Apocalypse

2007-05-26T09:52:00.000-04:00

DALLAS - Forecasters predicted more heavy thunderstorms in the Plains over the holiday weekend after two days of storms and flooding that left five people dead and one missing in central Texas.

Dozens of people were plucked from rising waters on Friday, and Gov. Rick Perry activated National Guard troops to be deployed in Waco, Austin and San Antonio for the weekend.

Near Fredericksburg, authorities were looking for a man whose sport utility vehicle was swept away during storms that have dumped about 8 inches of rain in the area since Thursday.

Lt. Jim Judd of the Gillespie County sheriff's office said about 30 people spent Friday looking for Edgar Garcia, 22, who called his mother after he drove around a barricade blocking a swollen creek and got stuck.

Three people died in Killeen, police said. The bodies of two brothers, ages 5 and 6, were found early Friday in a submerged SUV. The boys were riding with their mother and two siblings Thursday when their vehicle was wiped off the road into a gully.

Rescuers saved the mother and two siblings, but the swift-moving water rose too quickly for rescuers to help the boys trapped inside, said Garland Potvin, a Bell County justice of the peace.

Elsewhere in Killeen, the body of a 20-year-old man caught in rushing water was found lodged along a culvert, Potvin said.

Outside Copperas Cove, a husband and wife died late Thursday after attempting to cross floodwaters in their vehicle, said Bill Price, a Coryell County justice of the peace.

About 100 homes, apartment buildings and businesses sustained minor damage Friday, and a few minor injuries were reported, said Dennis Baker, the Bell County emergency management coordinator.

In Kansas, rivers and creeks continued to rise Friday in the central and south-central parts of the state following a downpour two days earlier. The most serious flooding was expected along the Arkansas River in Harvey County, the
National Weather Service said.

Floodwaters closed off all roads leading into the central Kansas town of New Cambria, Saline County emergency management officials said Friday. Rising rivers also covered many of the streets in the small town east of Salina.

At least 60 homes and businesses were flooded but no injuries were reported, and only voluntary evacuations had been ordered.

Spain evaluating scale of flood damage

MADRID (AFP) - The Spanish government on Friday said it had agreed a process to calculate the extent of severe flood damage and get emergency aid to the areas worst affected after several days of heavy rain in much of the country.

Six regions in south, central -- including Madrid -- and southeast Spain were badly hit and the cabinet approved an immediate evaluation of the damage and formulated measures to provide financial aid.

However, First Deputy Prime Minister Maria Teresa Fernandez de la Vega said it was too early to put a figure on such aid.

Spain's agricultural sector has borne the brunt of the damage with flooding swamping 100,000 hectares (247,000 acres) of vineyards in the central region of Castille-La Mancha.

On Friday, agricultural unions estimated some 500,000 hectares (1.3 million acres) of crops had been affected.

The rain also caused travel misery for thousands of commuters Wednesday and Thursday with mainline rail services between the capital and the major southeastern cities of Valencia and Murcia interrupted all day while some roads were closed.

On the plus side, the rains fell after three years of intensive drought affecting much of the country.

China hit by deadly flooding, severe drought

BEIJING (AFP) - Torrential rain in southwest China triggered flash floods and mudslides that have left 21 dead, while a neighbouring region is suffering its worst drought in 60 years, state media reported Friday.

A further 11 people are missing following the rains in Sichuan province and Chongqing municipality, Xinhua news agency said, in the latest extreme weather to ravage the country.

More than 360 people have been hurt and 112,000 evacuated in the disasters in a region that only last year endured its worst drought in half a century.

Meanwhile, more than 1.6 million people in Gansu province to the north face drinking water shortages due to the worst drought there since the 1940s.

The dry spell, which has had no significant rainfall in some areas for more than two months, is endangering crops or delaying planting on 1.46 million hectares (3.6 million acres) of cropland, Xinhua quoted officials with the Gansu provincial flood control and drought relief office as saying.

China last year suffered a range of extreme weather events including exceptionally strong typhoons, floods, and droughts, which meteorological officials have partly attributed to the affects of climate change.

Officials warned recently that similar weather is expected in 2007.

2007-05-17T12:14:00.000-04:00

Notre Dame basilica spire falls in storm

SOUTH BEND, Ind. - A powerful storm toppled a small spire from the University of Notre Dame's Basilica of the Sacred Heart and left more than 16,000 people without power Wednesday.

One person died when a tree fell on his car.

At Notre Dame, one of four smaller spires that surround the basilica's main spire fell about 60 feet to the ground, bringing with it some bricks and mortar. No one was injured.

"That's a fairly significant amount of damage to one of the university's most important landmarks," spokesman Dennis Brown said. Several large trees on campus also were damaged, he said.

The Tuesday evening storm brought heavy rain and wind up to 70 mph to LaPorte and St. Joseph counties, the
National Weather Service said. Several people reported seeing funnel clouds, and the weather service was trying to confirm whether any tornadoes touched down.

There were reports of trees falling on cars and homes across northern Indiana and into Ohio and Michigan, meteorologist Patrick Murphy (news, bio, voting record) said. The storm initially knocked out power to 52,000 customers of Northern Indiana Public Service Co. About 16,000 customers, most in Gary and Portage, remained without electricity Wednesday, the company said.

Thousands evacuated as New Jersey wildfire spreads

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A wildfire raged across the northeastern US state of New Jersey on Wednesday, forcing thousands of people to evacuate in the latest in a series of such blazes to strike the United States this month.

The fire spread through a nature reserve area in the southern part of the state overnight after being ignited when an F-16 jet fighter on a routine training mission dropped a flare on dry pinelands.

The warplane had been practicing the use of a self-defense system in which flares are fired as decoys to mislead heat-seeking missiles, a spokesman for the New Jersey National Guard told the New York Times.

Around 2,500 people had to be evacuated from their homes and as many as 13,500 acres (5,400 hectares) of land were torched, a New Jersey fire official told a news conference.

"We still have a lot of work to do with the fire. We need to get containment around the perimeter," he said.

"This fire will not be out until mother nature puts it out with a really good rainstorm," he said, adding that firefighters had only about 10 percent of the fire contained by morning.

Fires last week tore through California and Florida, forcing mass evacuations and burning hundreds of thousands of acres but causing no casualties.

Hundreds more flee as fire rages

Firefighters pushed back Tuesday against a massive wildfire along the Florida-Georgia border that jumped a containment line and forced hundreds of people to evacuate their homes.

Thunderstorms were forecast for most of the state today, but firefighters worried they would not be enough.

"It is so hot and dry, there is no moisture whatsoever, and the winds are our biggest concern," said Nina Barrow, a U.S. Forest Service spokeswoman at the fire command center at Olustee, Fla.

Steady winds off the water were forecast to continue today.

Approximately 725 homes have been evacuated in the Florida border area, but firefighters have managed to keep the flames from destroying any structures, the U.S. Forest Service said.

The latest evacuations began Monday night after the fire line was breached, threatening homes west of U.S. 441, Barrow said.

The blaze raced through the Okefenokee Swamp in southeast Georgia and into Florida after being started by lightning more than a week ago. By late Tuesday, the fire had burned approximately 250,000 acres — much of it swamp and timber owned by the federal government, state governments and lumber companies.

"It's a lot of swampland in there on the Georgia side," said Marlette Lacey, spokeswoman for the Joint Fire Information Center at a command center at Waycross, Ga. "It makes it harder to get to, to try and contain."

The fire has consumed 110,500 acres in Florida, where it is 50% contained, fire officials said. In Georgia, where nearly 140,000 acres have burned, the fire remains only 15% contained, Lacey said.

Smoke lifted enough to open Interstates 10 and 75 in Florida. Drivers were warned that periodic closures were possible.

The dry gusts of wind have whipped up other fires. The National Interagency Fire Center reported seven active fires in Georgia, burning 283,617 acres, and 14 in Florida, burning 179,608 acres.

Thousands of firefighters were battling the blazes, aided by helicopters and tanker airplanes dropping water and fire retardant.

Winds were blowing smoke to the west, where it was visible in Montgomery, Ala., and beyond, said Scott Unger, meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

Other wildfires were keeping firefighters busy across the country. One fire has burned 117 square miles in northern Minnesota and Canada, destroying more than 100 cabins and other small structures.

In New Jersey, a wildfire started by a jet flare burned 11,000 acres of woodlands, forced thousands of people from their homes and closed down major roadways, according to the New Jersey Forest Fire Service.

Kryn Westhoven, a spokesman for the state Department of Military Affairs, said the fire was caused by a flare dropped from an F-16 fighter on a training mission.

"Usually they burn out before they hit the ground; this one didn't," Westhoven said.

Residents from several developments in Ocean County, including several senior housing complexes in Barnegat, were evacuated.

2007-05-15T16:42:00.000-04:00

Hundreds flee massive wildfire in Florida

LAKE CITY, Fla. — Authorities evacuated hundreds of homes after a massive wildfire along the Georgia-Florida border jumped a containment line overnight, authorities said Tuesday.

Firefighters pushed the flames back to the containment line, but dry weather and 15 mph wind in north Florida was expected to further hinder their work.

"If we can just get through today," said Russell Hubright, a U.S. Forest Service spokesman.

Between 250 and 500 homes west of U.S. 441 had to be evacuated for a second time when the fire line was breached, Florida Highway Patrol Lt. Michael Burroughs said. An additional 570 people who were ordered out of homes east of the roadway were still waiting to return.

The wildfire had raced through the Okefenokee Swamp in southeast Georgia and into northern Florida after being started by lightning more than a week ago. By Tuesday, it had burned 109,000 acres in Florida and 139,813 acres of swampland in Georgia — nearly 390 square miles in all.

Flames jumped a containment line at the fire's western edge, but firefighters used bulldozers and water-dropping helicopters to extinguish them, said John Speaks, deputy incident commander with the forest service. The fire was about 1½ miles from U.S. 441.

On the western edge of the Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia, Fargo residents were told to stay alert as wind forecast at up to 20 mph pushed the blaze against fire breaks plowed between the swamp and the city of 380 people.

"Everybody's being told not to let their guard down, don't unpack," said Laura Polant, a fire information officer in Fargo. "Residents are still being told to be prepared to leave, because the call can come at any time."

In Florida, the blaze was 50% contained Tuesday. The smoke had lifted enough to open Interstates 10 and 75 to traffic, but drivers were warned that periodic closures were still possible.

Another large wildfire, in northeastern Minnesota and Ontario, could be brought under control by the end of the week, officials said. No one has been seriously hurt in the fire, which has burned 117 square miles of Minnesota and Canada, but many cabins and smaller structures — more than 100 in all — have been destroyed.

2007-05-10T00:22:00.000-04:00

Extreme weather, fires befall nation

NEW YORK - Nature's fury made life miserable Wednesday from one end of the nation to the other, with people forced out of their homes by wildfires near both coasts and the Canadian border and by major flooding in the Midwest.

And although the calendar still said spring, the first named storm of the year was whipping up surf on the beaches of the Southeast.

Overall, it wasn't quite a day for the record books.

"It's a major flood,"
National Weather Service meteorologist Suzanne Fortin said Wednesday of the flooding in Missouri. "It won't be a record breaker, but it will be in the top three."

However, a three-week-old fire in southern Georgia had become that state's biggest in five decades after charring 167 square miles of forest and swamp.

Smoke-filled air created a burning smell and a dusting of ashes that coated cars and buildings through much of Florida and southeastern Georgia. The haze over most of Florida even closed several highways and sent people with breathing problems indoors.

The flooding was produced by the drenching weekend thunderstorms across the Plains states that also devastated Greensburg, Kan. In addition to 11 tornado deaths, two drowning deaths were blamed on the storms, one each in Oklahoma and Kansas.

High water had poured over the tops of at least 20 levees along the Missouri River and other streams in the state, authorities said Wednesday.

Missouri National Guard troops were helping. And Highway Patrol troopers were working 24-hour shifts near Big Lake, a village town of about 150 permanent residents in the state's northwest corner, which was inundated by five levee breaks along the Missouri River and four smaller ones on other streams, said patrol Lt. John Hotz.

No injuries were reported but the Missouri Water Patrol rescued about 20 people from their flooded homes, including Glenn Burger, who had the patrol return him to his home Wednesday to rescue his two pet cockatiels.

"I've had them about five years and I hated to lose them," said Burger, 78, who lived through floods in 1984 and 1993. "This is the last one. I'm through. I'm going to move to town."

In Missouri's Jackson County, authorities evacuated 300 to 400 residents of Levasy on Wednesday. At least a dozen homes were partially under water from the Missouri River, a dispatcher said.

In central Missouri, the state capital, Jefferson City, was preparing for flooding. After floods in 1993 and 1995, the city raised the elevation of its riverside sewage treatment plant, and the federal government bought out scores of homes on the north shore of the river, but the airport and businesses are still vulnerable.

On the West Coast, in view of many Los Angeles residents, a blaze had covered more than 800 acres in the city's sprawling Griffith Park behind the iconic Griffith Observatory.

The danger to homes south of the park eased Wednesday and many of the hundreds of residents evacuated overnight were allowed to return.

No flames were showing by evening, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa told a press conference at the observatory, and firefighters expected full containment by Thursday night.

"The tide is turning in our favor," the mayor said.

At least 30 companies of firefighters were to remain in case the 817-acre blaze came back to life.

The fire appeared to have been accidental, said Battalion chief John Miller, who oversees arson investigations.

The fire destroyed Dante's View, a trailside terraced garden on Mount Hollywood.

"This is a tragic sunrise," City Councilman Tom LaBonge said while surveying the damage. "You look right there and you'd think you were at the observatory looking at Mars."

In the Southeast, a wildfire in northern Florida's Bradford County had forced the evacuation of about 250 homes, said Annaleasa Winter, a state forestry spokeswoman. That fire had blackened 16,000 to 18,000 acres and was 35 percent contained on Wednesday night.

Florida Gov. Charlie Crist said the state had more than 220 active fires Wednesday that had charred a total of 125 square miles.

Officials in southeastern Georgia issued a mandatory evacuation Wednesday for an area including the town of Moniac, saying that by early Thursday it may be in the path of a 107,000-acre blaze, or 167 square miles, in the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, the largest recorded blaze since state record-keeping began in 1957.

Smoke was spreading across wide areas of Florida as wind circulated around Subtropical Storm Andrea, centered about 100 miles off the Georgia coast with top sustained wind around 45 mph. The National Weather Service forecast that the storm would show little movement and dissipate near the coast in four days.

Battling the blazes won't get much immediate help from rain. Forecasters said no significant downpours were expected over land through at least Thursday morning. The storm's lightning could also spark off more fires, meteorologists said.

Elsewhere, a wildfire near the Canadian border in northeastern Minnesota had covered more than 34 square miles Wednesday, adding more than 8 square miles in one day, authorities said. Since it was spotted over the weekend, it has destroyed 45 buildings, including multimillion-dollar homes, and firefighters said it was just 5 percent contained.

More than 100 people had been removed from their homes in the path of the fire.

2007-05-09T19:22:00.000-04:00

First named '07 Atlantic storm forms near coast

MIAMI - The first named storm of the year formed Wednesday off the southeastern U.S. coast, more than three weeks before the official start of the Atlantic hurricane season, forecasters said.

Subtropical Storm Andrea had top sustained winds around 45 mph Wednesday afternoon and didn’t appear to be much of a threat, the National Hurricane Center in Miami said. Still, a tropical storm watch was issued for parts of Georgia and Florida, meaning tropical storm conditions are possible within 36 hours.

“We’re not looking at this system strengthening significantly,” said Richard Pasch, a senior hurricane specialist at the center.

The storm’s wind, however, has been blowing smoke from wildfires across Georgia and Florida.

It didn’t appear the wind would hinder firefighting efforts, said Jim Harrell, a spokesman for Florida’s Division of Forestry. But those battling the blazes won’t get much immediate help from rain — forecasters said no significant downpours were expected over land through at least Thursday morning. The storm’s lightning could also spark more fires, meteorologists said.

At 2 p.m. ET, Andrea was centered about 100 miles southeast of Savannah, Ga., and about 135 miles northeast of Daytona Beach. The storm was moving west at about 3 mph.

Some wave erosion
Wind-driven waves have been causing coastal erosion in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida, and the ocean has lapped at beachfront homes and condominiums.

Coast Guard officials in South Carolina said they had rescued one of two kayakers who had been missing since Tuesday when they were seen leaving Seabrook Island, S.C. Jeremy Scott, 28, of Atlanta, was found about five miles east of Fripp Island. Authorities were continuing to search for Stephen Lee, 27, of Atlanta.

Subtropical systems are hybrid weather formations that are usually weaker than hurricanes and tropical storms. They are kind of a half-breed, sharing characteristics of tropical systems, which get their power from warm ocean water at their centers, and more typical bad weather that forms when warm and cold fronts collide, Pasch said.

Forecasters said Andrea has the warm center characteristic of tropical storms but its core is not particularly well defined. In addition, its winds are farther out from the center than they would be in a tropical storm.

Typically, about one subtropical storm forms each year, but they often turn into tropical storms. That doesn’t appear to be the case with Andrea, senior hurricane specialist Jack Beven said. It only has a small area of warmer water to draw energy from and is facing dry wind.

Pre-season storms do happen
He said it wasn’t unusual for the storm to form in May, outside the hurricane season that starts June 1 and end Nov. 30. Eighteen tropical storms and four hurricanes have been recorded in that month since 1851; the earliest hurricane had made landfall on the U.S. was Alma in northwest Florida on June 9, 1966.

“What we call the hurricane season is a totally manmade creation. Nature doesn’t always pay attention to that,” Beven said.

Private and university forecasters have predicted that the 2007 season will be especially active, producing up to 17 tropical storms and hurricanes and a “well above average” possibility of at least one striking the U.S. The federal government plans to release its predictions May 22.

The Atlantic basin has been in a busy period for hurricanes since 1995. Some federal forecasters believe this is part of a natural cycle. But the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.N.-sponsored group, says global warming caused by humans has led to an increase in stronger hurricanes.

2007-05-08T22:31:00.000-04:00

Wildfire scorches LA's Griffith park

LOS ANGELES - A wildfire roiled through rugged brush-covered hills in the city's sprawling Griffith Park on Tuesday, triggering evacuations of the city zoo, a museum and other popular sites as dangerously hot and dry conditions plagued Southern California.

A towering column of smoke rose over the middle of the city as hundreds of firefighters and five water-dropping helicopters rushed to Los Angeles' landmark park — a mix of wilderness, cultural venues, horse and hiking trails and recreational facilities set on more than 4,000 acres on the hills between Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley.

Residents of neighborhoods along the park's edge nervously watched billowing smoke.

