A Philippine Airforce aerial shot shows damaged houses buried by mudslides triggered by Typhoon Durian in Albay province, south of Manila, December 3, 2006. (Philippine Airforce/Handout/Reuters)

Philippines fears 1,000 killed in typhoon's wrath

DARAGA, Philippines (Reuters) - The Philippines fears up to 1,000 people were killed in landslides and floods set off by Typhoon Durian but officials said on Monday that many of the bodies might never be found.

President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo declared a state of national calamity after Durian, which was approaching Vietnam on Monday, killed 450 in the central Philippines and left 630 missing.

"I can feel it in my heart that my children are still alive," said a tearful Maricel Arvelo as she searched hospitals, funeral parlors and everywhere she could think of for her two daughters and one son.

"When I see them I will embrace them very tight and I will not allow them to leave my side."

More than 1 million people were affected by the typhoon.

But villagers surrounding Mount Mayon, an active volcano about 320 km (200 miles) south of Manila, bore the brunt of Durian's wrath when torrential rains and wind sent walls of mud and boulders as big as cars crashing onto rural communities.

"It's going to be very difficult, extremely difficult, to retrieve all the bodies," Senator Richard Gordon, head of the local Red Cross, told Reuters. "You are probably talking 700 to 1,000 people who have lost their lives."

Soldiers, miners and a Spanish rescue team with a sniffer dog dug through the sludge, pulling out corpses and body parts. Nearly 60 people were killed when the chapel they were using for shelter from the storm was buried in debris.

Even the New People's Army, a communist rebel group locked in a four-decade insurgency against the government, ordered its cadres to help relief efforts.

The typhoon tore up power lines across 13 provinces and the operator of the national grid said the cost of restoring facilities would reach close to 800 million pesos ($16 million).

The National Disaster Coordinating Council put the damage to property and agriculture at 274 million pesos.

LUCK AND CHANCE

Residents in Albay province had already endured a series of typhoons this year and the threat of an eruption at Mayon, which triggered mass evacuations when it spewed flaming rocks and lava before calming down in September.

The debris left behind proved deadly when Durian struck on Thursday.

Durian, one notch below a category 5 "super typhoon" when it hit the Philippines, was expected to cross Vietnam's coast as a category 1 typhoon, potentially disrupting the coffee harvest.

At least 100 people were drowned in one Philippine village and an Australian and a New Zealander were among the missing.

Thousands crammed into schools, churches and town halls after 200,000 homes were damaged.

Despite the risk of a sudden eruption, poor farmers live on the slopes of Mount Mayon to tend fruit trees and vegetables in its fertile soil. But Gordon said communities needed to be relocated before the next catastrophe strikes.

"It's simply casting your faith on luck and chance. You can't do that," he said.

Storms regularly hit the Philippines. In the worst disaster in recent years, more than 5,000 people died on the central island of Leyte in 1991 in floods triggered by a typhoon.

In 2004, a series of storms left about 1,800 people dead or missing, including 480 killed when mudslides buried three towns in Quezon, an eastern province.

Tropical storm Durian kills at least 55 in Vietnam

HANOI (AFP) - At least 55 people died and 26 were missing when severe tropical storm Durian hit Vietnam, destroying houses and sinking boats after wreaking deadly havoc in the Philippines, officials said.

The storm was downgraded from the powerful typhoon that left more than 1,200 people dead or missing when it triggered a mudslide in the Philippines.

Twenty-eight people died and sixteen were missing in Ba Ria-Vung Tau, east of Ho Chi Minh City, in a province which has tourist resorts and offshore oil rigs, said Nguyen Ngoc Loc of the flood and storm control committee.

In the Mekong Delta province of Ben Tre, 17 people were reported dead and there were fears of more casualties in the poor and geographically flat region, where many people live in wooden huts or on house boats.

Durian made landfall in southern Vietnam overnight, with lashing rains and wind speeds of nearly 120 kilometres (75 miles) per hour, smashing thousands of houses, uprooting trees and bringing down power lines.

It sank more than 800 boats moored on a remote South China Sea island before brushing Ho Chi Minh City, the country's largest city, and heading southwest across the Mekong Delta.

