that flood risk is everywhere. It is the most pervasive of perils,” said Oliver Wing, the chief scientific officer at Fathom, who reviewed the findings. “Just because you’ve never experienced an extreme doesn’t mean you never will.”

Dresser, the ER doctor, said even a small amount of flooding can shut down an unprepared hospital, often by interrupting its power supply, which is needed for life-sustaining equipment like ventilators and heart monitors. He said the most vulnerable hospitals would likely be in rural areas.

“A lot of rural hospitals are now closing their pediatric units, closing their psychiatry units,” Dresser said. “In a financially stressed situation, it can be hard to prioritize long-term threats, even if they are, for some institutions, potentially existential.”

Urban hospitals can face dangerous flooding, too. Fathom’s data predicts 5 to 15 feet of water around neighboring hospitals — Kadlec Regional Medical Center and Lourdes Behavioral Health — that straddle a tiny creek in Richland, Washington.

By Fathom’s estimate, a 100-year flood could cause the nearby Columbia River to spill over a levee that protects Richland, then loosely follow the creek to the hospitals. Some of the deepest flooding is estimated around Lourdes, which was built on land the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers set aside in 1961 as a “ponding and drainage easement.”

At the time, this land was supposed to be capable of storing enough water to fill at least 40 Olympic-size swimming pools, according to military documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. A mental health facility has occupied this spot since the 1970s.

‘All the Elements of a Real Disaster’

One year ago, as Hurricane Helene carved a deadly path across Southern Appalachia, Angel Mitchell was visiting her ailing mother at Unicoi County Hospital in the tiny town of Erwin, Tennessee.

Swollen by Helene, the nearby Nolichucky River spilled over its banks and around the hospital, which was built in a flood plain. Staff tried to bar the doors, Mitchell said, but the water got in, trapping her and others inside. The lights went out. People fled to the roof, where the roar of rushing water nearly drowned out the approach of rescue helicopters, Mitchell said.

Ultimately, 70 people from the hospital, including Mitchell and her mother, were airlifted to safety on Sept. 27, 2024. The hospital remains closed, and the company that owns it, Ballad Health, has said its reopening is uncertain.

“Why allow something — especially a hospital — to be built in an area like that?” Mitchell told CBS News. “People have to rely on these areas to get medical help, and they’re dangerous.”

Beyond Unicoi, KFF Health News identified 39 inland hospitals — including 16 in Appalachia — that Fathom predicts could flood when nearby rivers, creeks, or drainage canals overspill their banks, even in storms far less intense than Helene.

For example, in the Cumberland Mountains of southwestern Virginia, a 100-year flood is projected to cause Slate Creek to engulf Buchanan General Hospital in more than 5 feet of water.

Near the Great Lakes in Erie, Pennsylvania, LECOM Medical Center and Behavioral Health Pavilion could become flooded by a small drainage creek that is less than 50 feet from the front door of the ER.

Neither Buchanan nor LECOM responded to questions about flooding or preparations.

And in West Virginia’s capital of Charleston, where about 50,000 people live at the junction of two rivers in a wide and flat valley, a single storm could potentially flood five of the city’s six hospitals at once, along with schools, churches, fire departments, and other facilities.

“I hate to say it,” said Behrang Bidadian, a flood plain manager at the West Virginia GIS Technical Center, “but it has all the elements of a real disaster.”

Shanen Wright, 48, a lifelong Charleston resident who lives near CAMC Memorial, said many in the city have little worry about flooding in the face of more immediate problems, like the opioid epidemic and the decline of manufacturing and mining.

Tugboats and coal barges sail past his neighborhood as if they were cars on his street.

“It’s not to say it’s not a possibility,” he said. “I’m sure the people in Asheville and the people in Texas, where the floods took so many lives, they probably didn’t see it coming either.”

‘The Water Is Coming’

Despite wide scientific consensus that climate change fuels more dangerous weather, the Trump administration has taken the position that concerns about global warming are overblown. In a speech to the United Nations in September, Trump called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.”

The Trump administration has made deep staff and funding cuts to FEMA, NOAA, and the National Weather Service. At FEMA, the cuts prompted 191 current and former employees to publish a letter in August warning that the agency is being dismantled from within.

