This is an aerial view of a flooded area in eastern Aceh, Indonesia taken on Friday, Dec. 24, 2006. Raging flood waters Sunday submerged houses and roads on Indonesia's Sumatra island, killing more than 70 people and forcing tens of thousands from their homes, officials and reports said. (AP Photo/Binsar Bakkara)

Floods kill 94 in Indonesia, Malaysia

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia - At least 94 people were killed and dozens left missing by floods in Indonesia and Malaysia, officials said. Looting broke out in areas of Malaysia abandoned because of rising waters.

An aerial view from an aid flight over the worst-hit region on Indonesia's Sumatra island showed many houses submerged, while only the roofs of others were visible. Some families were trapped on the roofs of their homes.

The death toll from more than three days of rain-triggered flooding on Sumatra was at least 87, with dozens others reported missing, while seven people have been killed in neighboring Malaysia, officials said.

More than 150,000 people have been forced to flee their homes in both countries.

The worst hit region was in Tamiyang district in Aceh province in Northern Sumatra, where rescuers found 60 bodies on Sunday, said Nurdin Jos, an Aceh government spokesman.

Aceh was the region worst hit by the 2004 Asian tsunami, but this week's flooding was in areas unaffected by that disaster.

Another official said 13 more people, mostly children, were killed elsewhere, adding to 14 confirmed dead on Saturday. State news agency Antara reported 114 people killed, but gave no attribution.

In Malaysia, nearly 70,000 evacuees were in public shelters in Johor state, about 10,000 in Malacca and 5,760 in Pahang, the Bernama news agency said.

Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi called on people to help prevent looting in the flooded areas by making citizen's arrests, the report said.

"There are looting incidents but not that rampant," Abdullah was quoted as saying. "We cannot wait for the police to act. The public and the volunteers must help."

Officials were not immediately available to confirm the report.

The flooding, which followed unusually heavy rainfall, is reportedly the worst in living memory in some areas.

The weather was expected to improve this week, the department said.

Seasonal downpours cause dozens of landslides and flash floods each year in Indonesia, a sprawling archipelago of 17,000 islands, where millions of people live in mountainous areas or near fertile flood plains.

In June, severe flooding and landslides killed more than 210 people on Sulawesi island.

Indonesia fears another massive tsunami

PADANG, Indonesia - Two years after an earthquake off western Indonesia unleashed a monster tsunami, scientists expect the same fault to rupture again within the next few decades — and this town stands to take the full force of the waves.

They predict a large swath of Sumatra island's densely populated coast just south of the tsunami-hit area will be pounded by a giant wall of water.

"All this area in red will disappear," Padang Mayor Fauzi Bahar said, pointing at a satellite map on his office wall showing the likely reach of the waves into the town.

The low-lying town of 900,000 people has started mapping out evacuation routes and educating the public, but all the same, authorities fear up to 60,000 will die, unable to outrun the waves even if they get a speedy warning and flee.

"The people will be washed away," Bahar said.

On the morning of Dec. 26, 2004, the most powerful earthquake in four decades lifted the seabed west of Sumatra by several yards, propelling waves up to two stories high at jetliner speeds across the Indian Ocean to smash into coastal communities, beach resorts and towns in 12 nations.

In hardest-hit Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka and India, the waves surged miles inland, tossing ships, swallowing entire villages and leaving behind a blasted landscape of concrete foundations and rubble littered with tens of thousands of bodies.

On Sumatra island — home to more than half the tsunami's nearly 230,000 dead and missing — volunteers and emergency workers took three months to recover all the corpses and bury them in mass graves.

Warnings of another tsunami-spawning quake are adding urgency to efforts to establish a warning system covering the Indian Ocean rim like the network of high-tech buoys in the Pacific that alerts Japan, the United States and other nations of sudden tidal changes.

The worst-affected countries have begun installing sirens on threatened coasts and three buoys with sensors capable of detecting waves generated by seismic activity are in the water, but the network is several years from completion, officials say.

Making sure the system works from end-to-end is a "daunting task," said Curt Barrett at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is helping set it up.

"Once the warning goes out, people have to know what to do," he said. "All of this information is useless if it doesn't get to the person down on the beach."