"Most of us saw this on TV and raced home to turn on our sprinklers," said Chad Griffin, 33, a resident of the Los Feliz district. "This is an early wake-up call for everyone in this area."

The blaze was reported at 1:30 p.m. and grew to 150-200 acres. Containment was estimated at 20-25 percent by late afternoon, said Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

No homes were immediately threatened but authorities said the battle would continue into the night. The city requested help from the state and two retardant-dropping airplanes arrived in the late afternoon.

Authorities were investigating whether the fire broke out after a person discarded a cigarette at one of the park's golf courses, a law enforcement official familiar with the matter told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the investigation was ongoing.

The person tried to put out the fire but was badly burned and was taken to Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center, the official said.

Deputy Fire Chief Mario Rueda told a news conference that authorities were questioning a person who walked out of the brush onto a golf course.

"He's not a suspect. He's just somebody we're questioning," Rueda said.

The man, possibly homeless, told investigators he fell asleep while smoking and was burned on his stomach and shoulders, said a high-ranking city official who requested anonymity since the arson unit had not announced its findings.

"The man claims he fell asleep on the trail, and his injuries appear to be consistent with that version," the official said.

At one point, flames came very close to a firefighting crew using a hose to douse flames near a pedestrian bridge. Aerial news footage showed flames roaring up a hill and the firefighters retreating under the bridge. Crews behind them tried to beat back the fire with hoses and moments later a helicopter dropped water on the area. Fire officials said none of the firefighters were injured.

The fire erupted on the second day of a heat spell. The National Weather Service said downtown hit 97 degrees, 23 degrees above normal, tying the record for the date. Humidity fell to just 9 percent during the day. The region was already woefully short of moisture, with rainfall measured downtown more than 11 inches below normal.

Rangers evacuated the park's Vermont Canyon area, which includes the Los Angeles Zoo, two golf facilities, a merry-go-round and a magnate school, said Jane Kolb, a city Department of Recreation and Parks spokeswoman.

Fire Capt. Rex Vilaubi said the evacuations were voluntary and the areas were not in imminent danger of being overrun.

The Autry National Center, which includes a museum of Western artifacts, was evacuated. Staff threw tarps over its collection of memorabilia and artifacts to protect them in case the sprinkler system went off, said Faith Raiguel, chief operating officer.

"We can see the fire from here ... it's up the hill," she said.

"It looks really dark and evil and ominous," Brian Wotring, 35, catering manager at the museum cafe, said before jumping into his car. "It looks really scary."

The fire burned to the east of Griffith Observatory and it was closed down although it never appeared threatened, said director Ed Krupp. However, tourists were sent away and staff was sent home.

Departing tourists appeared calm and stopped to take pictures of the flames.

"It's far enough away that I don't feel threatened," said Katherine Coates, 24, of Little Rock, Ark. "Right now it's more spectacle than anything else."

Heavy smoke and debris may have caused a momentary drop in power in a high voltage transmission line that runs by the park, said Joe Ramallo, a Los Angeles Department of Water and Power spokesman.

The dip in power was observed around downtown as energy was rerouted to other transmission lines, Ramallo said.

In March a fire burned 150 acres of brush in Griffith Park. Authorities said it was started by two boys playing with fire.

To the south in San Diego County, a 1,250-acre fire at Camp Pendleton was 80 percent contained late Tuesday afternoon and the rate of spread had "significantly slowed," the Marine Corps said in a press release. No injuries or structural damage were reported. The fire began Monday on a training range.

In neighboring Orange County, a 140-acre fire in Featherly Regional Park was 70 percent contained.

Several daily heat records were broken Monday. Among them, Los Angeles International Airport recorded a high of 88, beating the 80-degree record set in 1984.

Midwest flooding could near 1993 levels

AGENCY, Mo. - Five burst levees along the Missouri River sent a deluge of water that submerged the tiny town of Big Lake on Tuesday, as thousands in the region fled their homes amid warnings that the flooding could near the devastation of 1993.

The levees broke Monday south of Big Lake and the rush of river water immersed the town on Tuesday, said Mark Sitherwood, presiding commissioner of Holt County. Many of the buildings in town had several feet of water inside, said Holt County Clerk Kathy Kunkel.

"The town is a loss. At this time, we don't know, but it looks like that's what's going to happen," he said.

No injuries were reported. Most Big Lake residents evacuated Monday but a handful had to be rescued by boat Tuesday, Sitherwood said.

Big Lake is about 95 miles northwest of Kansas City and had a population of 127, according to 2000 census reports. Nearby, the communities of Craig and Fortescue also were being threatened, Sitherwood said.

In Agency, a town of about 100 surrounded on three sides by the Platte River, most had already evacuated. The town was hit hard in 1993 in one of the most costly and devastating floods in U.S. history. That flood claimed 48 lives in the Midwest and caused $18 billion in damage.

By midday Tuesday, a few homes were partially submerged, as were nearby roads and a cemetery.

"It isn't as bad as 1993," said Pauline Gibson, 71, who did not evacuate her trailer home was packed if she had to leave quickly. "But it's working on it. We don't want it like '93, but they say more rain is coming and that's not good."

Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt declared a state of emergency and mobilized National Guard troops to help. At least 19 Kansas counties declared local disaster emergencies.

"Once we've dealt with the entire flood across the state, we'll begin to evaluate the damage and find out what kind of assistance might be available to compensate or help people impacted by the damage," Blunt said Tuesday at a news conference in St. Joseph.

River towns across much of Missouri were evacuating low-lying areas Tuesday or seeking help filling and stacking sandbags.

"We're scrambling around here," said Steve Mellis, who was volunteering near the central Missouri town of Easley as residents moved boats and equipment to higher ground.

Two-thirds of the town of Mosby, 20 miles northeast of Kansas City, was already under 2 to 4 feet of water from the overflowing Fishing River, said D.C. Rogers, Clay County director of emergency services. He said the town's 242 residents began evacuating Monday morning. By evening, only one route into the community remained open.

Evacuations were voluntary in several western Missouri counties, but a mandatory evacuation was imposed in Parkville, just across the Missouri River from Kansas City, said Jessica Robinson, a spokeswoman for the governor.

Communities across the central Plains faced flooding from the weekend-long thunderstorms that spawned the deadly tornado that wiped out Greensburg, Kan.

Parts of Missouri, Iowa and Kansas received 4 to 8 inches of rain in a 24-hour period, the National Weather Service said. In some areas, Tuesday morning was the first time in several days that rain wasn't falling, but runoff was still raising streams and rivers.

Flooding in Oklahoma was blamed for the drowning death of a man whose car was swept off a county road. A Kansas man died when his vehicle overturned in a water-filled ditch near Wichita, Butler County officials said.

Nearly 1,600 people were urged to evacuate the southwest Iowa town of Red Oak on Monday as the Nishnabotna River rose out of its banks.

Levees broke near Willow Creek in the western Iowa town of Missouri Valley, and some residents had to be evacuated by boat Monday, said Mayor Randy McHugh. "Appliances are just floating around," he said Monday.

Authorities rescued about 500 people Monday from flooding around Topeka, Kan., said Dave Bevans, a spokesman for Shawnee County emergency operations. Officials reported similar evacuations in Saline County, about 100 miles to the west, and flooding forced the evacuation of New Cambria, a town of about 150 people northeast of Salina.

Since the 1993 floods in the Mississippi and Missouri river basins, only two or three other flooding episodes have been comparable to what forecasters are predicting in the next several days, weather service meteorologist Andy Bailey said.

There will be differences though. The 1993 flood was caused by melting snow combined with heavy rain over a two-month period. After that, state buyouts of property on flood plains left fewer residences in danger of future floods.

"But make no mistake," Bailey added, "this is a major flood."

White House denies Iraq war hampers home rescue efforts

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The White House on Tuesday dismissed charges that the Iraq war effort had stripped the United States of resources needed to fight catastrophes at home in the wake of a devastating Kansas tornado.

"I think they're separate issues... just as in a time of war, you know, the Pentagon plans for more than one conflict at a time, you have to be able to do more than one thing at a time," White House spokesman Tony Snow said.

"So the fact that you have people deployed in a time of war to protect Americans is important, but at the same time you also maintain your capability of dealing with domestic concerns."

US President George W. Bush is to visit Greensburg on Wednesday after the small Kansas prairie town was flattened by a tornado on Friday which left at least 10 people dead.

Bush is still haunted by the specter of Hurricane Katrina, which ravaged New Orleans in August 2005, and left US authorities heavily under fire for failing to act quickly to send in rescue and emergency services.

Greensburg, a town of some 1,800 residents about 120 miles (200 kilometers) west of Wichita, was virtually obliterated by the giant twister which struck late Friday, and Democratic Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius has already complained of a lack of lifting equipment to help the rescue effort.

She charged that the necessary machines had been deployed out of the US for the war in Iraq, increasing pressure on Bush locked in a standoff with the Democratic-controlled Congress over funding the conflict.

Democrats are seeking ways to force Bush and the Republican administration to bring home US troops from Iraq, and touched off new skirmish on Tuesday, with a plan to finance the unpopular war for just three months, while retaining the option to cut funding in July.

With the approach of hurricane season in June, the issue of the country's readiness to deal with natural disasters is likely to shoot to the top of the agenda again.

Snow said the country would be ready for the new hurricane season. "We certainly hope so. Again, you don't want to make predictions. But on the other hand, there is an enormous amount of planning going on so that you have the flexibility."

Much of the focus is on the National Guard, whose members serve each US state, often in domestic emergencies, but also has members deployed in Iraq.

Snow acknowleged that many states had "expressed concerns about National Guard levels into the future. And they have talked about Iraq deployments."

"It's one of the reasons why the president talked about expanding the military, in part to take pressure off National Guard units," he added.

But in the case of Kansas, he said, out of the 6,800 available National Guard, only 566 were needed to help in the crisis.

Earlier Snow reiterated that the US administration was "eager to provide what Kansas needs."

But he added: "It's interesting because as far as we know, the only thing the governor has requested are FM radios. There has been no request of the National Guard for heavy equipment."

Authorities said Friday's twister damaged or destroyed about 90 percent of the commercial and residential buildings in Greensburg.

2007-05-07T13:50:00.000-04:00

Weekend storms signal deadly year

The weekend blitz of tornadoes in Kansas and the Plains puts 2007 on track to be one of the busiest and deadliest tornado years in a decade, severe-storms meteorologists said Sunday.

"Even if the year stopped right now, it would be the deadliest year we've had since 1999," said Greg Forbes, severe-weather expert for The Weather Channel.

The huge twister that leveled the south-central Kansas town of Greensburg late Friday, killing at least eight people, is the first tornado of the year rated at the top scale of a new rating system adopted in February to measure intensity.

The tornado, which carved a 22-mile path and reached 1.7 miles wide, had winds estimated up to 205 mph, the National Weather Service reported.

The last one to reach such intensity was May 3, 1999, when an F-5 tornado — considered the most powerful under the old rating system — slammed an Oklahoma City suburb, killing 36 people.

Forecasters predicted more intense storms in the nation's heartland today and through the week. A slow-moving system from the West continues to draw warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico, triggering violent thunderstorms from Oklahoma and Kansas up to the Dakotas and Minnesota.

"Considering that we're probably going to be close to 600 (tornado) reports already this year, this season is probably going to be one of the busier we've had since 1998-99," said Dan McCarthy, severe-weather meteorologist at the federal Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla.

The annual average for the past 10 years is 1,272 tornadoes.

This year's 69 fatalities are more than twice the usual number by this date and the worst of the season may just be starting. The prediction center says May averages the most tornadoes each year, followed by June and April.

Ten people died in this weekend's storms: eight in the Greensburg area and two others in Kansas.

The deadliest tornado day on record was April 3, 1974, when 330 people died on the first day of a "super outbreak" of 148 tornadoes in 13 states.

This year, "We've had a lot of bad luck in terms of where these tornadoes have hit," Forbes said, noting twisters that killed six or more people in towns in Florida, Alabama, Texas and Georgia.

Before this weekend, 44 of the first 59 storm fatalities of 2007 were mobile home residents.

The Greensburg tornado was so significant that McCarthy drove from Oklahoma to head a quick-response team to examine the damage and rate the tornado's intensity.

Florida fire situation 'critical,' 1 neighborhood evacuated

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — Wildfire conditions in Florida are considered critical because parts of the state are dry and winds are gusty, state officials said Monday as they monitored a large fire on the east coast and a smaller fire in the Panhandle forced evacuations.

About 20 homes near Freeport in Walton County in the Panhandle were evacuated Monday morning as a 300-acre fire threatened the neighborhood, said Jim Harrell, a spokesman for the state Division of Forestry.

With humidity at dangerously low levels in much of the inland part of the state and winds gusting over 20 mph in many places, "conditions are critical," Harrell said.

"It's getting interesting and I don't think it's going to get better soon," added state Emergency Management Director Craig Fugate.

Causing the most concern was a large 6,100 acre fire about 4 miles west of Ormond Beach on Florida's east coast.

Harrell said tankers were dropping fire retardant in an area between that fire and a subdivision called Rima Ridge, hoping to keep the blaze away from homes.

"They're ready for evacuation on short notice, but so far they're still in their homes," Harrell said.

Firefighters were also working another large fire, covering almost 900 acres between Eustis and DeLand in central Florida.

In all, there were almost 200 separate fires burning Monday in Florida, covering about 19,000 acres. Nearly 50 of those started on Sunday, about half of them caused by lightning from a line of thunderstorms that moved through the state too quickly to offer much relief in the way of rain, Harrell said.

So far, no injuries have been reported in any of the fires.

SRI LANKA: Over 120,000 affected by severe flooding in west

COLOMBO, 7 May 2007 (IRIN) - "Weather Gods Show No Mercy!" That is how the headline of Saturday's edition of Colombo's "The Island" newspaper described the torrential rains on 3 and 4 May that flooded much of western Sri Lanka.

In Colombo, the capital city, routine commerce and most vehicular traffic, including some railway lines, came to a standstill and a large sinkhole developed in one of the city's main corridors, the Galle Road, causing massive traffic delays and diversions.

Voicing a common complaint, Sunil Lai Upali, one of the city's numerous three-wheel scooter taxi drivers said: "I just couldn't move with the water so deep." He bemoaned the fact he made little money during the two days of rain. "It was a metre-and-a-half-deep in so many places! It was just too dangerous for me to work," he said.

It was particularly dangerous in four districts in the south and west of the country - Colombo, Galle, Kaluthara and Gampha. Colombo received nearly 10 inches of rain and Galle over seven during the two-day period, according to Sri Lanka's Department of Meteorology.

The Inter Agency Standing Committee (IASC) reported that the government's Disaster Management Centre (DMC) under the direction of Maj-Gen Gamini Hetiarachi is leading efforts to assess, respond to, and mitigate the effects of, the floods. The immediate needs were for equipment to clear canals, water pumps and various non-food items.

Death toll 15

Hetiarachi told IRIN on 6 May: "Fifteen people have lost their lives in the floods and over 121,000 are affected." He said the deaths were due either to drowning, landslides, or electrocution. Seven died in Galle district, three in Colombo, three in Kaluthara and two in Gampaha. Another nine were reported injured.

Homes damaged, destroyed

The flooding, combined at times with high winds, resulted in 280 destroyed homes and 1,266 damaged ones, according to initial assessments by the DMC. Galle district sustained the most destruction with 247 houses destroyed and 813 damaged.

According to the Emergency Operations Centre of the DMC, of those affected or displaced 51,301 are in Colombo district, 40,088 in Gampaha and 17,486 in Galle. Some 16 camps and welfare centres in Colombo District and 14 in Gampha are being used temporarily to house displaced people, according to the DMC.

Hetiarachi said: "The government is currently assessing the situation and allocating money to government agents to provide food and other provisions to those in need." According to the acting director of the National Disaster Relief Service, Aarath Perera, 5 million rupees (US$50,000) are being sent to district authorities to assist flood victims.

UN aid

Hetiarchi said the humanitarian community is helping as well. "The UNDP [United Nations Development Programme] Emergency Fund has provided 100,000 rupees ($1,000) to Kaluthara and 100,000 rupees to Gampha district for the hiring of backhoes to clear canals." He said sandbags were being placed along the Kelani river in Gampha district to keep it from flooding the town of Kelaniya.

Poor drainage

According to the DMC director, and now most news reports, the principal reason for the recent flooding is poor drainage. "The waterways and canals in urban areas are blocked by debris and garbage and not maintained," Hetiarachi said. "And many poor people build their small houses on low-lying areas that quickly get filled with water."

Sri Lanka occasionally experiences damaging floods, most recently in mid-January 2007, when heavy rains in south and central Sri Lanka caused numerous landslides and 18 deaths and temporarily displaced some 30,000 to 40,000 people.

2007-05-06T00:06:00.000-04:00

Kansas, Oklahoma in for ‘another long night’

GREENSBURG, Kan. - A fresh wave of tornadoes ripped through southwest Kansas on Saturday evening, a day after a tornado all but destroyed this town, killing nine and injuring dozens more.

The National Weather Service said it had received reports “well into the double digits” of twisters touching down in six counties.

“It looks like it’s going to be another long night,” said meteorologist Mike Umscheid.

A series of half-mile wide “wedge” tornadoes — similar to the one that devastated Greensburg on Friday night — was seen in the area, Umscheid said.

“We’re going to expect quite a lot of damage,” he said.

Earlier, emergency crews called off the search in Greensburg for victims as the weather deteriorated again.

Umscheid said the slow-moving storm system would likely to spawn severe weather early into Sunday morning.

"I wouldn't say they are small tornadoes, they just haven't hit anything yet," a state police officer in Wichita told NBC News.

Rescuers in Kansas spent the day hurrying through the wreckage from Friday’s giant tornado, which left little standing in Greensburg beyond the local pub.

Friday’s weather was blamed for nine deaths in the region, a figure authorities feared could rise even before the latest twisters.

Town a near-total loss
City Administrator Steve Hewitt estimated 95 percent of the town of 1,500 was destroyed and predicted rescue efforts could take days as survivors could be trapped in basements and under rubble.

Among the only structures that survived was the Bar H Tavern, the town’s lone bar. It was briefly converted into a morgue.

Survivors of the storm picked over the remnants of their homes and possessions, still dazed by the twister’s strength and scope.

Jackie Robertson and her family collected wedding photos, a wallet and other belongings from the debris that had been her home.

Robertson, her husband and a friend stayed in a cellar Friday night when the storms struck.

“My heart just aches for everyone,” she said. “It is so surreal. This is where I live.”

The town, previously best known as the home of the world’s largest hand-dug well — 32 feet in diameter, 109 feet deep when it was finished in 1888 — was a nightmare of splintered homes and smashed vehicles, the air redolent with the smell of sap from trees stripped of bark.