Daniel Swain, a University of California climate scientist, said the administration’s rejection of climate change has left the nation less prepared for extreme weather, now and in the future.

“It’s akin to enforcing malpractice scientifically,” Swain said. “Imagine making a medical decision where you are not allowed to look at 20% of the patient’s vital signs or test results.”

Under Trump, FEMA has also taken actions critics say will leave the nation more vulnerable to flooding, specifically:

FEMA disbanded the Technical Mapping Advisory Council, which had repeatedly pushed the agency to modernize its flood maps to estimate future risk and account for the impacts of climate change.
FEMA canceled its Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, which provided grants to help communities and vital buildings, including hospitals, protect themselves from floods and other natural disasters.
And after stopping enforcement early this year, FEMA intends to rescind the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard, which was designed to harden buildings against future floods and save tax dollars in the long run.

Berginnis, of the Association of State Floodplain Managers, said the administration’s unwillingness to prepare for climate change and worsening storms would result in a dangerous and costly cycle of flooding, rebuilding, and flooding again.

“The president is saying we are closed for business when it comes to hazard mitigation,” Berginnis said. “It bugs me to no end that we have to have reminders — like people dying — to show us why it’s important to make these investments.”

FEMA did not answer specific questions about these decisions. In the statement to KFF Health News, spokesperson Llargués touted the administration’s response to flooding in Texas and New Mexico and said FEMA had provided billions of dollars to help people and communities recover and rebuild. He did not mention any FEMA funding for protecting against future floods.

Few hospitals understand this threat more than the former Coney Island Hospital in New York City, which has suffered catastrophic flooding before and has prepared for it to come again.

Superstorm Sandy in 2012 forced the hospital to evacuate hundreds of patients. When the water receded, fish and a sea turtle were found in the building.

Eleven years later, the facility reopened as Ruth Bader Ginsburg Hospital, transformed by a FEMA-funded $923 million reconstruction project that added a 4-foot floodwall and elevated patient care areas and utility infrastructure above the first floor.

It is now likely one of the most flood-proofed hospitals in the nation.

But, so far, no storm has tested the facility.

Svetlana Lipyanskaya, CEO of NYC Health+Hospitals/South Brooklyn Health, which includes the rebuilt hospital, said the question of flooding is “not an if but a when.”

“I hope it doesn’t happen in my lifetime,” she said, “but frankly, I’d be surprised. The water is coming.”

Methodology

After Hurricane Helene made landfall a year ago, a raging river flooded a rural hospital in eastern Tennessee. Patients and employees were rescued from the rooftop. Floods have hit hospitals from New York to Nebraska to Texas in recent years. We wanted to determine how many other U.S. hospitals face similar peril. Ultimately, we found more than 170 hospitals at risk.

For this analysis, we used data from Fathom, a United Kingdom-based company that specializes in flood-risk modeling across the globe. To assess the United States’ vulnerability, Fathom uses sophisticated computer simulations and detailed terrain data covering the country. It accounts for environmental factors such as climate change, soil conditions, and many rivers and creeks not mapped by other sources. Fathom’s modeling has been peer-reviewed and used by insurance companies, the World Bank, the Nature Conservancy, and government agencies in Florida, Texas, and elsewhere. The Iowa Flood Center has validated Fathom’s U.S. data.

Through a data use agreement, Fathom shared its U.S. mapping data that predicts areas with at least a 1% chance of flooding in any given year. Fathom’s data estimates the effects of three main types of flooding: coastal, fluvial (from overflowing rivers, lakes, or streams), and pluvial (rainfall that the ground can’t absorb). The data also accounts for dams, reservoirs, and other structures that defend against floods.

To identify at-risk hospitals, we used a publicly available Department of Homeland Security database containing the GPS coordinates of more than 7,000 short-term acute, critical access, rehab, and psychiatric hospitals — basically any hospital with inpatient services. (DHS under the Trump administration has discontinued public access to the database, so data for hospitals and other infrastructure is no longer widely available.)