The warnings of another tsunami are based on more than a decade of research by respected U.S. geologist Kerry Sieh and a team of scientists on a section of the fault just south of the part that ruptured in 2004.

His conclusions are shared by scientists at other universities and government research institutions.

The fault, which runs the length of the west coast of Sumatra about 125 miles offshore, is the meeting point of the Eurasian and Pacific tectonic plates that have been pushing against each other for millions of years, causing huge stresses to build up.

Using historical accounts of earlier quakes, measurements of coral uplift and data from a network of Global Positioning System transmitters on nearby islands, Sieh, from the California Institute of Technology, has found a pattern of large earthquakes about every 230 years, with the last major ones in 1797 and in 1833.

The 2004 jolt, as well as another strong quake on the same fault three months later that killed 1,000 people on nearby Nias island, has loaded even more stress, Sieh said.

"We are not saying the quake is going to happen tomorrow or next week, but on the other hand we don't want people to forget about it and be lax," he said. "I'd be surprised if it were delayed much beyond 30 years."

A small non-governmental agency funded by foreign donors is spreading the message in Padang and surrounding districts. The group has met with hundreds of village heads and religious leaders and sends volunteers to schools along the threatened coast with a simple warning:

"If the quake lasts longer than a minute, knocks you to your feet or collapses buildings, run to the nearest hills," volunteer Riska told a class recently.

"If you can't make it, then climb a tree. Start learning now," she said, her voice hoarse from trying to hold the giggling children's attention.

The group says residents and local government officials are receptive to its message, especially since a second tsunami on Indonesia's main island of Java last July killed 600 people.

Coastal residents say land prices have fallen, a sign that people are moving inland.

But simply raising awareness isn't enough, experts say.

The tsunami will likely crash into the shore within 20 minutes because the fault line is so close, meaning the town must make expensive infrastructure changes to enable people to flee.

Evacuation roads need widening and bridges crossing the town's many rivers need reinforcement. Some experts say tsunami-proof towers should be built in coastal areas and emergency services and government agencies moved inland.

Sieh says Indonesia would be better off spending more money on those projects and educating people than on installing and maintaining an expensive warning system of buoys.

"You have an earthquake and it lasts for five minutes. It is shaking so heavily you can't walk. Why do you need a warning? Haven't you got one already?" he asks. "It is not just a waste of money, it is a distraction: It gives people a false sense of security."

Australian Chris Scurrah and his wife manage a small hotel in Padang's seaside colonial quarter and run a thriving business organizing surfing trips. After five good years, they have no plans to leave.

"It's an awesome place to be, but it's just scary it's going to get smashed," Scurrah said before setting out with a boatload of surfers. "That's just the way it works here."

San Francisco area feels 3rd small quake in 4 days

BERKELEY, California (AP) -- A third small earthquake in four days rattled the San Francisco Bay Area on Saturday, but there were no reports of injuries or damage.

The temblor that struck at 9:21 a.m. had a preliminary magnitude of 3.5 and a depth of about 6.1 miles, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

The epicenter was about 2 miles from Berkeley and 3 miles from Emeryville, across the bay from San Francisco.

Residents throughout the Bay Area reported feeling the jolt, but police said there were no reports of injuries.

The latest earthquake was similar in magnitude and location to those that struck Wednesday and Friday.

They erupted along the Hayward Fault, which geologists believe is due for a quake in the potentially lethal 6.7 to 7.0 range.

But the minor earthquakes should not be interpreted as omens of a more destructive one to come, said Jessica Sigala, a geophysicist with the National Earthquake Information Center.

"It could mean there's something coming, it could mean there's nothing coming," Sigala said. "It just means the area is active, more active than it's been."

Also Saturday, a small earthquake rattled the desert in Southern California, but there were no immediate reports of injuries or damage.

The magnitude-4.1 temblor struck at 7:43 p.m. and was centered 8 miles east of Coachella, which is about 20 miles east of Palm Springs, according to a preliminary report for the U.S. Geological Survey. Two aftershocks also were reported, the agency said.

A dispatcher for the Riverside County Sheriff's Department said there were no calls about damage or injuries.

Wisconsin snowstorm knocks out power

MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin (AP) -- A winter storm dumped 7 inches of wet, heavy snow on central Wisconsin, leaving thousands of people without electricity and disrupting holiday preparations.