“We want everybody to know, and I plead to the American people as well as the people here in Kansas, this is a huge catastrophe that has happened to our small town,” Hewitt said. “All my downtown is gone. My home is gone. My staff’s homes are gone. And we’ve got to find a way to get this to work and come to work every day and get this thing back on its feet. It’s going to be tough.”

A monster storm
Residents said they heard the tornado warning sirens — a common feature of towns in “Tornado Alley” — about 20 minutes before Friday’s storm hit.

Jose Peraza said he was driving his oil rig into town when he heard the siren and driving hail started pounding the area. He pulled over and hid with several other people in a convenience store freezer.

He said the storm ripped the side off the freezer, and when he came out he found the twister had thrown his truck — weighed down by 40,000 pounds of oil — “like nothing.”

The dead included eight in Kiowa County, where Greensburg is located, and one in nearby Stafford County, said Sharon Watson, a spokeswoman for the Kansas Adjutant General’s Department.

“We continue to find folks and this will go on for a good couple days — the rescue itself,” Hewitt said. “I mean, the debris is just unbelievable. Even if you are in a basement, I mean your home is collapsed, and we’ve got to find a way to get to you.”

2007-05-02T13:25:00.000-04:00

Arctic melt worse than predictions

(CNN) -- Arctic sea ice is melting at a rate far quicker than predicted by climate change computer models and could disappear completely before the middle of the century, scientists have warned.

The study, published in the latest edition of the journal Geophysical Research Letters, found that the actual rate at which summer sea ice had shrunk per decade during the past 50 years was more than three times faster than an average of 18 of the most highly-regarded climate simulations.

Retreating Arctic ice is considered a key indicator of the pace of global warming by environmentalists, and one that could have devastating knock-on repercussions for the wider climate, including warmer oceans and rising sea levels.

Declining ice levels also poses a threat to Arctic wildlife including polar bears, walruses and ringed seals.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which releases the third of three reports into the causes, consequences and mitigation of global warming in Thailand this week, the Arctic could be ice-free in summer by the latter part of the 21st century.

But the research, conducted by the U.S.-based National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the University of Colorado's National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), demonstrates that the 18 models on which the IPCC has based its current recommendations could already be out of date -- and that the retreat of the ice could already be 30 years ahead of the IPCC's worst case scenario.

"This suggests that current model projections may in fact provide a conservative estimate of future Arctic change, and that the summer Arctic sea ice may disappear considerably earlier than IPCC projections," said NSIDC's Julienne Stroeve who led the study.

Climate change models of Arctic sea ice cover in September, the month when ice is usually at its minimum, suggest an average loss of 2.5 percent of ice cover per decade from 1953 to 2003. The worst case simulated by an individual model predicted a decade-on-decade reduction of 5.4 percent.

Yet when scientists studied observable data for the same period, including shipping logs, aerial photos and satellite images, they discovered the actual figure for ice loss from 1953 until 2006 to be 7.8 percent.

Furthermore, the rate of deterioration seemed to be accelerating, topping nine percent per decade since 1979.

The discrepancy between computer modelling and reality is most likely due to the fact that simulations have failed to fully take into account the impact of increased levels of carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere, the researchers believe.

Models have typically attributed half of the loss of ice to greenhouse gases and half to natural variations in the climate cycle. But now, many believe the first factor could be playing a significantly greater role.

Earlier this month NSICD scientists reported that winter sea ice cover in the Arctic was just 14.7 million square kilometers (5.7m square miles) -- slightly better than the all-time low 14.5m square kilometers (5.6m square miles) in 2006 -- but well short of the 15.7m average for 1979-2000.

The Arctic is especially prone to global warming because of the dangers of the so-called "feedback loop" caused by melting ice.

While ice reflects around 80 percent of the sun's heat, having a cooling effect, blue sea water can absorb up to 95 percent of solar radiation, warming up the sea and accelerating the melting process further.

"While the ice is disappearing faster than the computer models indicate, both observations and the models point in the same direction: the Arctic is losing ice at an increasingly rapid pace and the impact of greenhouse gases is growing," said co-author Marika Holland of NCAR.

Brush Fires Threaten Central Florida Homes

Two major fires continued to scorch dry brush across Central Florida on Wednesday morning. The two blazes have burned over 1,500 acres so far, WESH 2 News reported.

In Lake County, a brush fire is burning northeast of Mount Dora near Jericho Road and Royal Trails Road. Homeowners spent the night watching the flames and trying to protect their property.

Fire officials said brush fires tend to relax during the overnight hours, but in both instances the flames continued to spread because of the very dry conditions.

At least 10 homes along Jericho Road were threatened on Tuesday night, and the owners of the homes said they're exhausted and tired of the smoke.

"We got lucky. You can see down there how bad it was," Belinda Willis said.

Willis got a panicked call from her son on Tuesday to rush home because of the blaze. They built their home just four years ago.

"It took out our whole back yard, part of the middle, this over here, the kid's trampoline and the basketball hoop, all gone," Willis said.

Willis' home was one of 10 in the Royal Trails subdivision that was threatened by the fire that started burning 5 to 10 acres, but spread to over 450 acres during the night.

The fire that came so near Willis's home spread rapidly last night and at one point threatened ten homes. But, as of Wednesday morning, even though the fire was only 50 percent contained, the threat appeared to have died down, officials said.

"The conditions are so dry that it doesn't take much of a spark to start an ignition, especially in some of these light fuels we have in this area," Division of Forestry spokesman Don Ruths said.

Firefighters worked on the ground and in the air, successfully protecting the homes, but nobody will rest easy in the area anytime soon.

"I'm extremely worried. We just went through the hurricanes a couple of years ago that were really bad, and now we have fire trying to get to us," Willis said.

Flagler Fire Crews Battle 700-Acre Blaze
Firefighters in Flagler County are battling a growing brush fire near the Flagler-Volusia county line on Wednesday morning.

Officials with the Division of Forestry said the fire has jumped a number of the fire lines they set up during the overnight hours, and they believe someone intentionally or accidentally started the fire that's been burning since Tuesday afternoon.

Authorities evacuated three homes that were in danger because of the blaze, and they're keeping a close eye on six additional homes. There was also some concern about the fire reaching a power grid.

More than 60 firefighters are battling the flames from the ground and air.

2007-04-29T13:06:00.000-04:00

Earthquake hits Solomon Islands

PORT MORESBY, Papua New Guinea - A moderate earthquake toppled several houses Sunday in the Solomon Islands near where a quake and tsunami killed 52 people earlier this month, an official said.

The U.S. Geological Survey reported that a magnitude 5.4 quake struck mid-afternoon local time, 25 miles southeast of the region's main town of Gizo and 6 miles beneath the earth's crust. The quake was too small to pose a tsunami risk.

Provincial government member Danny Kennedy said there were reports of houses being toppled on the island of Mono in the western Solomons, but he said Gizo appeared to have suffered little damage. There were no reports of casualties.

"It certainly shook us quite a lot," Kennedy said.

A magnitude 8.1 quake and tsunami on April 2 killed 52 people, including 33 on Gizo island.

Huge Georgia wildfire ignites spot fires

WAYCROSS, Ga. - A few spot fires ignited Saturday afternoon across a highway from a massive wildfire and firefighters struggled to put them out before they could spread in the miles of tinder-dry forest beyond.

Several rural homes near the new fires were being evacuated Saturday evening, Georgia Forestry Commission spokesman Eric Mosley said.

Shifting winds and drought-parched forest and swampland have fueled the growth of the vast fire, which has consumed nearly 100 square miles in southeast Georgia since it ignited April 16.

Firefighters were patrolling a 16-mile stretch of U.S. 1, which links Waycross with Jacksonville, Fla., and set controlled burns to prevent the blaze from spreading into acres of drought-stricken forest beyond the road. The highway remained closed.

“We are still in the throes of a very, very difficult effort and we anticipate this fire burning intensely for at least another week — and maybe another month,” said Buzz Weiss, spokesman for the Georgia Emergency Management Agency.

Weary residents welcomed the shifting wind, which blew the smoke from the towns and into the swampland Saturday morning.

About half the blaze was under control, emergency responders said. A separate smaller blaze ignited near U.S. 301 after a passing train leaked fuel, but Weiss said firefighters have contained all but 10 percent of that fire.

“Right now we just have a bad situation where we have no rain, extremely low humidity and we’re dealing on a day-to-day basis with wind gusts and shifts,” Weiss said. “Those are the real recipes for a fire disaster — and that’s what we’re coping with.”

2007-04-27T18:15:00.000-04:00

Midwest storms cause injuries, flip police car

LAPORTE, Ind. - Storms packing winds strong enough to toss a police cruiser over a fence spawned apparent tornadoes that leveled houses and downed power lines in several states.

The storms buffeted parts of Indiana, Tennessee, Illinois and Ohio on Thursday. Tornadoes apparently touched down in Tennessee and Illinois, officials in those states said.

Debris injured at least seven people in the northeastern Tennessee town of New Tazewell. At least six homes were destroyed, and as many as 400 homes — about one in every five homes in Claiborne County — lost power, officials said.

Jason Ellis said his family fled their mobile home when the wind started rocking it back and forth.

“It felt like the top of the house was fixing to come off. I just didn’t want to chance it,” he said.

By Friday morning, electricity was restored to all but about two dozen homes, and roads had already been cleared of fallen limbs, said David Breeding, the county’s deputy emergency management director.

About 100 miles to the southwest, a tornado touched down outside Crossville, Tenn., damaging buildings and peeling the roof off an unoccupied trailer, authorities said. No injuries were reported there.

The National Weather Service sent teams Friday to both areas to confirm tornadoes. Authorities said they expected emergency crews would find more damaged homes and buildings on Friday.

In Plainfield, Ill., a small tornado tore off parts of a nursing home’s roof, flipped over a minivan and damaged several homes but no injuries were reported, authorities said.

In Indiana, a LaPorte County sheriff’s department patrol car was tossed over a 3-foot-high fence, said Sheriff Mike Mollenhauer.

“I don’t think I would have believed it unless I’d seen it,” he said.

In rural Brown County in southwestern Ohio, Donna Young’s front porch was blown about 50 feet from her house, she said.

“It was a nice, railed, country covered porch,” she said. The storm “came from the south and just picked the porch to take out.”

2007-04-26T12:22:00.000-04:00

Anti-Americanism: Your questions answered

2007-04-25T13:42:00.000-04:00

Tornado near Texas-Mexico border

EAGLE PASS, Texas — At least 10 people were killed, more than 150 were injured and hundreds of buildings were leveled when powerful tornadoes tore through twin border cities in Texas and Mexico.

Rescue and recovery efforts resumed early Wednesday in Eagle Pass, Texas, and Piedras Negras, Mexico after the tornadoes destroyed two empty elementary schools, a church, businesses and homes. Several mobile homes were missing.

The twister picked up one mobile home and slammed it into an elementary school Tuesday night, killing a family of five, Eagle Pass City Councilman Ramsey English Cantu said. Debris from the two buildings was indistinguishable early Wednesday.

Eagle Pass police Officer Ezekiel Navjas said he arrived at the wreckage of Rosita Valley Elementary School Tuesday night and was immediately handed the bloodied body of a 4- to 6-year-old girl.

"It was a whole family, and they were all together, probably like they were huddling," Navjas said. The mobile home held the girl, her parents and two other adult relatives.

Bricks from caved-in walls were scattered around the campus, broken water pipes were spewing water and the metal roof was violently twisted.

"You go by and you see the school areas and you can see where some of the kids' backpacks and stuff are literally outside, and it just hurts to see your community in such a way," Cantu said.

The tornado ripped up an area of about 4 square miles and officials asked the state to declare the region a disaster area, Maverick County Judge Jose Arandas said.

Gov. Rick Perry was scheduled to arrive in the devastated area at about 3 p.m. to survey the damage.

Across the Rio Grande in Piedras Negras, three people were killed, 87 injured and 300 homes were damaged. About 1,000 people sought refuge in shelters. Three years ago, a tornado killed 32 in Piedras Negras.

"It's the worst I've seen," said Eagle Pass resident Ricardo Tijerina, who rode out the storm with his six children in a house near the school. Tijerina, 38, said he watched as the storm destroyed a mobile home across the street.

"It was pretty scary; I saw the trailer when it blew apart," said Tijerina, who said all the mobile home residents survived.

One of those killed died in a house, but few details were available, Cantu said. Another victim who was taken to a San Antonio hospital died Wednesday, according to Maverick County Judge Jose Aranda.

"Numerous homes in that area and businesses, small businesses, what we consider the mom and pop stores that have been in this community for years, a lot of them have been destroyed," Cantu said.

About 150 rescue workers, including Border Patrol and National Guardsmen deployed to help with border security, were searching the Eagle Pass area for survivors. Workers marked the homes with spray-painted "X's" to show they'd been searched. The symbols were similar to those used to mark thousands of New Orleans homes in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Navjas said he and other rescuers worked as long as they could Tuesday night. He finally went home for a couple hours of sleep after his flashlight went out at about 4 a.m.

"I really didn't want to leave," he said.

Officials said 76 people were taken to Fort Duncan Medical Center, Eagle Pass' only hospital. Four were admitted, four were transferred to hospitals in San Antonio and Del Rio in critical condition, 32 were treated and discharged, the rest were still being evaluated, he said.

"The hospital in the early stages was being overrun, but they had called in additional doctors and were able to take care of business," Eagle Pass Mayor Chad Foster said.

School was canceled Wednesday in Eagle Pass, a border city of about 26,000 about 150 miles southwest of San Antonio.

In North Texas, streets flooded and roofs peeled off homes Tuesday afternoon, followed by another line of severe storms about six hours later. Tornado sirens rang in several counties, and drivers and residents were rescued from flooded cars and suburban neighborhoods.

In Denton County, heavy winds blew the metal roof off a restaurant and damaged several mobile homes and a commercial building under construction, said Roland Asebedo, assistant chief for Denton County's Emergency Services. No injuries were reported.

Fort Worth-based American Airlines had about 200 flights canceled because of weather in Dallas, spokesman Billy Sanez said. The airline also diverted about 80 flights bound for Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport to other airports, including San Antonio.

Ken Capps, vice president of public affairs at DFW airport, said the airport's flight control tower was temporarily evacuated Tuesday night but the airport remained open. Weather canceled 160 of about 950 departing flights Tuesday, and cots were provided for stranded passengers, airport officials said.

Wildfire forces evacuations in Georgia

WAYCROSS, Ga. — Dozens of residents evacuated their homes for several hours early Wednesday after a wildfire jumped a road and spread toward two small communities.

"It looked like it was snowing with all the ash falling. You could feel the heat," said Darryl Cribbs, 44, who packed up his family in Braganza after sheriff's deputies came to their door around 1 a.m. "They said as soon as we left they were going to bring in tanker trucks and try to save the house."

The wildfire spread rapidly Tuesday night and early Wednesday near the Okefenokee Swamp Park, fueled by dense and dry trees and brush.

A 35-mile stretch of U.S. 1 was briefly closed to traffic but reopened when the danger passed, said Tracy Smith, a spokeswoman for the Georgia Emergency Management Agency.

Over the past nine days, wildfires have burned about 67 square miles of forest parched by drought in southeast Georgia and destroyed 18 homes.

More than 1,000 Ware County residents have been forced to evacuate, and 5,000 others have been urged to leave because of health risks associated with the smoke.

A top concern Wednesday morning was a blaze that crossed state Route 177 and was threatening Braganza and Astoria, Smith said. Waycross, a city of about 15,300 resident three miles to the north, was not in immediate danger, though thick smoke blanketed the city, she said.

Firefighters tried to slow the wildfire by igniting underbrush ahead of it.

At a Red Cross shelter in Waycross, Curtis Cowart said his family had been warned twice last week that they might have to evacuate. They had already unpacked valuables they planned to take with them by the time they were told to flee on Wednesday.

"I wasn't going to leave, but I looked and saw the flames and the smoke, and it looked like it was getting closer" said Cowart, 61, whose property near Astoria backs onto the swamp. "If it comes through those woods, I don't know if they can stop it."

About a dozen area residents gathered Tuesday and nervously watched the orange glow from the fire behind the trees.

"I wasn't scared last week, but this is scary," said Kelli Lee, 33, who said she has kept valuables packed for the past week in case she has to evacuate. "I know I won't sleep tonight, that's for sure."

The fire started April 16 when a downed power line ignited tinder-dry trees in Ware County. Officials said Tuesday the blaze was 50% contained by fire breaks plowed along its perimeter.

But winds have kept shifting direction over the past week, threatening to cause pockets of smoldering embers to flare back to life.

2007-04-24T15:54:00.000-04:00

Severe Storms Blow Through Pittsburgh, Surrounding Areas

More than a dozen homes and businesses were damaged Monday night after a line of severe storms moved through the city. The National Weather Service issued a tornado warning for Mercer, Venango and Butler counties at about 8 p.m.

Residents told Channel 4 Action News roofs blew off some homes in Transfer, Mercer County. At one fencing business, model sheds were blown over.

As of 10 p.m., 1,000 Penn Power customers didn't have electricity but a spokesman said crews would be working through the night to get it back on.

In O'Hara Township, a tree split down the middle and smashed through a baby's bedroom window, sending shards of glass everywhere.

Authorities said the tree stopped about 15 feet away from where Hayden Strittmatter was sleeping.

They said insulation was hanging over his crib and pieces of drywall were scattered on top of him.

"I had heard thunder and lightening but for about five minutes, there wasn't a sound," said Hayden's father, Jeff Strittmatter. "It was as still as could be. I just dozed off when it was like a bomb was dropped. The next thing I knew, I was out of bed running towards my son's room. My wife beat me to it. He was in the crib, wasn't even crying. He was fine."

The family next door suffered a similar scenario. Part of the same tree fell in to a bedroom there where the home's owner was sleeping. He was not hurt.

Police said they haven't received any reports of injuries.

Torrential rains destroy 1,300 homes in south China

BEIJING, April 25 (Reuters) - Sudden torrential downpours in China's southeastern province of Guangdong destroyed more than 1,300 houses and forced 20,000 people from their homes, the official Xinhua agency reported late on Tuesday.

The rainfall and thunderstorms also delayed flights to the province's largest airport and destroyed thousands of acres of crops, the paper said, adding that nearly 20 cm (7.9 inches) of rain were recorded in some areas over Monday and Tuesday.

A recent national assessment of the likely impact of global warming said the country's south could face more flooding as temperatures rise.

Last year, China's warmest since 1951, the country was struck by an unusually high number of natural disasters, including a series of storms and typhoons.

Every year, 400 million people and 50 million hectares (125 million acres) of farmland are affected by natural disasters in China, with economic losses reaching 1 to 3 percent of gross domestic product.