Using GPS coordinates as the centerpoint, we created a circle with a 150-yard radius around each hospital, which in most cases captured the building plus nearby grounds and access roads. We then mapped Fathom’s flood-risk data to see where it overlapped with these circles. We started by looking for hospitals where at least 20% of the circle’s area had a predicted flood depth of at least 1 foot. That gave us an initial list of more than 320 hospitals across the U.S.

From there, we visually inspected those hospitals using mapping software and Google Maps, both satellite and street view. We trimmed our list to only the hospitals where a considerable portion of the building or all access roads were predicted to have at least a foot of flooding.

If two hospitals were mapped to the same building — for instance, a small rehab facility within a large hospital — we counted only one hospital. We also excluded hospitals recently converted to nursing homes or for other uses.

We ended up with a list of 171 hospitals across the U.S. That is most likely an undercount. Some hospitals could still face significant impact from flooding that is not deep enough or widespread enough to fit our methodology. Our analysis also does not account for how flooding farther from a hospital could affect employees or patients. And it does not assess what steps hospitals may have already taken to prepare for severe weather events.

We also ran a spatial analysis comparing Fathom’s data with flood hazard maps from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which in many cases are incomplete or haven’t been updated in years. We found that about a third of hospitals identified as flood risks by Fathom’s data did not overlap at all with FEMA’s 100- or 500-year hazard areas.

Fathom provided guidance and feedback as we developed our analysis.

CBS News correspondent David Schechter and photojournalist Chance Horner contributed to this report.

©2025 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

On September 24, a gunman shot at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field office in Dallas, killing two immigrants, Norlan Guzman-Fuentes and Miguel Ángel García-Hernández, and seriously injuring another, Jose Andres Bordones-Molina, who were being detained at the site. 

The federal government was quick to blame the attack on the “far left” and the “dehumanization” of ICE agents “who are simply enforcing the law.” Around four hours after the shooting, FBI Director Kash Patel posted a photo of bullets with the message “anti-ICE” written on them allegedly found at the scene, citing this as evidence of the suspected shooter’s “idealogical [sic] motive.” 

But for the immigrant community in Dallas, the shooting is yet another instance of the violence and fear they have endured under President Donald Trump’s nearly $30 billion “deportation-industrial complex” and a continuation of the lack of transparency and accountability from the local and federal governments alike. 

The immediate aftermath of the shooting was marked by panic and fear in the immigrant community. At a vigil two days after the shooting, at Parkland Hospital where victims were being treated, Noemi Rios, an organizer with the Chicana-led community initiative Vecinos Unidos DFW, said that local organizations were being flooded with requests seeking more information about the identity of the victims. Rios told reporters that family members who “knew their loved ones had been detained” at the Dallas ICE field office “couldn’t get confirmation of life or death.” 

Flaka Martinez, another organizer with Vecinos Unidos, said that this panic was the result of ICE’s detainee locator system, which has been criticized by families of detainees and their lawyers for not providing up-to-date information regarding the whereabouts of detainees. Martinez urged that anyone detained by ICE must have their unique identification numbers (known as an “A-Number”) put into the system within 12 hours of detention. She also pointed to the fact that the facility where the shooting happened was not a detention center but rather an administrative office where people frequently visit for check-ins with ICE. “It’s not sustainable, nor safe to detain people at that facility,” Martinez said. 

Dallas community organizers held a vigil outside city hall on October 3 for the victims of the Dallas ICE office shooting. (Haley Hill)

Well before the shooting, family members with loved ones detained at that Dallas field office reported inhumane conditions in the facility, including overcrowding, medical neglect, and individuals being detained for more than a week without access to running water and air conditioning. Over 600 people were held at the field office in June and July for longer than ICE’s own 12-hour limit on detention in so-called “hold rooms,” according to data obtained by the Deportation Data Project and analyzed by El Movimiento DFW, a local group advocating for immigrant rights. Protests and public pressure led in part by Vecinos Unidos and El Movimiento led Democratic Congressmembers Julie Johnson, Marc Veasey, and Jasmine Crockett—who all represent parts of Dallas—to send a letter to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem and Todd Lyons, acting director of ICE, on July 28 demanding “immediate answers” to reports about the field office. As of October 6, the U.S. representatives have not received a response.

