Tropical storm hits Mexico, U.S. tourist missing

LOS CABOS, Mexico (Reuters) - Tropical Storm Paul lashed Mexico's Baja California peninsula with rain and winds on Tuesday and high waves slamming into a beach resort washed away a U.S. tourist who is presumed dead.

The military, police and civil protection workers began evacuating some 1,500 people from poorly built houses as the storm took aim at the Los Cabos resort, popular with foreign visitors for its golf courses, yachting and sports fishing.

A large wave swept away a U.S. tourist from Washington state who was walking on the beach at Los Cabos.

"He is considered missing. It would be very difficult for him to be found alive," said firefighter Gabriel Garcia.

Paul faded to a tropical storm from a hurricane, with winds near 45 mph (75 kph).

The storm was about 130 miles southwest of Los Cabos and was expected on Wednesday to sweep close by the resort, made up of the towns of Cabo San Lucas and San Jose del Cabo, before moving across the Sea of Cortez and hitting the mainland state of Sinaloa.

Authorities shut the Cabos San Lucas port, frustrating sports fishermen who converged on the resort this week for a major competition involving up to 200 boats.

"I hope we can fish tomorrow but we probably won't be able to. They don't want anybody getting thrown off their boats," said Dan Helzer, a retiree from California who was part of a fishing team on a boat called Black Gold.

The resort escaped serious damage from two hurricanes earlier this year that veered away at the last moment.

'IT'S SCARY'

Mexican residents of the Tierra y Libertad (Land and Freedom) shantytown district followed the news, concerned the dried-up creek bed where they live could be drenched by flash floods as often before in storms.

"It's scary," said resident Maria Mariano Reyes, who lives in a flimsy shack without plumbing. "Water comes in from both sides of the house and we're stuck in the middle," she said.

Police drove round endangered areas asking people by loudspeakers to leave their homes and go to shelters.

Rain forced tourists to cancel scuba diving trips and golf.

Bob Bisbee, who founded the annual fishing tournament 26 years ago, stood in a tackle shop surrounded by radios and fishing lines on reels. He checked the Web page of the Miami-based U.S. National Hurricane Center.

"I'm not worried yet," he said of the storm. "It's trying to make up its mind what it's going to do.

"If the port is closed tomorrow, we'll fish on Thursday. If it's closed on Thursday, we'll fish on Friday. If we don't fish on Friday and we have to cancel, we'll have a nice big banquet and we'll do it next year."

Competitors pay more than $60,000 to enter all the categories in Bisbee's competition and last year's top prizewinner walked away with more than $1 million.

Sinaloa state, an important agricultural area, took a hit from Hurricane Lane last month and was in Paul's sights again.

Lane, which killed three people, seriously damaged tomato crops in the state, helping push inflation in Mexico to its highest monthly rate in six years.

Storms batter Portugal, killing 1 and causing widespread flooding

LISBON, Portugal (AP) — A river burst its banks and swept a packed school bus off the road Wednesday after a night of heavy storms that authorities said caused the death of one person.
A bus taking 52 children aged between seven and 14 to a school in central Portugal was knocked into a ditch by the current from a river that flooded surrounding countryside, officials said.

Emergency workers up to their waists in fast-flowing, muddy water formed a human chain and pulled the children and three adults from the bus, television pictures showed.

Nobody was hurt in the accident in Soure, a farming town 90 miles north of Lisbon, but the driver was shaken and received counseling, officials said.

In nearby Pombal, the local mayor told the national news agency Lusa that an elderly woman died when her home flooded. He did not provide details, but the local fire department said the woman was bedridden.

A woman in the same area was evacuated by helicopter after flood waters reached the first floor of her rural home, a local official said. The fire department was also helping rescue stranded livestock.

A school in the same area was evacuated midmorning when another swollen river burst its banks and flood levels started to rise. Some other schools canceled classes.

Three towns in central Portugal were on flood alert as river levels rose and dams approached their limits.

The Civil Protection Service said it responded to 679 incidents of flooding, 335 fallen trees and 19 landslides.

Dozens of roads were reported closed, mostly in central and northern areas.

Trains stopped running on part of the country's main north-south rail line between Lisbon and Porto because of flooding, rail company Caminhos de Ferro Portugueses said. Trains in the southern Algarve region also ground to a halt after a tree fell on a power line and cut the electricity supply.

On Monday, a German couple died in the Madeira Islands when their car was swept from a cliff and into the sea by a mudslide that occurred after days of heavy rain.

Quake of 5.2 hits Istanbul, second in days

ISTANBUL, Oct 24 (Reuters) - An earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter scale hit northwestern Turkey on Tuesday and was felt in Istanbul, just days after another quake of the same size in the area, Turkey's earthquake monitoring centre said.

CNN Turk quoted local officials saying the earthquake had caused no deaths or damage and they had no reports of injuries.