2007-04-20T13:01:00.000-04:00

Tsunami warning lifted after Japan quake

TOKYO - Three strong earthquakes rattled southwestern Japan islands on Friday, but there were no immediate reports of injury or damage.

Japan's Meteorological Agency at one point warned that a small tsunami was possible, but later said no such waves had developed.

The strongest quake, with a preliminary magnitude of 6.7, struck at 10:46 a.m. Two other quakes, each with preliminary magnitudes of 6.2, struck shortly before and then after the larger temblor, the agency said.

All the quakes struck near the island of Miyakojima, 1,130 miles southwest of Tokyo, part of the Ryukyu islands chain that stretches southwest toward Taiwan.

Japan is one of the world's most earthquake-prone countries.

2007-04-18T15:10:00.000-04:00

Flooding, power outages still plague Northeast

PORTLAND, Maine - Utility crews cut their way through downed trees Wednesday to restore service to thousands of customers still without power since the huge weekend storm battered the East Coast.

Communities from New Jersey to Maine were still coping with stream flooding caused by the storm, which dumped more than 8 inches of rain in places, along with coastal flooding brought on by astronomical high tides and heavy surf.

Seventeen deaths were blamed on the weather system.

New Hampshire safety officials made plans Wednesday to breach the 19th century Hayden Mill Pond dam at Hollis to relieve the pressure of high water from the storm and avert a failure. A dozen families living near the six-acre reservoir were evacuated Tuesday evening and National Guard troops closed part of a highway as a precaution.

More than 50,000 businesses and residences remained without power Wednesday in Maine, where Central Maine Power Co. was being helped by repair crews from neighboring New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and as far away as Pennsylvania.

'Huge number of trees' down
Utility officials warned that some people might be without power until the end of the week.

“It’s a huge number of trees that are down, so it’s a big job cutting those away,” said CMP spokesman John Carroll. “Plus there are 250 broken poles. That’s an enormous number of poles.”

Utilities in New Hampshire reported nearly 19,000 homes and businesses still had no electricity Wednesday and said some might not be reconnected until the weekend.

In many areas, road damage and fallen trees blocked repair crews’ access, said New Hampshire Electric Cooperative spokesman Seth Wheeler.

“There are 18 different tree crews we’ve hired ... just clearing trees first before the line crews can get in there and do construction,” Wheeler said.

About 1,700 New Jersey residents were in emergency shelters Wednesday because of flooding, up slightly from the day before, as more rivers crested. Rescue crews went house to house by boat in a flooded section of Fairfield asking if residents of any of about three dozen homes needed to be evacuated, said State Police Sgt. Stephen Jones.

“The numbers are fluctuating, actually going down in some places as folks go home, but rising in others as people who had been holding out just give in and go to a shelter,” Jones said.

Dozens of roads closed
More than 80 New Hampshire roads remained closed by high water or damage, said Department of Transportation spokesman Bill Boynton. Most were expected to be reopened soon, but it could take weeks to repair landslide damage to Route 101 in Wilton, he said.

New Hampshire Gov. John Lynch had asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency to start a preliminary damage assessment in all 10 counties to determine the state’s eligibility for federal disaster relief. “Many New Hampshire communities have been overwhelmed by all the flooding,” he said.

Swollen rivers in Massachusetts were receding but waves still crashed over sea walls and flooded coastal roads early Wednesday, authorities said.

Two families were evacuated at their own request from oceanfront homes in Duxbury, Mass., late Tuesday but were able to return Wednesday morning, fire Capt. Skip Chandler said. Their homes had knee-deep water on the ground floor, he said. “Thank goodness it wasn’t worse,” he said.

Most roads had reopened in the suburbs north of New York City, as homeowners in Westchester County piled water-ruined carpets and furniture in heaps outside.

On Fire Island, the barrier island along the south side of New York’s Long Island, some homes were clinging to narrow beaches atop rickety pilings because the storm’s waves had scoured the sand out from beneath them.

“There’s nothing I can do,” said homeowner Bill Raymond, 55. “You’ve got to keep your fingers crossed.”

Colombia volcano erupts, thousands flee

NEIVA, Colombia - Thousands of people were evacuated after a long-dormant volcano erupted late Tuesday and again early Wednesday, provoking avalanches and floods that swept away houses and bridges.

The Nevado del Huila volcano's eruptions were its first on record since Colombia was colonized by the Spanish 500 years ago.

There are about 10,000 people living in the area around the volcano, and about 3,500 had been evacuated, Luz Amanda Pulido, director of the national disaster office, told The Associated Press after flying over the volcano in southwest Colombia.

There were no reports of deaths or injuries.

The eruption sent an avalanche of rocks down the volcano's sides and into the Paez and Simbola rivers, causing them to flood.

"The bridges were swept away, the highway used by the indigenous in the zone was destroyed for various kilometers (miles) and the problem we have now is the lack of a route to deliver goods and medicines to the population," Police Gen. Orlando Paez said.

Experts were not ruling out more eruptions.

"The seismic activity remains light but permanent, and we can't rule out another bigger event in the next hours or days," said Mario Ballesteros, director of the government's Institute for Geology and Mining.

The Nevado del Huila, which is topped with a crown of ice, is Colombia's third-highest peak at 18,484 feet. Located 170 miles southwest of Bogota, it became active again in March with a series of internal rumblings.

In 1985, the town of Armero was wiped from the map and 25,000 people were killed when another volcano, the Nevado del Ruiz, exploded and set off a series of mudslides. It was Colombia's worst natural disaster.

2007-04-15T22:55:00.000-04:00

Streets are shown underwater in Danville, W.Va., Sunday, April 15, 2007, after overnight storms flooded many out of their homes in Southern West Virginia. A powerful nor'easter pounded the East with wind and pouring rain Sunday, grounding airlines and threatening to create some of the worst coastal flooding in 14 years. (AP Photo/Bob Bird)

...let me tell you something about living in America...

Storm causes flooding, canceled flights

NEW YORK - A nor'easter battered the East with strong wind and pouring rain Sunday, grounding hundreds of airline flights, downing power lines and threatening severe coastal flooding.

The storm flooded people out of their homes in the middle of the night in West Virginia and trapped others. Some New Jersey shore residents evacuated, and officials in Connecticut urged some residents along the Long Island Sound to do the same. Inland areas from eastern New York to Maine faced a threat of heavy snow.

One person was killed in South Carolina as dozens of mobile homes were destroyed or damaged by wind. The storm system already had been blamed for five deaths on Friday in Kansas and Texas.

Storm warnings and watches were posted all along the East Coast, with coastal flood watches from Maryland to Maine through at least Monday morning.

More than 5.5 inches of rain fell in the New York region Sunday, shattering the record for the date of 1.8 inches set in 1906, according to the National Weather Service. Weather service meteorologist Gary Conte said Sunday night's high tide was likely to bring coastal flooding on Long Island and in parts of New York City.

Connecticut's emergency management commissioner, James Thomas, was expecting most of the problems to come Sunday night with the high tide.

"We are prepared to deliver sandbags, assist with an evacuation, or whatever we need to do," Thomas said. "We're kind of all sitting back, getting prepared and hoping it doesn't get as bad as it has been in different parts of the country."

In New York, flooding stalled traffic along parkways and forced residents in at least one Queens neighborhood to paddle through streets in boats. In the coastal Seagate section of Brooklyn, which suffered major flooding in a December 1992 nor'easter, residents placed sandbags in the streets.

"Everybody remembers that (1992 storm)," resident Jose Serrano (news, bio, voting record) said. "Everybody's home got ruined. Some houses got underwater. It was up to your stomach."

Airlines canceled more than 400 flights at the New York area's three major airports, said Steve Coleman, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Kennedy Airport, on the wind-exposed south side of Long Island, had sustained wind of 30 to 35 mph with gusts to 48 mph, Conte said.

Fire Island Ferries suspended service to the island, off the south shore of Long Island, and the Metro-North Railroad suspended service on its Harlem and New Haven lines for several hours because of flooding in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx.

The Coast Guard had warned mariners to head for port because wind up to 55 mph was expected to generate seas up to 20 feet high, Petty Officer Etta Smith said in Boston.

A tornado touched down in the central part of South Carolina, killing one person, seriously injuring four others and cutting a 300-yard swath of destruction in Sumter County, officials said. A second tornado touched down near Lynchburg.

The storm caused flash flooding in the mountains of southern West Virginia, where emergency services personnel rescued nearly two dozen people from homes and cars in Logan and Boone counties early Sunday. Two people were unaccounted for and others were trapped in their homes.

"Our houses sit in the middle of the hill, and it's all around us. I'm surrounded, it's like a lake completely around us," said Samantha Walker, 29, who was visiting her grandmother in Matheny. "We can't get out even if we wanted to get out."

The storm forced the postponement of six major league baseball games Sunday — the most in a single day in a decade — and gave runners in Monday's Boston Marathon something to worry about besides Heartbreak Hill. The race-day forecast called for 3 to 5 inches of rain, start temperatures in the 30s and wind gusts of up to 25 mph.

Heavy rain and thunderstorms extended from Florida up the coast to New England on Sunday. Wind gusted to 71 mph at Charleston, S.C., the weather service said.

Major flooding was forecast in parts of eastern and central Pennsylvania, where some rivers already were above flood state Sunday night.

Thousands of electricity customers lost power in states including New York, Connecticut, New Jersey and North Carolina.

In New Jersey, 16 roadways throughout the state were either partially or fully closed and traffic lights were malfunctioning in some areas, Kris Kolluri, state Transportation Commissioner, said late Sunday afternoon.

Some residents of low-lying areas along the New Jersey shore packed up to leave.

"This is going to be bad," Shaun Rheinheimer said as he moved furniture to higher spots at his house on New Jersey's Cedar Bonnet Island.

Rain dumped 3 inches on eastern Kentucky, where a 50-foot section of highway collapsed near Pikeville, said State Police Sgt. Jamey Kidd. No vehicles were caught by the collapse, he said.

In central Florida, a tornado damaged mobile homes in Dundee but no injuries were reported, police said.

2007-04-13T23:08:00.000-04:00

'Once every 20 years' spring storm heads East

ALBANY, N.Y. - A spring storm dropping snow and rain on the central Plains on Friday before speeding toward the East Coast, where it was expected to create a messy weekend. New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer said the state is preparing for heavy rain, snow, high winds and flooding into early next week.

"It is imperative that the public be aware of the potential problems associated with this storm and plan accordingly," Spitzer said of the expected Nor'easter storm.

The state's National Guard is being alerted and prepared for the storm and the possibility of impassible roads and power losses.

The National Weather Service warned that several inches of rain is possible along with winds gusting to 40 mph or harder starting Saturday night.

In the Long Island area, the rain and some snow could meet the spring tide, which would mean a tidal surge of just 1 or 2 feet could result in coastal flooding.

"Even though it may be spring, we need to take this warning seriously and be sure to take appropriate precautions," Spitzer said.

Forecaster Brian Korty said the entire eastern half of the country would feel the brunt of it in the coming days, calling it the kind of storm that happens “once every 20 years.”

Snow, twisters
On Friday, up to 8 inches of snow fell over parts of western Kansas by early afternoon, making driving tougher and forcing some schools to close early. Southeastern Colorado was expecting to end up with no more than 7 inches — far less than the 18 inches initially forecast in some places.

Glum predictions had led Colorado legislators to take Friday off, and United Airlines had canceled 120 flights in Denver, but operations had returned to normal by Friday morning.

As the storm moved east, tornadoes were possible in east Texas, northern Louisiana and southwest Arkansas on Friday and Saturday, the National Weather Service said.

The storm could then bring rain and 25 mph wind to the Carolinas by late Saturday before hitting the Northeast with heavy snow or rain by Sunday, the weather service said. Forecasters also warned of possible flooding.

The storm’s combination of snow, rain and high wind was unusual for this time of year, said Korty.

It follows an earlier system that grounded hundreds of flights in the Midwest on Wednesday before delivering up to a foot fresh snow to northern New England on Friday.

At least seven traffic deaths were blamed on that storm.

At least one Eastern ski resort that had closed for the season changed course and reopened for the weekend — stretching out a season that began late because of a lack of powder.

“Better late than never,” said Chris Lenois, spokesman for Mount Snow in West Dover, Vt., which got just under a foot of new snow. “... There’s no bare spots on the mountain.”

2007-04-12T22:48:00.000-04:00

Powerful winds wreak havoc across Los Angeles

LOS ANGELES (AFP) - Powerful winds wreaked havoc across Los Angeles on Thursday, fanning brush fires near one of the city's most exclusive neighborhoods and knocking out power to thousands of homes, officials said.

One multi-million dollar home was completely gutted and three more suffered damage, one severely, after a wind-whipped fire erupted near Beverly Hills, fire officials said, while around 76,000 households suffered power cuts.

The fire tore through around 35 acres (14 hectares) of tinder-dry brush, driven by winds in excess of 50 miles (80 kilometers) per hour, Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman Ron Myers told local broadcaster KCAL 9.

Television footage showed one large house in the upscale Beverly Glen district next to Beverly Hills completely destroyed by the blaze, which broke out at around 1:00 pm local time (2000 GMT).

"We have two homes with serious damage while two more have suffered what looks like roof damage at this stage," Myers said.

Around 200 firefighters had been deployed to tackle the fire, with aerial support from helicopters which dumped water on the flames.

There were no immediate reports of any injuries.

Meanwhile local power companies said thousands of homes had suffered outages because of the winds, which also toppled several large trees across Los Angeles and shrouded the city's downtown skyline in clouds of dust.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power said around 63,000 customers across the city were without power, while Southern California Edison officials put their figure at around 13,000.

"Most are due to the wind," LADWP spokeswoman Gale Harris said.

2007-04-08T14:58:00.000-04:00

Cold snap chills Easter weekend in much of U.S.
Two weeks into spring, it’s feeling a lot like Christmas in many areas

ATLANTA - The Rev. Michael Bingham says the cold snap that greeted much of the country over Easter Weekend could have an effect on the musicians performing in a sunrise service at his church Sunday.

Bingham is pastor of Wesley Memorial United Methodist Church in Columbia, S.C., where lows were predicted to be in the low 20s Sunday. He said the service usually held in a courtyard was moved indoors this years.

“Our musicians are worried about their fingers,” he said.

Two weeks into spring, cold temperatures in much of the country have those celebrating Easter this weekend swapping out frills, bonnets and sandals for coats, scarves and socks.

Baseball fans are huddled in blankets, and instead of spring planting, backyard gardeners are bundling their crops.

Record lows predicted
The National Weather Service was predicting record lows Sunday for parts of the Southeast and Midwest, and an unseasonably cold weekend for much of the Northeast. Snow was forecast in parts of Ohio, Michigan and New England.

In Chicago, kids bundled in winter clothing for an Easter egg hunt at the Glessner House Museum. The high temperature in the city reached just 32 degrees on Saturday — matching a record set in 1936 for lowest high temperature. In early April, the Windy City’s average high is 54 degrees.

“It was freezing,” said Clare Schaecher, the museum’s education director. “All the little kids had boots on and some of them were trying to wear their spring dresses. It was awful.”

In Morrison, Colo., officials were forced to cancel an annual sunrise service scheduled for Sunday at the Red Rocks Amphitheater because seats and stairways were covered in ice.

In Washington, D.C., visitors to the nation’s capital awoke Saturday to see cherry blossoms coated with snow. Snow also fell in metro Atlanta Friday night, and even in parts of West Texas and the Texas Panhandle.

Heavier snow in Ohio postponed Saturday’s doubleheader between the Cleveland Indians and Seattle Mariners. The doubleheader had been scheduled because Friday’s home opener in Cleveland was postponed.

In Nashville, Tenn., a forecast low of 22 degrees Sunday would beat the current record set on March 24, 1940, when the morning temperature was 24 degrees.

“We’re going to be in record territory, for sure,” said Jim Moser, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Nashville.

Concern over impact on crops
Farmers were worried about the impact the weather could have on crops. Blueberries could be particularly affected, said Stanley Scarborough, production manager of Sunnyridge Farms, which has fields in Baxley and Homerville, Ga.

Scarborough said the majority of the state’s blueberry crop, a variety called rabbit-eye, is normally harvested around June 1. This year, the bushes bloomed early because of a wave of warm temperatures last week. Scarborough the blueberries are not able to withstand freezing temperatures.

“At 26 or 27 degrees, you would probably lose half of the Georgia crop,” valued at about $20 million to $25 million dollars, Scarborough said.

In Alabama, growers scrambled to protect early blooming peach orchards. State Agriculture Commissioner Ron Sparks said if temperatures stay at 28 to 29 degrees for two hours, there could be “very severe” damage to the crop.

“If we stay there for four hours, we could possibly lose the peach crop,” he said.

2007-04-03T18:37:00.000-04:00

Disasters in central Asia

KABUL, Afghanistan - Avalanches and floods triggered by heavy rains and spring snow melt have killed about 150 people in recent days in the mountains of central Asia, officials said Monday.

In Afghanistan, the death toll reached 88 on Monday and officials said more than half of the country's provinces had flooded, said the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development.

The government has distributed tents, blankets and sandbags to people, but aid agencies were still trying to reach an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 people in remote areas, said Aleem Siddique, spokesman for the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, flooding and avalanches have killed more than 50 people in the past 10 days in northwestern Pakistan, near the border with Afghanistan. The toll includes 38 people who died in weekend avalanches, some of whose bodies were found Monday in the rubble of demolished homes in a remote village, police said.

And in Tajikistan, a woman and her seven children between the ages of 5 and 20 were killed Sunday by an avalanche that swallowed their home, officials said.

The destruction has been most widespread in Afghanistan, where residents say this year's spring rains are heavier than they have seen in years.

The once trickling Kabul river breached its embankments early Monday, destroying 170 homes in the capital, Kabul, Siddique said. Families were evacuated and no casualties were immediately reported.

In central Bamiyan province, 60 homes were reportedly destroyed by an avalanche Sunday night, Siddique said. The area is difficult to access because of flooding, which has reportedly killed about 28 people, he said.

In Panjshir, north of Kabul, six districts have suffered avalanches and floods, killing nine people and destroying 40 homes.

Heavy rains and snow have been lashing Pakistan's rugged Chitral district, about 170 miles northwest of the capital Islamabad, since late last week. In some areas, 6 feet of snow has fallen in the past several days, officials said.

One of the weekend avalanches in Pakistan hit 26 homes in the village of Wasij, killing at least 34 people, police official Ali Khan said Monday. Another avalanche hit a home in the village of Postaki, killing four, he said. And 11 people were missing when an avalanche hit Olas village on Sunday. Police had no information on their fates.

Military helicopters were expected to bring medicine, food and blankets to victims after bad weather prevented previous flights to the remote area, said police official Ijaz Ahmed.

