Heavy rains claim 53 lives in Angolan capital

LUANDA (AFP) - Fifty-three people have died in Luanda, Angola's seaside capital, in torrential rains that have lashed the city for three days, a police spokesman has said.

"We have recorded 53 deaths until now," Divaldo Martins told AFP Wednesday, adding that more than 1,300 families were homeless.

Luanda's governor Job Capapihna on Tuesday met with senior local officials in the city of some 4.5 million, whose creaking infrastructure has been further damaged by the downpours, to assess the damage.

In March 2005, flooding in northern Angola -- a former Portuguese colony which is still recovering from a 27-year civil war that shattered most of its infrastructure -- left over 10,000 people without shelter.

Makeshift shelters have been put up in Luanda to house those rendered homeless by the flash floods, which have also hit telephone lines.

"The country has been cut off from the rest of the world because the rains have destroyed the optic fibre cables. We will do our best to address the situation," said Manuel Cesar, spokesman of the state-run telephone firm Angolatelecom.

Dozens dead, crops ruined in southern African floods

LUANDA, Jan 24 (Reuters) - Authorities in Angola, Zambia and Mozambique on Wednesday warned of a humanitarian crisis after deadly floods submerged towns, devastated crops and left thousands of villagers without shelter, food or water.

At least 55 people were killed and dozens others were missing in the three southern African nations after heavy rains triggered floods this week. The death toll was expected to rise as emergency crews searched for bodies and cared for survivors.

"We're trying to come up with an emergency plan, to work out how to get people out, supplying them with medicines and clean water," said a government official in Luanda, Angola's capital and the area hardest hit by the flooding.

"There has been a lot of damage done already and Luanda really isn't prepared to deal with this kind of situation," the official said on condition of anonymity.

While heavy rains are common at this time of year, the countries are often ill-prepared to cope.

Decades of civil war in Angola and Mozambique in particular have hampered the upkeep of infrastructure, leaving the drains and flood controls in a poor state of repair.

More than 50 people died in and around Luanda -- mostly in the Cacuaco municipality -- and some 1,200 families were displaced after their houses were destroyed by torrents of water, Luanda police spokesman Divaldo Julio Martins said.

"We believe that the number of reported deaths will rise," Martins said, adding more rain was expected.

The scale of the flooding has led to fears of an outbreak of cholera or other infectious diseases.

"We're calling on the health authorities to set up cholera treatment centres in Luanda. They need to be prepared because the consequences could be very serious," said Mark van Boekel, head of Medicins Sans Frontieres Holland in Angola.

More rain will also complicate efforts to set up temporary camps for those displaced in Cacuaco, where most of the homes are built on unstable sand and earth.

Some 70 percent of Luanda's more than 4 million residents were believed to be affected or at risk from the flooding.

CROPS DESTROYED

In neighbouring Zambia, officials were scrambling to airlift relief supplies to more than 20,000 people who had fled to higher ground after floods in Zambezi and other towns in the northwest, near the border with Angola.

The rising waters devastated cassava, maize, sorghum and millet crops and destroyed bridges linking the towns.

"Crops have been destroyed due to the disastrous floods, and people urgently need relief," Richard Salivaji, the permanent secretary of North Western province, said in a news conference in the Zambian capital Lusaka.

Salivaji said many of the displaced villagers had no food.

Authorities in Mozambique, which was devastated in 2000 and 2001 by floods that killed more than 700 people, also reported that flooding had wiped out crops and killed livestock in a number of towns.

Five people died and some 5,000 were forced to flee to emergency shelters in the former Portuguese colony.

"Small rivers burst their banks and flooded our fields, sweeping away everything including our goats and chickens," Armando Casimiro, a resident of Moma in Nampula province, told Noticias, a daily newspaper in Maputo.

"That was when we started to hear people screaming for help only to open our doors to find out that many houses had disappeared and been replaced by a lake," Casimiro said.

Winter lingers in southern New Mexico

Parts of southern New Mexico could still get more snow Tuesday, while other parts must finish digging out from the latest blast of winter weather to hit the state.
Snow advisories have been canceled for the southwest desert, including Lordsburg, Deming and Las Cruces. But the National Weather Service said it can't rule out a chance of snow showers from Ruidoso to the east and south through Tuesday night.

In addition, a system in northern Mexico could begin to move north, bringing scattered to isolated snow showers to the south, west and central sections of New Mexico by Thursday night.

Snowplows and sand trucks were busy Monday after the winter weather sent motorists skidding, closing 145 miles of the state's main north-south artery for hours and shutting down dozens of schools.

New Mexico State Police Lt. Rick Anglada had a simple message for southern New Mexico motorists: "Stay home."

Interstate 25 was closed between Socorro and Las Cruces and Interstate 10 was closed from Las Cruces to the Arizona state line for much of Monday morning. Both highways reopened in the afternoon.

The storm also closed some state roads in southern New Mexico and forced the cancellation of classes at Animas, Artesia, Clovis, Estancia, Hatch, Melrose, Mescalero, Moriarty, White Sands Missile Range and Truth or Consequences.

The state Department of Transportation has activated message boards to notify travelers about highway conditions.

The storm was forecast to drop an additional 3 to 5 inches of snow in areas below 7,500 feet and 5 to 9 inches above that, said Todd Shoemake, a weather service forecaster in Albuquerque.