The quake's epicentre was in the Sea of Marmara, which lies alongside Istanbul, and the shocks were briefly felt in Turkey's largest city of 12 million residents.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the earthquake was of 5 magnitude and was centred 29 km (40 miles south of Istanbul.

On Friday another small quake hit the province of Balikesir, which lies across the Marmara from Istanbul, but there were no injuries.

Turkey, which lies on a major fault line, has suffered devastating earthquakes in the past and in August 1999 nearly 18,000 people were killed in a quake, also centred in the Sea of Marmara.

Istanbul residents are jumpy as scientists have predicted a major earthquake is likely to hit in the next 30 years.

Brightly coloured danger spots

If a picture can tell a thousand words, a brightly coloured map is nearly always better than a hundred words of technical jargon. Now the U.N.'s humanitarian people in Asia have cottoned on to this - they've jazzed up their website and included a load of useful maps.

This seems to be something of a trend, following hot on the heels of World Bank maps doing something pretty similar, but these hazard maps from the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs are pretty far-reaching.

You can look up storms across Asia and the Pacific over the past 50 years, fires in the past nine years, or drought and flooding in the past 20. You can see where the region's volcanoes and fault lines are and track the storm seasons across Asia. Or you can put the whole lot together in one big red, blue and yellow map.

The website also has country profiles with a snazzy bar chart showing how much of the country is exposed to which natural hazards - quakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, floods, drought, you name it.

Dozens flooded out of homes in Texas


By Andrew Nenque, The Beaumont Enterprise via AP
A horse is seen in flood water overflowing from Village Creek Friday, Oct. 20, 2006, in a south Hardin County neighborhood north of Beaumont, Texas.

VIDOR, Texas (AP) — Flooding forced dozens of people from their homes Monday, including some residents who have been living in government trailers since Hurricane Rita struck southeast Texas last year.
Heavy rains saturated the area last week and flowed downstream into the Neches River, which spilled over its banks and rose nearly 8 feet above flood stage Monday.

Although the river later dropped by about 2 inches, the water was expected to remain high through Thursday, said Jeff Kelley, emergency management coordinator for Orange County, about 100 miles northeast of Houston.

Kelley estimated about 40 homes had been destroyed as of Sunday. About 60 others were damaged, officials said.

Authorities in neighboring Hardin County estimated at least 100 homes had been damaged.

The Sabine River also was out of its banks. Officials in Newton County officials said at least three bridges have been washed out.

Officials continued assessing damage Monday. It varied from home to home because some had been built on stilts, while others sit at ground level. In some cases, water was up to the roof lines.

The area was hit hard by Rita last year, and Kelley said a number of Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers were still in the area.

Gov. Rick Perry declared nine counties disaster areas. He also ordered state agencies to be on standby for rescue efforts if the remnants of Hurricane Paul bring more rain in the coming days. Paul was roaring toward the southern tip of the Baja California peninsula late Monday.

USA's trees under relentless attack from bugs, blight


Egg masses of the hemlock woolly adelgid look like cottony tufts on twig stems. The insects suck the sap of the tree, halting new growth and killing the tree within a few seasons.

DENVER — Some of the USA's most treasured tree species, from ash and aspen to white pine and Hawaii's native wiliwili, are under attack by insects and diseases in a growing assault coast to coast.
Some of the killers are foreign pests brought here in cargo or by travelers. Others are homegrown insects at epidemic levels because of drought and unusual warmth. This year has been the warmest on record.

The Agriculture Department's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service finished adopting new rules this summer barring cargo from abroad unless crates and pallets are treated with chemicals or heat to kill any bugs in the wood.

"We're at one of those points in time where it's all happening at once," says Wayne Shepperd of the U.S. Forest Service.

The mountain pine beetle, a native, has ravaged millions of acres of Western forests. Trees were weakened by drought or subjected to worse infestations because warmer temperatures allowed the bugs to multiply faster. The emerald ash borer from Asia is killing species that have no natural defenses.

Ash borers can spread in diseased trees cut up for firewood. The Agriculture Department airs radio ads in eight states and has billboards that warn: "Pack marshmallows, not firewood."

California's Big Sur region and Sonoma and Humboldt counties have "tons of new mortality this year" from sudden oak death, another disease, says Katie Palmieri of the California Oak Mortality Task Force. "Entire hillsides are just gone."

A nursery shipment is blamed for spreading the hemlock woolly adelgid into Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee and North Carolina. The park hopes to save older hemlocks by using insecticides and beetles that eat the aphid-like bugs.

Scientists don't yet know what is killing aspens across much of the West. "This die-back just occurs, boom, and we're not seeing new sprouting" of trees, Shepperd says. He says drought is a possible cause, but "we see (aspen) dying in wet areas, too, so I'm not convinced it's drought alone."

A study this year in BioScience said exotic bugs and diseases "pose the most serious current threat to the forests of eastern North America."