Humanitarian crisis threatens tsunami-hit Solomons

HONIARA, April 3 (Reuters) - A humanitarian crisis triggered by a huge earthquake and tsunami threatened thousands of homeless people in the Solomon Islands on Tuesday as aid began to trickle in and powerful aftershocks rattled the country.

After the first disaster teams reached hard-hit Western and Choiseul Provinces, Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare said aerial patrols had reported "massive and widespread" destruction from Monday's magnitude 8.0 quake and tsunami.

Aerial pictures showed flattened homes and twisted iron roofs on the ground all along the remote coastline as people wandered seemingly aimlessly on roads clogged by debris and boats hurled ashore by powerful waves up to 10 metres high.

The first priority of rescue teams, Sogavare said, would be to restore communications with affected areas amid official estimates that 22 people had been killed and 5,409 left homeless. The death toll was expected to rise.

"We will be needing a mobile hospital facility and I think Australia and New Zealand have kindly offered to come forward on that," Sogavare said.

Australian aid agency Caritas said infection would set in quickly among those injured, with antibiotics in short supply and doctors currently tending to survivors at a hilltop aid station near Gizo, the worst affected town.

"Many water tanks have been damaged, and we also have a problem with food supplies. The gardens have been inundated, so there is a problem with fresh food," Caritas spokeswoman Liz Stone told Australian radio.

Thousands of villagers remained on high ground as more than 27 aftershocks, including a magnitude 6.2 quake, shook the region and scientists warned more tsunamis could follow.

With a state of emergency in force, a police patrol boat carrying food and emergency supplies arrived in Gizo, where schools and a hospital were damaged, and dozens of houses sucked into the sea. At least 13 villages were feared destroyed.

"There are vast tracts of land, many, many islands and very complicated terrain," Deputy Solomons Police Commissioner Peter Marshall told reporters.

The region around Gizo is popular with international tourists and scuba divers for its corals. A New Zealand resident was among the dead, New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark said.

AID ATTEMPT

Gizo dive shop owner Danny Kennedy said workers were trying to clear roads and the local airport of debris to allow military aid flights to bring in tents, medical supplies and food.

"It's basically just houses stacked on top of one another, roofing iron. It's still quite a mess," he told Reuters. "One village on Simbo was completely wiped out. The entire village is gone and where the people are we have no idea."

Kennedy said villagers were too traumatised to search homes to find who might be buried under the rubble of their houses and villages, or to use traditional canoes to assess damage.

Most people in the low-lying town of 20,000 rely on fishing or logging for jobs. Many homes were built of timber and bamboo, making them particularly vulnerable.

The majority of Solomon Islanders live on subsistence agriculture with less than a quarter of the population having paid jobs. In 2006 the country had a GDP of $322 million.

Gizo is the second largest town and is surrounded by smaller islands, including Kennedy Island, named after late U.S. president John F. Kennedy, who swam to safety there after his navy patrol boat was rammed in World War Two.

The Solomons Red Cross said about 2,000 Gizo residents were homeless, while 500 houses might have been damaged or destroyed. Other estimates said more than 900 homes had been levelled.

A bishop and three worshippers were killed when the tsunami struck the island of Simbo during a church ordination, the United Church said.

In neigbouring Papua New Guinea, authorities were investigating reports that a tsunami had swept away a family of five in the PNG province of Milne Bay.

The quake struck 350 km (220 miles) northwest of Honiara and sparked a tsunami alert around the Pacific.

Government and Red Cross disaster teams are taking tents and supplies to the affected area. Australia has offered A$2 million ($1.6 million) in aid, while New Zealand offered NZ$500,000 ($360,000) and sent an air force plane laden with supplies, including water containers, blankets, tarpaulins, food and lamps.

The United Nations said it had a full Disaster Assessment and Coordination team on standby for deployment to the Solomons.

The Solomon Islands lie on the so-called Pacific "Ring of Fire" where volcanic activity and earthquakes are fairly common.

Successive cyclones bring Madagascar to its knees

JOHANNESBURG, 3 April 2007 (IRIN) - As the sixth mayor cyclone to hit Madagascar this season tears across the northeast of the impoverished Indian ocean island, a relentless succession of natural disasters has left nearly half a million people in desperate need of humanitarian assistance.

Tropical cyclone Jaya made landfall on Madagascar's northeastern coast today on a projected trajectory that will see it rage through areas already devastated by cyclone Indlala just over two weeks ago.

"This is the worst cyclone season in the recorded history of the country," Dusan Zupka, the Senior Emergency Coordination Officer assigned to Madagascar by the United Nations (UN) Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Geneva, told IRIN.

According to the latest UN situation report, almost 130,000 people were "directly affected by cyclone Indlala" and "at least 88 people were killed and 30 disappeared, with about 30,000 left homeless or deprived of all their belongings."

Natural disasters have been tormenting the island since the end of last year; Indlala followed in the wake of five destructive cyclones and unprecedented flooding. "Since December 2006, approximately 450,000 people have become the victims of natural disasters all over Madagascar," said a UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) statement released today.

"If we cannot speak of a tsunami here in Madagascar, we can at least say that the affects of the natural disasters are somewhat similar to that in the aftermath of the tsunami," said Bruno Maes, the UNICEF Representative in Madagascar.

"Considering the low level of human development [in Madagascar], the consequences are huge," Zupka said. Madagascar already faces serious challenges: More than 85 percent of its 19.1 million people live on less than US$2 a day, according to the 2006 United Nations Human Development report, and food insecurity and malnutrition are chronic, particularly in the drought-prone south.

"Due to the flooding, tens of thousands of hectares of rice, the basic food source for the Malagasy, have also been destroyed," the UNICEF statement said. "With the increased food insecurity and shortage, there is the risk of increased malnutrition."

Access to affected areas is a major obstacle to the delivery of humanitarian assistance, and although assessments are underway, immediate needs are critical.

Communication infrastructure, roads, schools and health centres have been severely damaged; provision of food, potable water, shelter, medicines, sanitation facilities, dealing with waterborne diseases and finding alternative means of transportation - like helicopters - until roads are fixed, are essential.

Officials have warned that in-country supplies are drained. "We are overstretched in terms of human capacity and financial resources," Zupka said, adding that international donors had been generous and that "all UN agencies have boosted capacity [in Madagascar].

"Some replenishment has already come from the international community: "contributions so far in response to the cyclones/floods amount to ARIARY 1.5 billion (US$7.5 million)," the UN report noted.

Zupka expressed concern over the lack of attention the emergency in Madagascar had received in the international media, considering the extent of the multiple disasters and the vulnerability of the island and its people. "It is striking that so little attention is being paid to a crisis that affects so many that are already vulnerable because of poverty," he commented.

With the cyclone season continuing until the end of April or early May, expectations are that Jaya will not be the last disaster to strike the island.

2007-04-02T09:42:00.000-04:00

Tsunami hits South Pacific's Solomons

HONIARA, Solomon Islands - A bone-rattling undersea earthquake sparked a tsunami that sent 10-foot-high waves crashing into parts of the Solomon Islands on Monday, wiping out one village and killing at least 13 people. The death toll was expected to rise.

Large waves struck the western town of Gizo, inundating buildings and causing widespread destruction within five minutes of the earthquake.

"There wasn't any warning — the warning was the earth tremors," Alex Lokopio, the premier of the Solomon's Western Province, told New Zealand's National Radio. "It shook us very, very strongly and we were frightened, and all of a sudden the sea was rising up."

Despite initial regionwide warnings, there was no repeat of the massive 2004 tsunami, when a magnitude 9 quake sent massive waves slamming into the coastlines of a dozen countries around the Indian Ocean's rim, killing or leaving missing about 230,000 people.

Julian Makaa, spokesman for the Solomons National Disaster Management Office, said numerous villages in the country's remote west were reporting people being swept away as waves plowed through their communities.

Reports remained sketchy because communications were reduced in many cases to scratchy two-way radio lines. Emergency officials have yet to be able to reach the area hit by the tsunami and communications with the area is limited.

Alfred Maesulia, the information director in Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare's office, said late Monday that 13 people had been killed and an unknown number were still missing.

"Some people were seen floating on the sea during the big waves but it was very difficult to go near them," Maesulia told The Associated Press. "The number at the moment is 13. It's possible that number will increase, maybe double up or even more."

Lokopio said he witnessed a large wave crashing into the island.

"I saw the wave ... all of a sudden the water was just rising up and moved toward the island and hit all the houses on the coastal area, and all of their property was washed away to the open sea," he said.

Julian McLeod of the Solomon Islands National Disaster Management Office said there were unconfirmed reports that two villages in the country's far west were flooded.

National police spokesman Mick Spinks said "our biggest problem is communications, because most of the high frequency radio system there was submerged."

Gizo resident Judith Kennedy said water "right up to your head" swept through the town.

"All the houses near the sea were flattened," she told The Associated Press by telephone. "The downtown area is a very big mess from the tsunami and the earthquake," she added. "A lot of houses have collapsed. The whole town is still shaking" from aftershocks.

The
U.S. Geological Survey said the quake measured magnitude-8.0 and struck at 7:39 a.m. about 6 miles beneath the sea floor, 217 miles northwest of the capital, Honiara.

The Pacific region from Australia to Hawaii went on high alert for several hours after the quake struck between the islands of Bougainville and New Georgia.

Gizo, a regional center, is just 25 miles from the earthquake's epicenter.

Another witness in the town, dive shop owner Danny Kennedy, Judith's father, estimated the height of the wave at 10 feet.

"I'm driving down the street — there are boats in the middle of the road, buildings have completely collapsed and fallen down," he said in a telephone interview.

"We're just trying to mobilize water and food, and shelter for people at the moment because ... in the town alone there's going to be between 2,000-3,000 homeless. It's not a very good scene at the moment."

Maesulia said deaths and widespread destruction was also reported on Simbo, Choiseul and Ranunga islands near Gizo.

"There are reports that some villages were completely washed away," he said. "Sasamungga village is quite a big village ... it was reported that 300 houses were completely destroyed in that village alone."

Harry Wickham, who owns a waterfront hotel in Gizo, said the damage was widespread.

"The waves came up probably about 10 feet and swept through town," he told Australia's Nine Network television by telephone. "There's a lot of water damage and a lot of debris floating around," he added.

"Ten feet of water washing through town — you can imagine what damage it has done here."

A town in the west, Munda, was believed to be badly damaged, officials and the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Corp. said, but details were not confirmed.

Solomon Islands deputy police commissioner Peter Marshall said an airplane was to fly over the devastated areas later Monday to assess damage. He said a national state of emergency has been declared.

The Hawaii-based Pacific
Tsunami Warning Center reported the quake at magnitude 8.1, and said a temblor of that strength could cause a destructive tsunami and issued a warning bulletin for the Solomon Islands and neighboring Papua New Guinea. The alert was later lifted, and no reports of a wider tsunami or damage elsewhere emerged.

Australian officials closed beaches anyway along the length of the country's east coast, from near the Great Barrier Reef in the north to Sydney and it's famous Bondi beach in the south. Ferry services in the city were canceled.

It ordered a lower-level "tsunami watch" for other places, including most South Pacific countries, but later canceled the alert. The center said a 6-inch wave had been reported in Honiara.

Police Sgt. Godfrey Abiah said in Honiara that police in Gizo had received warning about a possible tsunami and were helping people leave the town for higher ground when the wave hit.

"We have lost radio contact with the two police stations down there and we're not getting any clear picture from down there," he told the AP by telephone.

A spokesman for Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare, Deli Oso, said the quake was felt in Honiara but there were no reports of any damage.

The Solomon Islands is a poverty-wracked archipelago of more than 200 islands northeast of Australia, with a population of about 552,000 people, that lies on the Pacific Basin's so-called "Ring of Fire," an arc of volcanos and fault lines where quakes frequently happen.

2007-04-01T00:07:00.000-04:00

More damaging storms hit Texas

DALLAS - Thunderstorms hammered parts of Texas early Saturday, blacking out thousands of customers and spinning out tornadoes.

The same group of storms sent a twister through a small town west of Waco late Friday and caused flooding that forced some 40 people from their homes.

The violent weather had largely eased by Saturday afternoon and the bulk of the storms had moved into Louisiana and Arkansas.

One tornado struck early Saturday in Lavaca County, which is between Houston and San Antonio, destroying a mobile home and sending its four residents to a hospital, said sheriff's dispatcher Gina Dvorka. A hospital spokeswoman said the residents were in stable condition. Other mobile homes and outbuildings in the area were damaged, Dvorka said.

About 66,000 Centerpoint Energy customers lost power early Saturday in the Houston area. Texas-New Mexico Power, an electricity distributor for several retailers, reported scattered outages throughout the Gulf Coast region, with the biggest briefly affecting 18,000 customers in Alvin, southeast of Houston.

The thunderstorms delayed the start of Saturday's third round of the Houston Open golf tournament.

Late Friday, tornadoes hit two communities near Waco and in Lavaca County, and straight-line wind or a tornado tore through a residential area of Wylie.

"We're lucky," Kim Ray, an administrative assistant for the McGregor Police Department, said Saturday. A tornado hit the small town west of Waco on Friday, causing extensive damage, but no injuries were reported.

About 40 people had to be evacuated from their homes in Haltom City, just north of Fort Worth, because of flooding on Big Fossil Creek.

Some Haltom City rescuers had to be rescued themselves. Three of them were trying to reached a handicapped woman when strong current swamped their boat and they had to cling to trees, said Deputy Chief Wes Rhodes. A backup team sent to their aid had to climb on top of cars, and finally teams from Fort Worth and Hurst came in with hovercraft and rescued the rescuers, he said.

Lancaster, in southern Dallas County, recorded 10 inches of rain over a two-to-three day period, the weather service said.

First sandstorm of year hits northern China

BEIJING (AFP) - Northern China was blanketed in dust on Saturday as the first sandstorm of the year struck the region, including the capital Beijing, state media reported, citing the national weather service.

Visibility was low in the capital due to the storm, but meteorologists said the sand was likely to blow out of town by nightfall due to strong winds, the Xinhua news agency reported.

The mild storm was caused by a cyclone which developed over Mongolia and then moved eastward toward parts of Inner Mongolia and northern Hebei province, said Sun Jun of the China Meteorological Administration, quoted by Xinhua.

Authorities urged residents to stay indoors and cover up if venturing outside to protect themselves from the floating dust.

Other sandstorms are in the forecast for Gansu, Liaoning, Ningxia and Shaanxi provinces, along with Inner Mongolia and the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, meteorologists said.

Northern China suffered from more than a dozen dust storms last year which were attributed to desertification in China's northwestern regions, including Qinghai province. A similar number has been predicted for this year.

China has around 1.74 million square kilometers (696,000 square miles) of desertified land, or 18 percent of its total land area.

Despite the sandstorms, the Chinese government has insisted that it will intensify its efforts to clean the air and prepare for the 2008 Olympics by planting broad belts of trees around the capital.

2007-03-29T15:14:00.000-04:00

A man watches as a tornado crosses the highway east of the Northern Natural Gas Plant in Beaver County, Okla., on Wednesday.

Major storm slams Plains states

OKLAHOMA CITY - An early spring storm swept across the Plains early Thursday, spinning off tornadoes that killed an Oklahoma couple in a home that was blown to pieces and a Colorado woman whose small town was nearly destroyed.

A tornado as wide as two football fields carved a destructive path through Holly, Colo., late Wednesday, destroying five homes, damaging dozens more and littering the streets with broken power lines, tree limbs and debris.

“Homes were there and now they’re gone,” county administrator Linda Fairbairn said. “Many, if not all, the structures in town suffered some degree of damage.”

A 28-year-old woman who suffered massive injuries during the twister died after she was airlifted to a hospital in Colorado Springs, Prowers County Coroner Joe Giadone said Thursday.

The line of storms stretched nearly the length of the nation, from South Dakota to Texas. As it headed east on Thursday, it threatened flash flooding in central Nebraska and Kansas. More severe weather was expected in Oklahoma, as well, forecasters said.

At least 11 tornadoes were reported throughout western Nebraska on Wednesday, destroying or damaging three homes and 10-12 miles of power lines, emergency management officials said.

Oklahoma couple dies
A husband and wife were killed near Elmwood, Okla., when the storm blew apart their home, said Dixie Parker, Beaver County’s emergency management director.

In Holly, Colo., a town of about 900 residents 235 miles southeast of Denver, the storm tore the back off Cheryl Roup’s home and flipped it into her front yard, the Denver Post reported. Somehow, her China closet survived the damaged, and her border collie, Lacy, escaped harm.

“Lacy managed to crawl out from under the rubble, but she seemed OK,” Roup told the Post. “She’s a little shocked, much like I am right now.”

The same storm system had dumped snow on Wyoming, where a school bus carrying 36 students from Tongue River High School to a competition in Cheyenne collided with two minivans on Interstate 90 Wednesday, school officials said.

Weather sparks big-rig spill
Soon after that crash, another pileup started nearby involving several passenger vehicles and seven big rigs, two of which were hauling diesel fuel. One of the diesel haulers rolled over, and authorities said the other leaked around 1,000 gallons of fuel. No one on the bus was hurt, but four other people were taken to a hospital, Wyoming Highway Patrol spokesman Sgt. Stephen Townsend said.

The wintry weather closed a 100-mile stretch of I-90 and 45 miles of I-25. Thirteen other state roads were also closed.

As the storm moved through Texas, the Panhandle region was hit with baseball-sized hail, rain and 70 mph wind that downed power lines and uprooted trees. Tornadoes also touched down, including one that was on the ground at Caprock Canyons State Park for about 20 minutes, the National Weather Service said. The storm overturned trucks, and at least three people were hospitalized with injuries.

2007-03-25T16:33:00.000-04:00

Quake in central Japan

NOTO PENINSULA, Japan, March 25 (Reuters) - A strong earthquake killed one person and injured at least 160 in central Japan on Sunday, demolishing houses, buckling roads, triggering landslides and cutting off water supplies to thousands of homes.

More than 1,300 people evacuated to shelters after 44 houses collapsed and some 200 others, mostly wooden with heavy tile roofs, were seriously damaged by the 6.9 magnitude earthquake, which struck at 9:42 a.m. (0042 GMT), officials and media said.

The focus of the quake -- which was also felt in Tokyo -- was 11 km (7 miles) below the seabed off the Noto peninsula in Ishikawa prefecture, about 300 km (190 miles) west of Tokyo.

"It was frightening so I dashed outside. It shook and shook," said Shina Yamashita, 88, one of about 200 mostly elderly people taking shelter in a civic centre in the rural city of Wajima, Monzen district, one of the hardest hit areas.

The mountainous peninsula is known for its hot spring resorts.