The storm will stall before moving northward Thursday, perhaps giving Albuquerque another shot of precipitation, he said.

The storm had dropped 1 to 2 feet of snow across the southern mountains and more than 6 inches in the lower elevations north of Las Cruces on Monday.

Oklahoma covered with slush, mud as ice and snow melt away

TULSA (AP) — A break in wintry weather has helped utility crews working non-stop for the past week restore power to all but about 10% of the 125,000 homes and business that lost electricity during a deadly ice storm.
About 12,102 customers, mostly in eastern Oklahoma, still didn't have electric service early Tuesday, the Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management reported. Officials said it could be a week to nine days before power is back on for some rural customers.

Most of those customers receive power from the Oklahoma Association of Electric Cooperatives, which reported more than 3,700 utility poles down and 11,922 outages in its service area, emergency management officials said. Northeast Oklahoma Electric Cooperative in Vinita reported the largest service disruption — 7,703.

Oklahoma Gas & Electric reported 180 total outages, 90 in the Muskogee area.

Electricity has been restored to all customers of Public Service Co. of Oklahoma, which number 514,000 in eastern and southwestern Oklahoma, according to the company's website.

Donna Tow, 50, of Rose had power by Monday morning after going 10 days without it.

"After about the first four days of camping out with a family of eight in the house, it was quite nerve-racking to say the least," said Tow, a homemaker.

With temperatures forecast to reach the 30s and 40s on Tuesday and climb into the 40s and 50s through Friday any residual ice clinging to power lines and pavements will melt, although a storm system lurking over northern Mexico could bring a fresh round of frozen precipitation to the state, the National Weather Service said.

Meanwhile, Gov. Brad Henry announced he would ask the Legislature for $15 million to help pay costs tied to the brutal storms and officially forwarded his request for a major disaster declaration for eastern Oklahoma to President Bush.

The request allows communities and individuals to seek federal reimbursement for uninsured damages as they recover from the storm. Bush approved an emergency declaration for all 77 Oklahoma counties on Jan. 14 to cover federal assistance for federal assets that were needed to respond to areas affected by the winter storm, which lashed the state for three days beginning Jan. 12.

The Oklahoma Office of the Chief Medical Examiner and the Oklahoma Highway Patrol attribute 32 deaths to the storm. Highway collisions took 19 lives, eight people died of hypothermia, two from smoke inhalation and three from falls.

Of the latest victims, a 60-year-old Allen man fell on ice, a 31-year-old man was involved in a car wreck in Payne County and a 22-year-old Oklahoma City woman who was riding a sled being pulled by an all-terrain vehicle died when it collided with a pole, officials said.

Snow melt and rainfall has lifted the levels of major rivers in the state, including the Arkansas, Illinois, Kiamichi and Poteau rivers, but all are forecast to remain well below flood stage.

Runoff from melting ice and snow also caused some streams to spill from their banks.

A pickup carrying radioactive materials used in pipeline scanning equipment was swept from a bridge Sunday and disappeared in swollen Coal Creek in Pittsburg County.

It was located Monday about a quarter of a mile downstream, and officials were waiting for waters to recede to fish it out, said Undersheriff Richard Sexton.

"It doesn't appear to be any hazard whatsoever to the public," Sexton said, noting that the material was in a container secured to the truck.

Troopers reported nearly 500 collisions on Oklahoma roads since Jan. 12, and 3,656 people have been treated at Oklahoma hospitals for various injuries related to the weather, according to the Oklahoma State Department of Health.

A nighttime curfew implemented in two southeast Oklahoma counties following reports of break-ins and the theft of generators that powered railroad crossing guards was lifted in Pittsburg County, officials said.

A 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. curfew remained in effect in McIntosh County.

Snow storms bring chaos to Europe

LONDON, England (Reuters) -- Three people were killed as snow and ice caused travel chaos across Europe on Wednesday, halting trains and planes and cutting off electricity to thousands of homes.

In Germany, icy roads caused multiple accidents, killing three people and injuring dozens, police said.

In the southern city of Stuttgart, about a thousand airline passengers were stranded overnight as 70 flights were cancelled due to heavy snowfall, the airport said.

In Britain, the first snow of winter disrupted road and rail travel across the southeast.

Commuters faced severe delays on many routes into London. Southeastern, a train company serving the region, said it expected delays to continue into the afternoon and said its Web site crashed from a flood of passenger queries.

Britain's Met office said heavier snowfalls were expected in parts of the southeast on Thursday and Friday.

Temperatures dipped to minus 10 Celsius (14 Fahrenheit) in parts of France.

About 5,000 vehicles were stranded when the A6 motorway that runs through eastern France was cut off by snow and 200 police and firefighters were sent to help stranded motorists.

Power was cut off to about 85,000 homes in central France and train travel was disrupted.

In Austria's Carinthia province 12,000 homes lost electricity when heavy snow toppled trees onto power lines and officials issued an avalanche warning for nearby Alpine mountains.

A blizzard deposited more than a metre of snow within hours, stranding hundreds of vehicles on roads.

But the weather was good news for Europe's ski resorts which have been struggling due to a lack of snow. The cold weather is expected to continue for the rest of the week.