Flash floods kill six in Algeria

ALGIERS (AFP) - A flash flood killed six people in southern Algeria when torrential rains caused wadis to overflow, while high winds brought down trees and walls, press reports said Saturday.

Two teenage schoolgirls and four shepherds were swept away in separate incidents in the Djelfa region, 270 kilometres (170 miles) south of Algiers on Thursday when more than 100 millimetres (four inches) of rain fell in just a few hours, the reports said.

Other people were injured by falling walls, trees and telegraph poles as winds reached 120 kilometres (75 miles) an hour, the reports added.

In Algiers itself some 30 houses were flooded in the east of the city when a river overflowed for the first time in 15 years. Firemen had to use boats to evacuate the residents.

In the mountainous east of the country meanwhile roads were blocked by snow, and weather forecasters predicted conditions would worsen on Sunday.

Typhoon Muifa creating battering waves

What started Tuesday innocently enough as a moderate tropical storm has become a small, but potent, typhoon east of the Philippines. Typhoon Muifa (Moy-fa) became worthy of its prefix today when winds were estimated at near 105 mph. Muifa is at best meandering to the north while churning in the Philippine Sea just east of Manila. In fact, for all intents and purposes, the typhoon has stalled. Though forecast to move west over the islands, forward progression will be slow. Bad news for the island chain as flooding and mudslides will result from the copious amounts of rain expected to fall over the next 48 hours. There is no doubt that the large and powerful waves have been battering the eastern coast of the northern Philippines. The system is forecasted to weaken gradually over the next 5 days as it heads towards southern Vietnam.

The Atlantic and eastern Pacific Basins remain quiet.

Kansas tornado was one for the books
With speeds up to 200 mph, it was earliest twister in state history

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Meteorologists reached for superlatives to describe a tornado that barreled through two Kansas counties on its way into Missouri last week.

The National Weather Service on Tuesday said the twister that slammed parts of Anderson and Linn counties on Feb. 28 was classified as an EF-4, with wind speeds of 166 mph to 200 mph.

It was also the nation's most powerful so far this year, and the first one to get the EF-4 classification since the weather service switched Feb. 1 to the Enhanced Fujita Scale, which offers a more detailed analysis of tornado strength.

No tornado of such power had ever struck Kansas in February — or before March 13 of any year.

"It's unusual, but not as unusual as you might think," said Dan McCarthy, warning coordinator meteorologist at the Storm Prediction Center operated by the National Weather Service in Norman, Okla.

It felt very unusual to Lee Wilson, a Linn County veterinarian. Wilson heard the deafening whine the evening of Feb. 28 as the twister approached, and he later watched lightning illuminate the funnel cloud roaring away from his house near Centerville.

"It's definitely my first winter one," he said, "and I hope it's my last."

Sheriff Marvin Stites, a lifelong Linn County resident, said the Feb. 28 tornado was the earliest he could recall in any year.

No deaths and no major injuries resulted from the tornado, although it caused extensive property damage in Linn County.

The same storm system spawned 50 reported tornadoes from Minnesota to the Gulf Coast, killing 20 people, including a 7-year-old Missouri girl and eight students at an Alabama high school.

The National Weather Service classified the Alabama tornado as an EF-3 with winds 136 to 165 mph. Storms are rated from EF-0 to EF-5, with the higher numbers being the most damaging.

Forecasters said winter is a good time to prepare for tornado season, even if it seems distant. In the Kansas City area, for example, peak season for twisters is April to early June, said Andy Bailey, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service at Pleasant Hill.

"Families need to sit down and plan what they would do if there is a tornado warning," Bailey said. "If they wait until the warning is issued, it could be too late."

Monitoring the weather service's broadcasts to weather radios and staying alert to other media is good policy, forecasters say.

Linn County, however, doesn't get reliable weather radio reception, and parts of the county lack emergency sirens.

For Wilson, who has been through four tornadoes in the county since 1979, the only bright spot was seeing neighbors help neighbors. The veterinarian said volunteers combed his neighborhood on Sunday.

"Within one afternoon," he said, "they had picked up three square miles of debris."