More than 100 aftershocks jolted the area, including one with a magnitude of 5.3 more than eight hours after the first quake, which was the biggest in the area since records began in 1926. Officials warned more aftershocks could follow.

A 52-year-old woman died in Wajima, a resort and fishing town on the western side of the peninsula, after being trapped under a stone lantern that toppled in her garden.

In Nanao, a resort and fishing city with a population of around 60,000, ambulance services were flooded with calls to help people who had suffered burns and injuries.

"I looked outside and electricity poles were shaking," said Hiroshi Tanaka, a fire department official. "Residents called in but they were calm and there weren't many serious injuries."

About 40 people were treated for mostly minor injuries in Wajima. Most were hurt from falls when the tremor struck or by being hit by falling objects, Kyodo news agency said.

Anxious residents gathered outside their homes in the town of 34,000 people, some holding children in their arms.

Around 1,200 Wajima residents whose homes were damaged were evacuated to schools and community centres and were receiving food and blankets, a city official said.

TSUNAMI WARNING LIFTED

Kyodo later said around 1,800 had been evacuated in Wajima but the number of injured had been lowered to 162, from 170.

About 30 troops arrived in the area to help assess the damage and some 400 police from neighbouring prefectures headed for the site to provide assistance, media reported.

The Japan Meteorological Agency originally estimated the magnitude at 7.1 but later revised it to 6.9.

Some trains were halted and people were trapped in elevators. Power outages hit nearly 500 homes in the area and 9,000 had their water supplies cut, public broadcaster NHK said.

"Furniture toppled over with a crash and dishes scattered and broke," said Yuko Ikawa, 38, who fled to the Monzen evacuation centre with her family.

"The biggest worry is there is no tap water," she added.

Officials closed an airport on the peninsula because of cracks on the runway and halted traffic on damaged expressways. High-speed bullet trains resumed service after being checked.

Telephone services were snarled, as many tried to confirm that friends and family were safe. Power companies said there were no reports of irregularities at nuclear plants in the area.

A tsunami warning issued for Ishikawa prefecture was later lifted after small tsunamis hit in some areas.

Separately, two strong earthquakes struck on Sunday near Vanuatu in the South Pacific, Australia's geological agency reported, but there were no immediate reports of damage.

The first, measured at magnitude 7.3, occurred two minutes before the quake in central Japan. Vanuatu's second quake, at magnitude 7.1, came about half an hour later.

Earthquakes are common in Japan, one of the world's most seismically active areas. The country accounts for about 20 percent of the world's earthquakes of magnitude 6 or greater.

In October 2004, an earthquake with a magnitude of 6.8 struck the Niigata region in northern Japan, killing 65 people and injuring more than 3,000.

That was the deadliest quake since a magnitude 7.3 tremor hit the city of Kobe in 1995, killing more than 6,400.

New Mexico towns clean up after twisters

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. - When she awoke Saturday, Andrea McLaren found that a stretch of the eastern New Mexico city she calls home had been obliterated by a tornado that flattened houses, snapped telephone poles and even heaved a trailer through a bowling alley.

The tornado was one of 16 that moved through communities along the New Mexico-Texas border late Friday and early Saturday, leaving two people critically injured. Residents said Saturday that the cleanup effort could take months.

"Pretty much everything was pushed together like toy cars," McLaren said by telephone from Clovis, N.M. "We've been picking up debris the whole day. ... Clean up and assess the damage, that's all we can do."

The worst damage was reported in Clovis and the village of Logan about 80 miles to the north, state officials said.

The Clovis twister touched down shortly before 8 p.m. Friday, forecasters said. On Saturday, city officials described a narrow path of destruction about three miles long. About 100 homes and businesses were either lost or damaged, and at least three schools were damaged, police said.

"We've got some significant damage. No question it's the most significant we've ever seen here," Clovis Mayor David Lansford said.

Hospitals in Clovis treated 35 victims, including two critically injured, state emergency management spokeswoman Carrie Moritomo said Saturday. One of the critically hurt was taken to a hospital in Lubbock, Texas, for treatment.

Gov. Bill Richardson ordered about 20 soldiers from the New Mexico Army National Guard to provide support in Clovis, spokesman Maj. Kenneth Nava said. Richardson is expected to travel to Clovis Sunday to be briefed on the damage, Moritomo said.

In Logan, a twister hit a trailer park, leaving two people hospitalized, Moritomo said. Many other injuries were reported, but they were minor.

That tornado touched down shortly before 3:30 p.m. Friday, and early reports show that 55 properties were affected by the storm, state officials said. At least 20 properties were completely destroyed.

Nearly 3,000 people were without electricity in Clovis on Saturday, and state officials say it will take two to three days to restore power.

Larry Wallin, the village administrator, estimated it would be five to six months before the damage is cleaned up.

"It happened so fast and we were scattered so thin," he said.

Two state emergency assessment teams were expected to arrive in Logan and Clovis on Saturday, officials said. The Salvation Army has opened a shelter at high school in Clovis.
American Red Cross teams were fanning out to provide food and assistance as needed.

Three tornadoes touched down in west Texas late Friday night, damaging a cotton gin about four miles west of Morton, said Jose Valdez, a
National Weather Service meteorologist in Lubbock.

Early Saturday, a tornado touched down in McLean, causing damage to structures and trees, said Matthew Kramar, a weather service meteorologist in Amarillo. There were no reports of injuries.

"There's not a whole lot there, so there were some windows blown out in a couple homes and businesses," Kramar said.

2007-03-23T11:38:00.000-04:00

Bird flu spreads to more farms in Bangladesh

DHAKA, March 23 (Reuters) - Bird flu has spread to six poultry farms near Bangladesh's capital, the government said on Friday, sparking a nationwide alert.

The United Nations also expressed concern.

C.S. Karim, the government adviser for agriculture and livestock, said among more than 42,400 poultry on the six farms in Savar, over 12,000 had died and another 21,000 had been culled over the past few days.

The H5N1 avian flu virus has not spread to other areas of the country and there was no cause for panic, he told a news conference. Savar is 25 km (14 miles) north of the capital.

Dr. Duangvadee Sungkhobol, representative of U.N.'s World Health Organisation in Dhaka, said: "We are very concerned because this is a highly densely populated country where people, animals and poultry live very close".

"The government has taken aggressive measures to stop the spread of the disease and that WHO has confidence it (the government) would be able to limit the spread," she told the same news conference.

The disease was confirmed through tests by laboratories in Bangladesh and Thailand, the government said late on Thursday.

Another U.N. official also expressed concern.

"Maybe the outbreak of avian flu started in the country weeks or months before but the authorities took a long time to confirm it."

"We are talking to the government and relevant agencies to find out the extent of the spread of H5N1 in Bangladesh," the official said on Friday. They asked not to be identified.

The European Union pledged assistance.

"The EU has kept funds ready for all of Asia in case they need to fight bird flu. All donors are contributing ... Bangladesh can use it to tackle the flu," Stefan Frowein, head of the EU delegation in Bangladesh, told a private television station on Friday.

"But such funds can be available through a single channel, the World Bank," he added.

Health experts had long expected an outbreak of H5N1 because the country is surrounded by India and Myanmar, which have reported bird flu infections.

Myanmar reported another outbreak of bird flu on Wednesday, saying a chicken farm had been hit outside the capital, where the H5N1 virus reappeared in four areas last month.

Bangladesh's dense population and large numbers of backyard poultry also increased the risks of outbreaks, experts have said.

The government has banned transport of poultry from affected areas, imposed constant monitoring of poultry farms across the country by joint forces led by the army and health checks on people working on the farms, Karim said.

"We have put the health network across the country on high alert and kept one specialised hospital ready to face any emergency," the government's health adviser, retired army major-general A.S.M. Matiur Rahman, said.

Syed Abu Siddiq, secretary of the Bangladesh Poultry Industries Association, said there were 125,000 small and large poultry firms in the country, producing 250 million broilers and 6 billion eggs annually.

Annual turnover was $750 million, he said.

About four million Bangladeshis were directly or indirectly associated with poultry farming.

Cyclone in Madagascar

ANTANANARIVO, March 23 (Reuters) - A cyclone that swept across Madagascar last week killed at least 69 people and made tens of thousands homeless in the north of the Indian Ocean island, officials said on Friday.

Mudslides have buried whole villages, rivers have burst their banks and roads have been cut off since Cyclone Indlala struck on March 15.

"I have never seen so much damage," Jacky Randimbiarison, executive secretary of the government's disaster management agency, told Reuters.

The agency said it had confirmed 69 deaths, two people missing, and nearly 78,000 people uprooted on the world's fourth largest island that is home to 18.6 million people.

The storm wiped out more than 3,600 houses plus dozens of government buildings, schools and bridges, officials said. Some 8,280 hectares of paddy-fields were ruined.

In northern Ambanja district "a whole mountain has collapsed, burying two villages under thousands of tonnes of rock and killing 20 people including six children in a school", Randimbiarison said.

FOOD CRISIS LOOMS?

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies appealed on Friday for $637,000 to help Madagascar.

"The situation has been made worse because Indlala is the fifth cyclone to hit Madagascar in the past three months and the region has already experienced heavy rains since December," said Amna Al-Ahmar, the federation's regional officer, in Geneva.

"According to government figures, about 80 per cent of the country's vanilla production -- Madagascar's top foreign exchange earner -- has been lost," it said in a statement.

Emergency assistance was focusing on temporary shelter and preventive health measures through the provision of tarpaulins, blankets, jerry cans, water purification tables and other basic relief items, the federation said.

Some emergency aid was being delivered by air and sea, officials in Madagascar said.

Aid agency CARE International said it was likely the total number of people affected is around 225,000.

"At least 75,000 people are in urgent need of immediate relief," said Didier Young, CARE's emergency coordinator in Madagascar. "These people have lost everything ... their houses, food stocks and their crops."

CARE said that with the destruction of the main rice harvest, which had been due in May, "a substantial part" of Madagascar was now facing a potential food crisis.

2007-03-21T11:14:00.000-04:00

PAKISTAN: Landslides

ISLAMABAD , 21 March 2007 (IRIN) - Landslides triggered by heavy rains have killed at least 40 people across Pakistani-administered Kashmir, an aid official confirmed on Wednesday.

At least 27 people, mostly women, died and 16 were injured when a landslide ripped through Doba Syedan village in the Jhelum Valley on late Tuesday, according to John Sampson, head of the International Organization for Migration's (IOM) sub-office in Muzaffarabad, capital of Pakistani-administered Kashmir.

Landslides killed 10 people in the Bagh district and three died in separate incidents in Muzaffarabad, Sampson added.

In another incident, a landslide buried 22 people in their houses on Tuesday. Officials are expressing fears that they might not be alive, but there has been no confirmation of that.

Apart from the deaths caused by landslides, about 350 families have been left stranded in a remote village in Jhelum Valley at an altitude of more than 1,500 metres. Many roads in the area have been blocked due to a series of landslides following heavy rains that started on Sunday evening.

"This [Wednesday] morning, an emergency helicopter operation was planned to evacuate and shift the stranded families to a safe area, but continuing bad weather conditions are preventing us from taking any active steps," said Sampson.

The Pakistani military, together with international aid agencies, have shifted endangered families away from potential landslide risk areas.

"Still, we have not been able to lift them to a completely safe place. But the agencies are trying to assist them with food and non-food items," Sampson said.

In the Tariqabad area of Muzzaffarabad city, 160 families were evacuated after a landslide on Wednesday morning.

Survivors of the devastating earthquake of October 2005, the majority of whom live in temporary shelters, have also been affected by the recent bad weather.

"Several tented camps of quake-displaced people were flooded after three days' of continuous rain and we have been providing them with new tents, blankets, hygiene kits and other non-food items," Arshad Aziz, field coordinator for the Norwegian Refugee Council's camp support team, told IRIN from Muzaffarabad.

The second winter after the October 2005 earthquake was more severe than the previous one, according to meteorologists.

"This time, there were more rainy days across northern Pakistan, including the earth-quake affected areas," said Aamir Warsi, a senior meteorologist at Pakistan Meteorological Department in Islamabad. "Also, the spells were widespread and more intense."

According to the Met office, the winter rainy season, which started in early December 2006, is expected to continue until the end of March.

Weather experts expect more natural disasters

MADRID, Spain - Global warming is likely to bring more tidal waves, floods and hurricanes, leading meteorologists said on Monday.

"What we know is that global warming is very likely to lead in the future to more frequent tidal waves," the secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) told a news conference ahead of a meeting in Madrid on Monday.

"Heavy precipitation events are very likely to become more frequent ... and it's likely that hurricanes and cyclones will become more intense," Michel Jarraud said.

He was speaking at the start of a four day conference of the WMO, a United Nations specialized agency for weather, climate and water.

The WMO's President Alexander Bedritsky said flooding in mid and higher latitudes in Western Europe had already become more common.

In Russia the number of damaging weather incidents logged in a year now averages more than one a day, said Bedritsky, who is also head of the Russian Federal Service for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring, Roshydromet.

"There's a constant increase of around 6 percent a year," he said.

A draft survey by top U.N. climate scientists is due for release in Brussels on April 6. It says climate change, widely blamed on the burning of fossil fuels, is already underway with impacts ranging from melting glaciers to earlier than normal plant growth in spring.

Meteorologists must increasingly consider climate change projections in their forecasting, former WMO president John Zillman told the Madrid conference, which is due to publish the conclusions of its four day meeting on Thursday.

2007-03-19T14:14:00.000-04:00

Garden State digs out from icy storm

EWING, N.J. (AP) — New Jersey residents on Saturday were digging themselves out from a surprisingly strong storm that authorities said had caused at least six traffic deaths.

"It was a monster storm," said Kris Kolluri, who heads the state Department of Transportation.

The storm created treacherous travel conditions across the state. Just days after balmy temperatures covered the area, the wintry mix of snow and sleet caused hundreds of accidents and spinouts and led to airport delays and cancellations.

State police said a man was killed early Saturday morning when his car overturned on Interstate 287 in Bergen County.

Witnesses told state police that Stephen R. Day, of Montville, was passing another car, lost control and went off the roadway. Day, who was not wearing his seat belt and had a suspended license, was ejected from the driver's side window.

Two men and one woman were killed Friday night when a passenger van carrying 13 migrant workers collided with a box truck on a slick highway in Gloucester County, according to state police. The van's driver lost control of the vehicle and went into oncoming traffic, Jones said.

Several people in the van and a passenger in the box truck were ejected. The driver of the van, Juan Calderon, 23, and a female passenger, Reyna Vasquez, 39, both of Bridgeton, were killed in the accident. The third victim, a man, who was also riding in the van hasn't been identified yet, Jones said.

Thirteen other people were injured in the crash, but their injuries weren't thought to be life-threatening.

Earlier Friday, one person was killed on Interstate 80 in Warren County when a Jeep Cherokee veered off the road and smashed into a tree, state police said. And a 79-year-old woman was killed in a head-on crash on an icy road in Franklin Township, Gloucester County, Friday afternoon.

State police received more that 2,000 calls regarding motorists between 6 a.m. Friday and 6 a.m. Saturday, according Jones.

"No matter how many troopers you put on the road you're not going to be able to put up with those kinds of numbers," Jones said.

Continental Airlines canceled all flights to and from Newark Liberty International Airport through noon, except for one flight, the company said in a news release. The company did not return a call seeking comment.

JetBlue spokeswoman Jenny Dervin said none of her company's flights had been canceled in Newark on Saturday. Dervin said the company canceled some flights out of JFK in New York, but that Newark flights would only see delays of 20 to 30 minutes.

"We're working with the airports to make sure the planes are ready to go and not too significantly delayed," she said.

A combination of snow and sleet measured nearly a foot in Sussex County, while the central part of the state got 3 to 5 inches, said Dean Iovino, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Mount Holly.

Burlington and Camden counties in the southern part of the state received 3 to 5 inches while the southernmost portions saw just rain, Iovino said.

In Ewing Saturday, Mark Epstein, was out shoveling the walkway around his house shortly Saturday.

"I was waiting for it to warm up, but it doesn't seem to have made much of a difference," said Epstein, who was wearing water resistant boots to protect his feet. "I was hoping last week that we'd had the last of it. It's very inconvenient."

In Trenton, Laverne Woodall said she didn't think the storm would be as messy as it was.

"I thought it would be maybe more rain," the 42-year-old said as she tackled ice with the help from her nephews, Charles, 9, and Jordan, 4, Smith.

But she knew not to get used to the warmer temperatures from earlier in the week.

"I knew it was iffy," she said. "It could be back and forth."

2007-03-17T11:12:00.000-04:00

Cleanup continues after Northeast storm

NEW YORK - Cleanup crews were out early Saturday to clearing snow and ice from Manhattan streets in preparation for the city's St. Patrick's Day parade, a day after a heavy storm buffeted the East Coast and caused the cancellation of more than 1,000 flights.

Forecasters said the sleet, snow and freezing rain that pelted the East Coast Friday had tailed off, and the National Weather Service canceled a winter storm warning for New York City and the surrounding areas.

"We got the whole gamut there," Nelson Vaz, a meteorologist with the weather service, said early Saturday. He called the weather "a pretty impressive late-winter storm."

The storm dumped up to six inches of snow on parts of Maryland and forecasters said more than a foot could have fallen in upstate New York. It was being blamed for at least five traffic deaths in New Jersey and three in Pennsylvania, authorities said.

JetBlue canceled nearly three-fourths of its scheduled flights on Friday to avoid the criticism and chaos that followed a Valentine's Day storm, when the company was slow to cancel flights and some passengers were stranded in planes for hours.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said more than 1,400 flights were canceled Friday at the region's three major airports because of the storm.

American, United, Delta and Continental also canceled flights, and there were delays reported in at airports in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Albany, N.Y., Baltimore-Washington and Boston.

At the airport in Newark, N.J., Karen Opdyke, 48, was trying to get to Miami for a cruise with her husband, three young children and mother after their 9 a.m. flight was canceled.

"We got on the plane, we got off the plane. We got on the plane and off the plane," Opdyke said as she balanced a crying child next to a pile of luggage. She wasn't having any luck rescheduling. "There's nothing available all week."

New Jersey state police had responded to about 1,300 reports of accidents or spinoffs on the roads by late Friday afternoon, state police Sgt. Stephen Jones said.

In Delaware, state police said sleet and ice were responsible for more than 100 accidents, and a vehicle in President George W. Bush's motorcade traveling from Washington to Camp David collided on Friday with another car along a slushy Interstate in Urbana, Md. No one was injured.

The storm also forced school cancellations throughout the Northeast and prompted some government agencies to send workers home early.

In Hartford, Conn. and York, Pa., officials postponed their annual St. Patrick's Day parades. New York did not cancel its parade, and officials were expecting up to 2 million people to attend.