The Vietnamese island of Phu Quy, 250 kilometres (150 miles) east of Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon, suffered heavy damage as the storm lifted the roofs off more than 1,000 houses, but there were no reported casualties.

Two people were reported dead in Tien Giang province, two were missing and 20 were injured, said flood and storm control committee official Nguyen Duc Thinh.

"More than 6,600 houses were damaged and 26 schools unroofed," he said, adding that authorities had evacuated nearly 13,000 people.

Two more people were killed by falling trees in Binh Thuan province, three people died in Phu Yen province, and one was killed in Vinh Long, with three more missing, officials said.

Meteorologists had expected the storm to hit further north, where troops had helped Monday in evacuating tens of thousands of people, but preventive action in the provinces further south appears to have averted a worse disaster.

"We had evacuated 3,500 people," said Tran Thi Luan, head of the Ben Tre provincial flood and storm control committee.

"If the evacuation had not happened, the toll would have become much higher. The storm was really strong."

Wind speeds slowed to 100 km/h in the afternoon, when Luan said "the weather seems to be better, but we do not dare yet tell people that the storm is over, because this is a really complicated storm."

Ho Chi Minh City escaped the worst as the eye of the storm passed to the south. Vietnam television, however, said two people were killed in the country's business capital.

More than 8,000 people were evacuated from high-risk areas, but there were still fears for some people missing.

Officials in the seaside resort of Nha Trang said they had no immediate reports of casualties.

Communist Vietnam, which in May lost more than 240 fishermen and scores of boats to typhoon Chanchu, days ago barred fishing vessels from leaving harbour and warned those at sea to seek shelter to avoid the typhoon.

Central Vietnam was in October hit by typhoon Xangsane, which killed at least 70 people and brought widespread flooding and destruction.

Haiti floods kill 3, wash away roads

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - Floods triggered by nearly two weeks of heavy rain have washed away roads and bridges, wiped out crops and killed at least three people in western Haiti, the International Red Cross said Tuesday.

The destruction has been most severe in the rural departments of Grande Anse and Nippes, along the impoverished Caribbean nation's vulnerable southwestern peninsula. Flooding has also affected the northwestern town of Port-de-Paix.

Haitian Red Cross workers have been providing first aid to injured residents and moving flood-stricken villagers to temporary shelters, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies said.

The Geneva-based group said it has asked donors for $522,800 to buy hygiene kits, water, blankets and mosquito nets for 17,500 people affected by flooding.

The rain began Nov. 22, unleashing flash floods that killed livestock, damaged two hospitals and isolated many remote villages in the heavily deforested country.

In August, Hurricane Ernesto washed away wooden shacks and killed at least two people along Haiti's peninsula.

Flooding kills eight in Pakistan

QUETTA, Pakistan (AFP) - At least eight people have been killed in torrential rains and flooding, which blocked roads and caused widespread disruption in several Pakistani cities, officials said.

Five villagers were swept away early Monday in a flood caused by a downpour in a remote village of southwest Pakistan, officials said.

The five drowned after floods swept them away in Ornath village in Khuzdar district, some 450 kilometres (280 miles) southwest of Quetta, a paramilitary official told AFP.

The flood also damaged several mudbrick houses in the village, he said.

Two bridges collapsed in the area which severed road links to the cities of Quetta and Karachi, and stranded hundreds of passengers, he added.

In southern Karachi, Pakistan's largest city and commercial capital, three people were electrocuted to death, city police chief Tariq Jamil told AFP.

The rain water flooded Karachi's streets, causing huge traffic jams and disrupted train services to other cities, officials said.

Widespread rain and snowfall since Saturday has disrupted life in several Pakistani towns and cities and was likely to continue over the next couple of days, the meteorological department said.

More than 200 people died this year in Pakistan's monsoon rains which occur from July to September.

Alps are warmest in 1,300 years

VIENNA, Austria - Europe's Alpine region is going through its warmest period in 1,300 years, the head of an extensive climate study said Tuesday.

"We are currently experiencing the warmest period in the Alpine region in 1,300 years," Reinhard Boehm, a climatologist at Austria's Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics said.