For the immigrant community in Dallas, this lack of transparency around what advocates claim are unlawful and unjust detentions has become an expected response not just from federal law enforcement but local police as well. While the Dallas Police Department (DPD) maintains no official 287(g) agreement with ICE,  it has stated that the department “regularly” interacts with federal agencies and will “assist these agencies upon request.”

Tony Rodriguez, the regional commander of the Brown Berets of North Texas, a community defense group that runs an “ICE Watch” in the area, said that the DPD’s public comments are “political double speak.” Rodriguez pointed to a recent multi-agency operation led by Homeland Security Investigations, an arm of ICE, on the Chicas Bonitas Strip Club in Dallas for suspected “human trafficking and unlawful employment.” Rodriguez said that as soon as the Brown Berets’ ICE Watch was alerted of a possible raid, members of the organization were on the scene, collecting testimonials and documenting the arrests.

Corbin Rubinson, spokesperson for DPD, wrote in an email to the Observer that the department was “requested to provide perimeter security during the outside agency’s operation.” According to an ICE press release, federal agents arrested 41 undocumented immigrants; just five had criminal records in the United States.

With suspicion from community organizations already high, Senate Bill 8 could dramatically change how immigration enforcement is conducted in the state. SB 8 will force county sheriffs to enter into 287(g) agreements with ICE by next December, which could give deputies the authority to arrest and detain people off the street on the basis of immigration status depending on the 287(g) model a sheriff selects. As the Texas Observer has previously reported, around 30 local county sheriffs and police departments have already voluntarily inked “task force model” agreements, which effectively deputize local officers as ICE agents. 

(Haley Hill)

The ever-expanding relationship between local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities is a key detail in how one of the victims of the September 24 shooting, Guzman-Fuentes, a 37-year-old from El Salvador, ended up at the Dallas ICE Field Office that day. According to a press release from ICE, DPD arrested Guzman-Fuentes on August 25 on an aggravated assault charge—which ICE said was later dropped—and an outstanding warrant for a DUI. Shortly after Guzman-Fuentes was booked at the Dallas County Jail, ICE “encountered him” and filed an immigration detainer. The press release states that he was being transferred into the office that morning when the shooter opened fire, killing him and García-Hernández, a 32-year-old immigrant from Mexico who passed away due to his injuries five days later. 

As previously reported by the San Antonio Express-News, ICE is increasingly using county jails to detain undocumented immigrants before they are taken into federal custody and ultimately deported. While all Texas county jails have been sharing biometric data with ICE since 2010, since January of this year, the number of immigration detainers filed on immigrants booked at the Dallas County Jail has increased by 71 percent. When SB 8 goes into effect, those rates could further increase.

At a vigil held at Dallas City Hall on October 3, organizers gathered to “center the victims of the shooting” and to condemn the “dehumanization” of migrants by the Trump administration. 

Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, an Austin immigration attorney who has been in contact with the families of the victims, told the Observer that for families, the loss of their loved ones has been compounded by the “way that the government has responded, by not giving them information quickly.” CBS reported that Guzman-Fuentes’ wife only found out that her husband had been killed after contacting the Salvadoran consulate. Organizers also read a statement from his sister, who said she wants people to remember her brother as “the greatest brother, tío, and friend.” The statement also noted that officials told her that she wouldn’t be able to see her brother’s body and would only be offered two hours for a funeral.

Eric Cedillo, an attorney representing García-Hernández’s wife, told the crowd that he must be remembered for his “heroism.” Cedillo said that when “bullets crashed through the window and hit Miguel,” he turned to the 18 year-old boy sitting next to him in the van and said, “I don’t think I’m going to make it, get underneath me. Let me shield you.”

Looking ahead, Martinez, the community organizer, said that in spite of the Trump administration using the shooting as a pretext to vilify resistance to ICE, her community is determined to continue to fight against Trump’s deportation machine and “serve justice for [the victims’] families.”

The post In Dallas, Organizers Mourn the Immigrant Victims of Recent ICE Shooting appeared first on The Texas Observer.