Winter officially ends at the vernal equinox Tuesday evening, but climatologists said it was not unusual for storms to arrive well into March.

"Usually you have the biggest storms in March," said meteorologist Kevin Lipton in Albany, N.Y.

On Thursday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that this winter was the warmest worldwide since record keeping began in 1880.

2007-03-16T11:46:00.000-04:00

Ivorian cocoa growers say drought worst in memory

DALOA, March 16 (Reuters) - A harsh spell of dry weather in Ivory Coast's central Daloa region which has lasted several months is the worst in living memory and is killing off young cocoa trees, farmers and cooperatives said on Friday.

Rains have scarcely fallen in the major cocoa producing region since late November, apart from a short but heavy downpour in early February.

Farmers in the world's top cocoa exporter said they expected to harvest far less than usual during the coming April-September mid crop, the smaller of the two six-month growing cycles.

"It's a complete failure. There will be no mid crop on my farm," said Lambert N'Dri, 47, picking up dry, shrivelled pods from the trees as he walked through his 10-year-old, three-hectare plantation.

The few tiny flowers visible on his trees -- which normally herald the growth of pods -- fell from the branches when touched. Many of his trees were bare while others had a small number of medium-sized green pods.

N'Dri, who was born in Daloa, said he had never seen such a harsh, long-lasting spell of dry weather.

A manager at the local cooperative Kavokiva said it reminded him of a 1983 drought which caused months of power cuts because of a lack of water for hydro-electric dams.

Exporters have estimated output for this year's mid crop possibly as low as 200,000 tonnes, far below last year's big harvest of more than 400,000 tonnes.

Farmer Cesar Yoboue, 33, was less fortunate than N'Dri. His plantation with younger, more vulnerable trees planted between three and five years ago bore little resemblance to a cocoa farm, with leaves drooping and almost no pods.

"When it doesn't rain the young trees die because they don't have deep roots," he said, explaining that older trees could source moisture from deeper in the ground to sustain them for longer.

The paper-dry brown leaves carpeting the ground crackled as he walked around and turned to flakes when handled.

"There are cocoa trees that I will have to replace now," he said, yanking a tall but thin sapling from the ground and tossing it aside.

East Coast expects major winter storm

A major storm is expected to hit the East Coast on Friday, with heavy rain forecast for areas of the Mid-Atlantic region that could lead to flooding.
The National Weather Service is forecasting heavy snow from northeastern New Jersey through southern New England, with more than a foot expected in some inland areas.

Temperatures in the Southeast are expected to be cool but remain above freezing. Most of the West will enjoy clear skies, but parts of the Northwest are expected to get rain.

Temperatures in the Lower 48 states Thursday ranged from a low of 0 degrees at Grand Marais, Minn., to a high of 99 degrees at Death Valley, Calif.

2007-03-15T10:39:00.000-04:00

Rare snowstorm closes roads, schools, businesses in Jordan

AMMAN, Jordan (AP) — A rare winter storm on Thursday dumped up to 4 inches of snow in parts of Jordan, closing roads, schools and businesses.
The director of the state meteorology department, Abdul-Halim abu-Hazeem, said more snow was expected during the day in several areas of the kingdom.

Temperatures dropped below 32 degrees F during Thursday's snowfall. Parents and children played with the snow around their houses while plows worked to clear Amman's hilly streets. Most banks and some government offices also closed in Amman within hours of opening Thursday.

An airport official said air traffic was unaffected by the storm, which contained winds of up to 50 mph.

Police spokesman Maj. Bashir al-Da'ajah said that approximately 100 traffic accidents were recorded on Thursday, including a Saudi bus that overturned near the northeastern city of Zarqa, injuring 12 passengers.

The Middle East is accustomed to mild winters, although big storms have occasionally battered the region. Last year, up to1.6 feet of snow fell in western and northern parts of Jordan.

In 2004, Jordan received up to three feet of snow in what was described as the kingdom's worst snowstorm since 1950.

Weak tornado touches down in northeast Ohio; buildings, power lines damaged

ELYRIA, Ohio (AP) — A small tornado touched down briefly near a shopping mall in northeast Ohio, ripping siding from an office supply store, flattening residential garages and forcing some schools to cancel classes because of a power outage.
No injuries were reported from the tornado, which struck Wednesday evening. Elyria is about 25 miles west of Cleveland.

The tornado was weak and on the ground only a few minutes, said Jim Kosarik, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Cleveland.

Investigators will have to assess the damage to determine wind speed, said NWS meteorologist Mike Abair.

Strong winds downed power lines and trees, and tossed a shopping cart through the window of an empty building, said Lt. Bob Krugman of the Elyria Fire Department.

Classes were canceled at local schools because power was out and officials didn't know when it would be restored, school board member Kathryn Carpus said.

Very intense tropical cyclone Indlala

2007-03-14T14:24:00.000-04:00

Rain drenches Texas; more expected Wednesday

Showers and thunderstorms fell across much of Texas on Tuesday, and more rain was expected Wednesday with highs in the 70s in many areas, the National Weather Service says.
Golf ball-sized hail was reported near Berclair in Goliad County. Hail the size of marbles was reported in Goliad.

Danny Madrigal, an investigator with the Goliad County Sheriff's Department, said a firefighter near Berclair reported seeing a tornado on the ground for about five minutes but there were no immediate reports of damage.

There were isolated reports of penny-sized hail and winds of up to 50 mph Tuesday as the storms moved across North Texas, said Alan Moller, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

South-Central Texas saw moderate to heavy rain and some road closures, said Mark Lenz, a hydrologist with the National Weather Service.

On Tuesday afternoon, emergency responders in San Antonio were called to five high-water rescues of motorists stranded in vehicles by rising water, but no injuries were reported, the San Antonio Express-News reported in its Tuesday online editions.

Meanwhile, Cameron County and Brownsville officials spent Tuesday surveying damage from a Monday storm that dumped more than 7 inches of rain in less than an hour.

Water reached near the front doors of St. Luke's Catholic School on Monday.

"We had kids that stayed a while in the portable building until it pretty much stopped raining," Ana Gomez, school principal, said in a story for Wednesday's editions of The Brownsville Herald. "We were pretty much covered in water."

In the Austin area on Wednesday, mostly cloudy skies were expected with a 50% chance of showers and thunderstorms and highs in the upper 70s. By evening, partly cloudy skies were expected with areas of fog after midnight and lows in the mid-50s.

A 30% chance of showers and thunderstorms was expected in the Dallas area with highs in the upper 70s. By evening, cloudy skies were expected with lows in the upper 50s.

In the Houston area, a 70% chance of showers and thunderstorms was expected. Some thunderstorms were expected to be severe in the morning and produce gusty winds and heavy rainfall in the afternoon. Highs were expected in the mid-70s. A 30% of showers and thunderstorms was expected by the evening with areas of fog late and lows in the upper 50s.

In the Amarillo area, partly cloudy skies were expected with highs in the upper 70s. By evening, partly cloudy skies were expected with lows in the lower 40s.

Fifty die as snow blankets Kashmir, rains pound northern India

SRINAGAR, India (AFP) - At least 50 people were killed as snow engulfed Kashmir and torrential rains pounded the rest of northern India, officials said Tuesday.

Some 28 people were killed and 25 others received burn injuries in separate lightning strikes in Uttar Pradesh as rains crippled life in the populous northern Indian state, they said.

Seventeen people, including two children and a soldier died in landslides, cold and floods in Indian Kashmir and its summer capital Srinagar reported its heaviest March snowfall in 15 years, weather officials said.

Five other weather-related casualties were reported from other parts of northern India, lashed by rains since Friday.

In Kashmir, five Hindu pilgrims trekking to a snowbound shrine high in the Himalayas froze to death.

A police patrol discovered the five bodies huddled together Monday in a shelter built to protect travellers to the Vaishno Devi shrine.

"All five pilgrims died of hypothermia as they weren't wearing enough clothes and heavy snow had brought down temperatures," said Puneet Kumar, a senior official at the shrine.

Another 13 people suffered hypothermia injuries. Nine were in critical condition but were "recovering fast" in hospital, the official said.

The dead were all from Uttar Pradesh, and officials said they had underestimated the cold at that time of year in Kashmir where the mercury regularly falls below zero Celsius (32 Fahrenheit).

"Ten more people died due to hypothermia, landslides and caving in of structures across the state," a police officer said while rescue officials reported another two deaths in the snowbound region.

Snowstorms have paralysed life in revolt-hit Kashmir, shutting schools, knocking out power and telephone lines and closing the region's main highway, police said.

"The main highway has been shut due to heavy snow and nearly 800 vehicles are stranded," police officer Abdul Hameed told AFP.

Labourers were using bulldozers, snow removal machines and shovels to open up the 300-kilometre (186-mile) highway, the main route for supplies to the Kashmir valley from state winter capital Jammu and the rest of the subcontinent.

"It may take us a few days to restore power supply in the valley," senior engineer Nissar Ahmed said.

Offices in the region were still open but many people were late as they had to walk through the thick blanket of snow.

Earlier this month, India's air force airlifted to safety more than 5,000 people stranded for days in sub-zero temperatures on the main highway by avalanches and landslides.

The Indian army has a strong presence in Kashmir where it is fighting to suppress a deadly Islamic separatist insurgency that has raged since 1989.

2007-03-11T21:04:00.000-04:00

A firefighter races down Avenida De Santiago while helping fight a wildfire in Anaheim Hills near Orange, Calif., Sunday, March 11, 2007. (AP Photo/Orange County Register, Jebb Harris)

Calif. brush fire forces evacuations

ANAHEIM, Calif. - A fast-moving brush fire scorched 1,000 acres of parched hillside and charred at least two homes Sunday, forcing authorities to evacuate more than 200 homes, Orange County fire officials said.

The nearly 2-square-mile fire threatened many other houses and the firefighters working to protect them, Anaheim city spokesman John J. Nicoletti said.

"This is a very dangerous firefight," said Orange County Fire Authority Chief Ed Fleming. "The terrain is quite rugged, with homes on top of ridges, and the fire picks up speed as it heads up the hill."

No injuries have been reported, Nicoletti said.

The fire, stoked by hot dry winds and fueled by chaparral, spread south and west quickly in an unincorporated part of Orange County and threatened multimillion-dollar homes here and in Anaheim Hills, about 35 miles southeast of Los Angeles. Authorities said the blaze may have been started by a vehicle fire.

Capt. Steve Miller of the Orange County Fire Authority said winds blowing up to 35 mph were making firefighting difficult for the more than 400 firefighters on the scene. Temperatures were in the 90s and humidity was at 5 percent.

Firefighters were aided by helicopters and planes dropping water and retardant on the flames, and police went door to door to warn residents to evacuate.

"We are holding our own, but the fire is going to continue to make progress as long as fuel is in its way. It's not a good situation for us," Miller said.

The area, like much of Southern California, is under a red flag alert, indicating a high fire danger. A prolonged drought has left the chaparral-covered hills highly combustible.

Fleeing fires has become a part of life for many residents.

Susan Snell, who has lived in Anaheim Hills for 23 years, followed a well-worn routine Sunday: She put her cat in a carrier, packed tax and insurance papers and photographs and found a good vantage point.

"It's freaky what you end up taking with you," she said as she watched television at the Anaheim Hills Community Center for updates.

Meanwhile, another brush fire had started about 20 miles away in Corona in Riverside County, said Capt. Julie Hutchinson from the California Department of Forestry. It had consumed about 25 acres but didn't threaten any houses, said Hutchinson.

2007-03-10T12:11:00.000-05:00

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."

2007-03-08T13:16:00.000-05:00

Strong quake hits seas off Japan coast

TOKYO - A strong earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 6.0 struck in Pacific Ocean waters off Japan's eastern coast Thursday, but there was no danger of a tsunami, Japan's Meteorological Agency said.

There were no immediate reports of injuries or damage.

The earthquake, which occurred at 2:04 p.m., was centered 87 miles below the earth's surface, near the island of Tori-shima, the agency said. Tori-shima is about 360 miles southeast of Tokyo.

Japan sits atop four tectonic plates and is one of the most earthquake-prone countries in the world.

Small earthquake shakes Melbourne

A shallow earthquake of magnitude 3.5 shook homes east of Melbourne just after 1.30pm (AEDT) on Thursday.

The quake's epicentre was in the Bunyip State Park, approximately 70 kilometres east of Melbourne, although residents would have felt the shudders up to 40 kilometres away from its centre.

Duty seismologist David Jepsen at Geoscience Australia said it was unlikely there would be any damage associated with the tremor.

The last earthquake of a similar strength was six years ago, although Melbourne residents experienced one with a magnitude 2.9 in October last year.

Today's tremor, defined as an intraplate earthquake, occurred when stresses in the earth's crust exceeded the strength of the rock above, causing the rock to break, Dr Jepsen said in a statement.

Australia's west braces for tropical storm

CANBERRA (Reuters) - Communities on Australia's north west coast prepared for a severe tropical cyclone expected to hit the region early on Friday, with mines and oil production shut down and emergency services placed on alert.

Cyclone George was expected to hit the remote coast between Port Hedland and Karratha early on Friday, bringing heavy rain and winds of up to 235 km per hour (146 miles per hour).

A second storm, tropical cyclone Jacob, was also heading toward Western Australia, but was still far off the coast and was 240 km south of the Australian territory of Christmas Island.

Mining company BHP Billiton Ltd./Plc. said it had closed its iron ore port operations in Western Australia's Port Hedland as George was expected to intensify from category three to a category four cyclone within hours, just one step short of the maximum level five.

"People have been sent home to look after their own properties," a company spokeswoman said.

Much of the offshore oil production in the area was also suspended as a precaution, affecting about half of Australia's daily oil output.

The storm was moving slowly south toward the coast, in an area known as Cyclone Alley, at 16 km (10 miles) per hour and the Bureau of Meteorology expected it to cross the coast around 6 a.m. on Friday (2200 Thursday GMT).

Emergency services issued a yellow alert -- the second highest -- for the area between Broome and Dampier, warning of destructive winds and advising people to shelter in the strongest parts of their homes.

Ships in the area's iron ore ports were heading to the safety of deeper water to ride out the cyclone and await the possible arrival of category two Jacob.

The storm threat revived memories of Cyclone Glenda, a destructive category four storm, which forced oil and gas fields to shut down and thousands of people to take shelter when it hit the region last March.

Destructive storms also caused havoc along Western Australia's southern coast and goldfields in January, bringing flooding and strong winds.

The weather bureau said George also threatened to bring extensive flooding and dangerous storm tides as it crossed the coast, after which its power was expected to weaken quickly.

Cyclones are a regular feature of the Australian summer in the tropical north and the season still has another month to run. The most deadly on record was Cyclone Tracy, which killed 65 people in the northern city of Darwin in 1974.

2007-03-07T12:01:00.000-05:00

Survivors stunned by power of Indonesia quake

SOLOK, Indonesia (AFP) - Relief operations swung into gear Wednesday a day after a powerful quake rocked the Indonesian island of Sumatra as a senior official revised the death toll down to 52.

The force of the 6.3-magnitude earthquake, which was followed by an almost equally powerful aftershock, stunned villagers used to the tremors that often shake this mountainous region of West Sumatra.

Rescue officials earlier said the quake, which hit early Tuesday, killed 71 people and injured hundreds, many seriously.

A spokesman for President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono revised that figure to 52, saying some of the dead had been counted twice, although the Antara state news agency cited an unconfirmed breakdown of fatalities adding up to 88.

"We have earthquakes now and then but nothing as strong as yesterday's. I have never experienced an earthquake that strong," said Emi Zurmiati, 42, her eyes reddened from crying.

Speaking in front of a crumbled home in Sumani village, one of the hardest hit areas of West Sumatra's Solok district, she said her mother and two nieces had been killed in the quake.

The girls died in a fire that swept through a primary school after a wall collapsed on it. Her mother was killed in a nearby alleyway.

Altogether nine people died in Sumani, five of them primary school pupils and the rest women hit in the alley by the same collapsing wall.

Zurmiati, who had been sweeping in front of her home when the quake struck, said the ground shook so strongly that she could not even stand.

"Even crouching, I was tossed right and left," she said.

The quake's epicentre was located 49 kilometres (30 miles) northeast of the West Sumatran capital Padang, according to the US Geological Survey, but was also felt in neighbouring Malaysia and Singapore.

"This time, it was not only very strong but also lasted a long time," said 75-year-old Nurbari, a grandmother sitting under a large plastic sheet strung between trees in front of her house in Tanah Garam, a village near Sumani.

"The last time there was such a strong earthquake, that crumpled buildings and left large cracks on the ground. I was still very young," Nurbari said.

In the hamlet of Sumagek, near Sumani, about 70 people spent the night in the open, fearful of returning home.

"Everyone, by habit, knows what to do in case of a quake," said Masri, a 60-year-old farmer. "Run out of buildings. But this time, it (the quake) was extraordinary, really extraordinary."

Suryadi, a rescue coordinator on Sumatra, said more than 1,000 houses had been completely destroyed and at least 2,500 damaged.

"The latest data we have received is 71 dead in seven districts and cities," he told AFP.

"We have not received reports of the total number of people injured, but we did receive reports that many people cannot be accommodated by the hospitals."

Suryadi said the evacuation efforts were still underway and emergency meals were being distributed, although there was a shortage of tents.

"Many people are staying in front of their damaged houses, with whatever they can use as shelter," he added.

Syafrizal, member of an emergency team in nearby Tanah Datar district, said search efforts there had been called off.

"Now we are concentrating on relief efforts, including providing medical services, distributing aid and helping the population clean up," he said.

But quake survivors criticised the government's relief push as too slow.

Ridah, from Tanah Garam, said she had yet to be helped.

"Nothing, nothing, nothing," she responded when asked what she had received, the walls of what was once her home crumbling behind her.

The Netherlands pledged two million dollars to buy immediate necessities, while Canada promised 250,000 Canadian dollars.

Indonesia, an archipelago of some 17,000 islands, sits on the so-called Pacific Ring of Fire, where continental plates meet -- and where earthquakes are a regular and often deadly occurrence.

The devastating Asian tsunami in 2004 was set off by a massive earthquake off the coast of Sumatra, killing some 168,000 people in Aceh province on its northern tip in a total of 220,000 across the Indian Ocean region.

2007-03-05T23:04:00.000-05:00

Table-sized ice slabs close Toronto streets

Bitter snowstorm interrupts warm China

BEIJING - The worst March snowfall to hit northeast China in 56 years killed three people and storms halted power and water supplies just days after the country registered one of its warmest ever winters, state media said on Monday.

The three died when roofs of two market stalls collapsed under the weight of the snow on Sunday in Liaoning province, Xinhua news agency said.