Boehm based his comments on the results of a project conducted by a group of European institutes between March 2003 and August 2006. Their aim was to reconstruct the climate in the region encompassing the Rhone Valley in France to the west, Budapest, Hungary to the east, Tuscany, Italy to the south and Nuremberg, Germany to the north over the past 1,000 years.

Boehm said the current warm period in the Alpine region began in the 1980s, noting that a similar warming occurred in the 10th and 12th centuries. However, the temperatures during those phases were "slightly under the temperatures we've experienced over the past 20 years."

Humans first had an impact on the global climate in the 1950s, Boehm said, noting that at first, the release of aerosols into the atmosphere cooled the climate. Since the 1980s, however, greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane have warmed it up, he said.

"It will undoubtedly get warmer in the future," Boehm said.

Sponsored by the European Union, the project sought to homogenize climate data collected in the Alpine region over the past 250 years. Climate reconstruction focused on seven parameters, including temperature, sunshine periods and cloud cover. Tree rings and ice core measurements were also taken into consideration.

The unseasonably warm weather this autumn has caused concern in Austria's ski resorts, where slopes are still largely covered in green grass instead of snow. Many, such as St. Anton am Arlberg, have had to postpone the start of their skiing season and some have tried attracting tourists with alternative programs, such as hiking.

Austrian ski resorts usually open at the end of November or early December.

Wilma Himmelfreundpointner, deputy director of the St. Anton Tourist Office, said the resort has the capability to cover 80 percent of its slopes with fake snow. But the current mild temperatures and sunshine make that an impossible option at the moment, she said.

"What can you do? One can't change the weather," Himmelfreundpointer said, adding some tourists go on day trips to nearby glaciers in order to ski.

In some cases, organizers have had to be creative to make sure their events take place as planned.

In Hochfilzen, Tyrol, organizers of an upcoming international race went to the Grossglockner — Austria's highest mountain — to get snow they needed to prepare their track.

It took about five days to truck between 7,000 and 8,000 cubic meters (9,200 - 10,500 cubic yards) of snow from the Grossglockner, said organizer Thomas Abfalter.

Chill slows storm recovery in Midwest

ST. LOUIS (AP) — After spending three days at a shelter in a converted recreation center, Angela Luster hitched a ride with the National Guard to check on her apartment.
"It's terrible. You just had to uproot your life," said Luster, 28. "We have to live by other people's rules and regulations. It's difficult being around people you don't know."

People slept in shelters during their search for warm surroundings as the region entered a sixth day Tuesday of a blackout caused by the first storm of the winter season.

The Missouri National Guard was sent to the St. Louis area after Thursday's snow and ice storm to make sure people were surviving without electric light and heat.

The same was happening in neighboring Illinois, where Gov. Rod Blagojevich ordered National Guard troops to begin checking on Decatur-area residents Tuesday.

The St. Louis-based utility Ameren Corp. was reporting nearly 195,000 outages in Illinois and Missouri on its website early Tuesday. The bulk of the outages were in the St. Louis area.

The utility said it would be several more days before power is fully restored.

"We've had some ice storms before. This one puts them to shame," said Ron Zdellar, vice president of energy for AmerenUE, who has worked for the company for 35 years.

Utility crews were working 18-hour shifts, especially in the biggest problem areas, where ice coated roads and utility poles. Workers from 14 states were helping.

The storm also caused widespread power outages elsewhere as it blew snow and ice from Texas to Michigan last week and battered parts of the Northeast with thunderstorms and high winds.

The number of deaths blamed on the storm rose Monday to at least 23, with three more deaths reported in Missouri and one more in Illinois. The causes included weather-related traffic accidents, fires, carbon monoxide poisoning and exposure, officials said.

The combination of low temperatures, downed power lines, ice-covered poles and brittle tree limbs hampered repair efforts.

"We knew when this thing hit, it would be far different from anything we've seen before," Zdellar said.

After a run of temperatures in the teens, the St. Louis area got a break Monday afternoon with thermometers showing almost 40.

The National Weather Service did not forecast any additional snow or ice in the affected region, but high temperatures this week were expected to stay in the 30s and low 40s.