Wisconsin Public Service Corp. reported fewer than 15,600 customers without electricity Saturday night. About half of the outages were in the towns of Wausau and Stevens Point.

"For the little ones that are making snowmen it is awesome," said Kelly Zagrzebski, a spokeswoman for the utility. "For us, no."

The snow began falling Friday night and did not let up until Saturday morning. The weight of the snow snapped power lines and tree limbs, causing the outages, she said. Nearly 30,000 customers initially had service interrupted.

More than 100 crews were working to restore power, a job that would likely continue through Sunday, Zagrzebski said.

"People are expecting family ... and want to know if their power is going to be restored," Zagrzebski said. "It's just a hard question right now."

Temperatures in the region were expected to drop to the teens and 20s overnight and partly cloudy skies were forecast for Sunday.

Bob Warnke, 61, of Stevens Point, said he is giving up plans to visit relatives 30 miles away in Wausau to stay at his bar.

"It kind of aborted my Christmas holiday because I'm not going up to see them, he said.

He chose instead to watch over his building and customers at the Trackside Bar, some of whom are elderly, he said.

"They're out of power, also, and they're quite uncomfortable," Warnke said.

Australia ponders climate future

Parts of Australia are in the grip of the worst drought in memory.

Rainfall in many eastern and southern regions has been at near record lows. On top of that, the weather has been exceptionally warm.

The parched conditions have sparked an emotional debate about global warming.

Conservationists insist the "big dry" is almost certainly the result of climate change and warn that Australia is on the brink of environmental disaster.

Other experts believe such hysteria is wildly misplaced and that the country shouldn't panic.

'A war-like scenario'

The drought in Australia has lasted for more than five years.

The worry for some is that this could be the start of a protracted period of low rainfall that could go on for decades.

"The really scary thing is last time we had a drought of this intensity that lasted about five years - it lasted for about 50 years," cautioned Professor Andy Pitman from Macquarie University in Sydney.

"The politicians truly believe this is a five-year or six-year drought that will break sometime in 2007 or 2008. But it might not break until 2050 and we aren't thinking in those terms at this stage," Professor Pitman told the BBC.

Global warming, the drought and the future of dwindling water supplies will undoubtedly dominate talk at barbeques and dinner parties this festive season in Australia.

"We're in a state of emergency," said Cate Faehrmann from the Nature Conservation Council of New South Wales. "We need to treat this as a war-like scenario. The people are really worried that we are going to run out of water."

She added: "I can imagine Australia being a desert in a few decades' time in some of these agricultural areas. The soil is blowing away, the rivers are drying up.

"I think there will be plots of land abandoned and perhaps whole agricultural practices abandoned."

Massive losses

The drought has affected farmers worse than anyone else.

Jock Lawrie, president of the New South Wales Farmers' Association, paints a dismal picture.

"There are people out in some parts of our state that have gone to work for four or five years and haven't even earned an income.

"With the winter crop failing to the extent it did, there have been some massive losses. It is really hard on the emotions of people, there's no doubt about that."

Australia has some of the world's most erratic rainfall-patterns.

This vast continent has experienced very dry periods before: the "Federation Drought" of the late 1800s was a disaster for many communities.

However, some climate experts believe this drought will also pass and Australians shouldn't be too alarmed.

Veteran meteorologist Bill Kinimonth insists the gradual warming of the earth is part of a natural cycle: "The climate follows patterns which we can read back from our instrument records for about 150 years, and from a lot of the proxy records they go back thousands of years.


"The ice cores show the fluctuations of the climate over 100,000-year cycles."

He told the BBC News website: "We're presently in what we might call the optimum period, where the Earth is warmer than it has been for the last 20,000 years, and I think we should be making the most of it.

"The alternative is not very good - a cold, dry Australia."

The Australian Prime Minister John Howard, who refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol insisting it would damage the economy, now believes, however, that serious environmental trouble is brewing.

Professor Andy Pitman says the drought has forced politicians to look at the bigger picture.

"The Australian government has absolutely jumped on greenhouse bandwagon in the last three or four months," he said.

"Although it won't sign Kyoto, it's now saying it wants to lead the drive for greenhouse gas emissions globally in a very aggressive leadership way.

"That's largely due to the drought and the Stern report."