High winds brought down 1,100 ramshackle houses and damaged another 1,300, it said, citing a provincial spokesman.

Power stations in the coastal city of Dalian were hit by high winds. Water and heating were cut for many parts of the city, the agency said. As a result, some 900,000 students were told not to show up for school Monday.

Heating for 40 percent of users of Dalian's largest electricity group was cut at midnight on Sunday, leaving thousands of urban families shivering as the temperature dropped to 19 degrees Fahrenheit, it said.

It would take two or three days to repair the damage, it added, quoting city authorities.

Scores of flights and trains were cancelled in the area, leaving hundreds of passengers stranded.

Most of China's northern wheat-growing areas had also been hit by the snowfall, agriculture officials said.

A warmer-than-usual winter had increased the possibility of spring freeze damage as it accelerated growth of the crop, grain experts said.

Rain, isolation hamper Indonesia landslide rescue

JAKARTA, March 5 (Reuters) - Heavy rains and poor access to remote areas hampered search and relief efforts for about 40 missing people and hundreds displaced by landslides in Indonesia's eastern Flores island, officials said on Monday.

About 1,000 people whose homes were washed away have been evacuated, many still remain cut off with key roads severely damaged by the landslides and floods that have killed 34 people across vast swathes of land.

The landslides followed days of torrential rain in hillside areas in Flores' Manggarai regency, around 1,500 km (932 miles) east of Jakarta.

"It is still raining here today. There is thick fog around the location but we managed to evacuate 1,000 people," said Manggarai regent Christian Rotok, who was moving aid to an isolated district.

"Many houses in Manggarai are built on hills which are prone to disaster and much of the forest above has been stripped. Landslides occur almost every year," he told Reuters by telephone.

Rotok said rescuers, including soldiers and policemen, were forced to take food and medicine to evacuees by foot because some affected districts were still cut off.

Indonesia is in the middle of the rainy season, when landslides are frequent in the country. Tropical downpours can quickly soak hillsides and years of deforestation often means there is little vegetation to hold the soil.

2007-03-03T10:55:00.000-05:00

Feds assess damage from Alabama tornado

ENTERPRISE, Ala. - Betty Thomas' house was without power, battered by a tornado that killed eight students at a nearby high school.

But Thomas said she was more concerned about caring for her five grandchildren and neighbors — who she was barbecuing food for in her front yard Friday — than about how much the government will chip in to help fix her place up.

"I haven't even had a chance to think about that," said Thomas, 54. "I'm just glad to be here."

President Bush arrived in Enterprise on Saturday, a day after Gov. Bob Riley toured the town's heavily damaged school and ravaged neighborhoods.

Federal Emergency Management Agency officials fanned Friday out to assess the damage, which Police Chief T.D. Jones said covered a swath about four miles long and hundreds of yards wide. Riley promised the state would help rebuild Enterprise High School, where a tornado struck Thursday, killing eight students.

"I told the superintendent that 'We're going to rebuild your school,'" Riley said.

The students were among 20 people killed in Alabama, Georgia and Missouri by tornadoes contained in a line of thunderstorms that stretched from Minnesota to the Gulf Coast. The storms damaged or destroyed hundreds of homes, toppled trees and knocked down power lines. In Enterprise, a town of 22,000 people, more than 50 people were hurt.

As residents began the arduous task of cutting and hauling away downed trees on Friday, some questioned why students were still at the high school nearly three hours after the first tornado warnings were issued Thursday.

Warning sirens began blaring about 10:30 a.m. that day, prompting school officials to order the high school's 1,200 students into interior halls — supposedly the safest part of the building.

Many students left school after the initial warnings, and administrators decided to dismiss classes at 1 p.m., before the worst of the weather was forecast to hit, said Bob Phares, an assistant school superintendent.

But with hundreds of students still huddled inside the school, emergency management officials warned that a tornado may hit the area and advised school officials to hold students until 1:30 p.m., Phares said.

"The storm hit about 1:15," he said. A wall in one hall collapsed, and the concrete slab roof fell on the victims.

Residents of the neighborhood around the school said they heard warning sirens long before the tornado slammed into the building, crushing the victims in an avalanche of concrete and metal.

"It came real fast, but they had plenty of time to get those kids out because sirens were going off all morning," said Pearl Green, whose 15-year-old niece attends the school and was hit in the head by a flying brick.

But school officials said they had no chance to evacuate earlier because of the approaching severe weather. And others said the carnage would have been greater had students been outside or on the road when the storm hit.

The governor defended administrators' actions after a tour of the school.

"I don't know of anything they didn't do," Riley said after stepping out of the collapsed hallway where the students died. "If I had been there, I hope I would have done as well as they did."

The last of the bodies were removed Friday. The dead students included five boys and three girls, all 16 or 17 years old.

"Each one who was brought out, somebody would say, `That was a good kid,'" said Phares.

Landslides kill 17 in eastern Indonesia

AKARTA, March 3 (Reuters) - Landslides caused by torrential rains in the eastern Indonesian island of Flores killed at least 17 people and left 46 missing, a government official said on Saturday.

The heavy rains also caused flooding and washed away dozens of homes in six hilly districts in East Nusa Tenggara province, Yos Nono, an official at the disaster management office in Manggarai regency, told Reuters.

"An evacuation team is digging to search for the victims, but we are facing problems because of bad weather and heavy rain," Nono said.

He said the road from Ruteng, the main town in the area, to Reok district was cut off because of the landslide and some areas had turned into virtual lakes.

Officials had no estimate of the number of people who may have been displaced from their homes, but the government was distributing rice, noodles and canned fish to victims.

Indonesia is in the middle of the rainy season when landslides are frequent in the country. Tropical downpours can quickly soak hillsides where deforestation has left little vegetation to hold the soil.

Moderate quake jolts Indonesia's Papua

AKARTA, March 3 (Reuters) - A moderate 5.3-magnitude earthquake struck Indonesia's Papua island on Saturday, damaging some houses and a TV tower but caused no serious damage or deaths, a meteorological official said.

The quake struck 67 km (42 miles) southeast of Manokwari, the capital of West Irian Jaya province, at a depth of 33 km, Setiyono, an analyst at the meteorology and geophysics agency, said.

Indonesia lies in the so called "Pacific Ring of Fire" where seismic activity is frequent because of the shifting of tectonic plates.

Cyclone causes flooding across NT

Heavy rain from tropical cyclone George is causing widespread flooding in the Northern Territory's north-west.

Darwin's northern suburbs have recorded 206 millimetres of rain since yesterday morning.

Weather bureau spokesman Ian Roberston says the heavy downpours are the result of a tropical low, which is now a category 2 cyclone.

"Darwin has 310 millimetres of rain so far this month, and the average for the month is 317, so we've almost had the average for the whole, all of March, in the last four days," he said.

Tropical cyclone George is moving west at 15 kilometres-per-hour and is about 115 kilometres west-south-west of Port Keats.

A cyclone warning is current from Cockatoo Island off the Kimberley coast to Daly River mouth in the Northern Territory.

A cyclone watch has been extended from Cockatoo Island to the Kimberley town of Broome.

Oenpelli

Meanwhile, flood waters have dropped about half-a-metre overnight in the Arnhem Land community of Oenpelli, 320 kilometres east of Darwin.

Oenpelli has recorded almost 870 millimetres of rain in the past week, which forced the evacuation of almost 100 people to high ground.

Rain is still falling in the town today, but the local council is hoping the worst of the flooding is over.

Council spokesman Bill Medley says the community is now listing household goods such as beds, fridges and food stocks that will need to be brought in.

"We'll need to bring some stuff in and the environmental health people are coming out," he said.

"So once the water does receded, we've got a big clean-up of all the houses and buildings that have been affected by the water.

"But we're just compiling a list of gear now that we need to get bought in, but then it's just roll your sleeves up and just go and get your hands dirty and start working."

Katherine warning

Heavy rainfall in the Top End has also prompted police to launch the first flood warning under the Katherine region's new flood plan.

Floodwaters have reached three metres at the Nitmiluk Visitors Centre, near Katherine Gorge.

Katherine and Northern Regional Police Commander Greg Dowd says the warning indicates water could reach 14 metres at the town's Railway Bridge within the next 12 hours.

He says residents on Gorge Road and other low lying areas have been notified.

"Obviously we've now got about a 12 hour window where that water will flow through to Katherine, but we're not expecting it to go beyond somewhere about the 14 metre mark," he said.

"It doesn't even trigger us to the next stage of the plan for the Katherine township itself."

2007-03-02T00:21:00.000-05:00

19 dead as tornadoes tear through southern US

NEW ORLEANS, United States (AFP) - Nineteen people were killed as tornadoes and severe storms rippped through the southern United States on Thursday, with many of the victims at an Alabama school, the White House said.

The US government extended federal aid to the stricken states of Alabama and Missouri. The aid came on the same day President George W. Bush, criticized for a slow response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, visited New Orleans to tell the storm victims he had not forgotten about them.

"The administration stands ready to help," Bush spokesman Scott Stanzel said, adding that Bush was "deeply saddened" by the deaths, which included a girl in Missouri and 18 more people in Alabama, of whom 13 were in a school.

The worst-hit was the Alabama city of Enterprise, where a tornado tore through a high school.

"I felt like I was on a rollercoaster. It was the scariest thing ever," student Brooke Shroades told the Enteprise Ledger newspaper after surviving the twister by hunkering down in a cubbyhole at the school.

"When I heard the train sound, I started screaming," she said.

Her father, Mike Shroades, who had hoped to pick up his daughter before the storm hit, sought shelter in a school hallway with other parents, teachers and students.

"You could feel your body moving from the wind and suction," the Enterprise Ledger quoted him as saying.

School official Bob Ferris said the extent of the tragedy was not immediately clear. "We need your prayers," he said at a news conference.

City Mayor Kenneth Boswell announced he had imposed a dusk-to-dawn curfew to ensure emergency crews can work unhindered.

Dozens of people were taken to hospitals in Enterprise and other parts of the southern state, where numerous homes were reported destroyed.

"Cars are overturned and kids are being taken away in stretchers," Enterprise resident Maria Finch told the Montgomery Advertiser.

Television footage showed destroyed buildings, smashed cars, uprooted trees and downed power lines.

"It is complete devastation," Sheriff Russell Thomas told WSFA television as he assisted in rescue efforts in Enterprise. "It is very tragic."

"Enterprise has suffered major and widespread damage," said Alabama Governor Bob Riley, announcing he deployed about 100 National Guardsmen to assist in recovery efforts.

Local hospitals asked for blood donations and utility Alabama Power said about 15,000 homes across the state were without power Thursday afternoon.

In Missouri, one girl was reported dead after an apparent tornado touchdown.

The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said a total of 19 tornadoes were reported to have touched down in Alabama, Missouri and Georgia on Thursday.

And it warned more twisters, hail and "destructive thunderstorm winds" could threaten the southeastern United States and possibly some areas farther north during the night.

2007-03-01T15:35:00.001-05:00

Near-blizzard, tornadoes sock central U.S.

CHICAGO (Reuters) - The second big winter storm to hit the central United States in less than a week slammed parts of Nebraska and Iowa with near-blizzard conditions on Thursday and spun off tornadoes that killed a child in Missouri.

Snow piling up at a rate of 2 inches an hour closed Interstate 80, a major transcontinental highway, in southeast Nebraska from Omaha westward, where more than 9 inches of snow had fallen in some areas.

More than 50 counties were under blizzard warnings in neighboring western Iowa. Interstate 29 was closed in Iowa from near Omaha north to Sioux City at the South Dakota line.

Schools were closed across southern Minnesota as snow began piling up.

Parts of several Midwestern states and regions as far south as the Gulf Coast to the Florida panhandle were under tornado watches or warnings. In the town of Caulfield in south-central Missouri, a tornado killed a girl in a mobile home and damaged six other homes and two gasoline stations, officials reported.

Damaging hailstorms struck several states.

Foul weather in other cities snarled air traffic in Chicago, where 250 flights were canceled at O'Hare International Airport.

The Weather Channel reported that heavy snow would hit parts of northern New England on Friday and Friday night, where 1 foot or snow may fall as the storm moves east. But it said the bigger cities from Boston and New York, southward would escape with only rain.

2007-02-28T17:11:00.000-05:00

La Nina's brewing, forecasters warn

WASHINGTON - Forecasters warned Tuesday that a La Nina weather pattern — the nasty flip side of El Nino — is brewing, bringing with it the threat of more hurricanes for the Atlantic.

Officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced the official end of a brief and mild El Nino that started last year. That El Nino was credited with partially shutting down last summer's Atlantic hurricane activity in the midst of what was supposed to be a busy season.

"We're seeing a shift to the La Nina, it's clearly in the data," NOAA Administrator Conrad Lautenbacher said. La Nina, a cooling of the mid-Pacific equatorial region, has not officially begun because it's a process with several months with specific temperature thresholds, but the trend is obvious based on satellite and ocean measurement data, he said.

"It certainly won't be welcome news for those living off the coast right now," Lautenbacher said. But he said that doesn't mean Atlantic seaboard residents should sell their homes.

Forecasters don't know how strong this La Nina will be. However, it typically means more hurricanes in the Atlantic, fewer in the Pacific, less rain and more heat for the already drought-stricken South, and a milder spring and summer in the north, Lautenbacher said. The central plains of the United States tend be drier in the fall during La Ninas, while the Pacific Northwest tends to be wetter in the late fall and early winter.

Of special concern is west Texas which is already in a long-term drought, which during a La Nina will likely get worse, Lautenbacher said.

Historically, El Ninos and La Ninas are difficult to forecast, said National Center for Atmospheric Research senior scientist Michael Glantz, who studies how they effect humans.

"I don't see it as a useful forecast," Glantz said. "Every event since they've been looking at El Nino ... surprised scientists."

La Ninas tend to develop from March to June and reach peak intensity at the end of the year and into the next February, according to Vernon Kousky, NOAA's top El Nino/La Nina expert. La Nina winters tend to be warmer than normal in the Southeast and colder than normal in the Northwest.

Andrew Weaver, a meteorology professor at the University of Victoria in Canada, said NOAA's forecast looks good because the signs of a brewing La Nina are apparent just below the ocean's surface.

"La Nina is the evil twin sister of El Nino, so it's good or bad depending on where you live," Weaver said. However, in general La Ninas do not have as costly effects on humans as El Ninos do, he said.

The last lengthy La Nina, from 1998 to 2001, helped cause a serious drought in much of the West, according to NOAA drought specialist Douglas Lecomte.

"There are winners and losers, people tend to concentrate on the losers," Lautenbacher said.

2007-02-26T13:35:00.000-05:00

Arkansas town copes with tornado damage

DUMAS, Ark. - Much of this small town still had no electricity Monday and an estimated 800 workers had no jobs to report to because of a weekend tornado.

Among the dozens of people injured, two young children remained in critical condition Monday.

Gov. Mike Beebe cut short his trip to the National Governors Association conference in Washington to tour the damaged area Monday. Lt. Gov. Bill Halter visited Sunday and said it looked as though "high explosives" had been set off in some homes.

The tornado struck Saturday with wind estimated at up to 207 mph.

It destroyed the Arkat Feeds pet food plant, where 125 people were employed, and heavily damaged the Federal Mogul auto supply company. It also destroyed several other businesses in the town of 5,300 people

About 2,300 customers in the Dumas area were still without power Monday, said Entergy Arkansas spokesman James Thompson.

Thompson said the utility's electric substation for the area was knocked out and it had to bring in temporary equipment. However, he said everyone able to accept electricity should have service by the end of business on Tuesday.

On Sunday, Dumas resident Kevin Hill and his family pulled furniture from the rubble of their home. He said he and his family were in Pine Bluff to pick up a saw blade when the storm ripped apart their home.

"Thank God for a five-dollar saw blade or we would have all been inside the house," said Hill, 42.

The storm also polluted the town's drinking water and residents were told to boil it before using it.

The National Weather Service rated the Dumas tornado an F-3, with wind estimated at 158 to 207 mph. A second tornado that went from near Pendleton to near Tichnor was rated an F-1.

The tornadoes were spun off by thunderstorms that were part of the huge weather system responsible for blizzard conditions farther north that blocked highways on the Plains, grounded airline flights and blacked out hundreds of thousands of customers.

At least 43 houses and 50 mobile homes were destroyed or damaged around Dumas, while 25 businesses were leveled and nine had major damage, a state Department of Emergency Management spokesman said.

"We feel like we've probably got 800 unemployed today as a result," Desha County Sheriff Jim Snyder said.

Severe winter storm hammers Midwest, East Coast

CHICAGO (Reuters) - A severe winter storm dumped snow and freezing rain across the Midwest and mid-Atlantic United States on Sunday, stranding air travelers from Boston to Chicago and causing several traffic deaths.

More than 200 flights were canceled at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, with remaining flights delayed 60 to 90 minutes because of the icy snow, Chicago Department of Aviation spokeswoman Wendy Abrams said.

JetBlue Airways Corp., still struggling from a service meltdown during last week's ice storm in New York, was among the airlines that canceled flights.

Numerous road closings were reported in the upper Midwest. Wisconsin police reported at least eight traffic-related fatalities, including one accident in southern Wisconsin where a woman's vehicle slammed into a snow plow, killing her and two children.

Thousands of homes lost power. In northern Illinois, utility company ComEd spokesman Jeff Burdick said at its peak, 38,000 customers lost power. Ice on the power lines was a major contributor to the outages, he said.

The National Weather Service said a winter storm warning was in effect from New Jersey to Virginia, while an ice storm warning was in effect in western Pennsylvania.

Moderate to heavy snow was expected through the afternoon for much of the region, but Pennsylvania and Maryland state authorities said all roads remained open.

Snow removal efforts caused flight delays at Dulles and Reagan National airports in the Washington region, Washington Metropolitan Airports Authority spokesman Rob Yingling said.

Bad weather caused flight cancellations from Boston to Milwaukee.

Amtrak service on the East Coast was unaffected by the storm, but service between Washington and Chicago was canceled in part due to the weather, spokeswoman Karina Romero said.

On Saturday, authorities shut down highways and canceled hundreds of flights on Saturday as the storm hammered much of the Midwest.

At least one tornado touched down in Arkansas, while the storm caused a 35-car pileup east of Denver.

Food crisis looms in flood-ravaged Mozambique

CAIA, Mozambique, Feb 26 (Reuters) - Thousands of flood victims are pouring into crowded refugee camps in central Mozambique, straining relief efforts and prompting fears of a food crisis, authorities said on Monday.

Weeks of heavy rains have triggered flash floods along the mighty Zambezi river and its tributaries, washing away homes, bridges, livestock and crops in four central provinces in the low-lying southern African nation.

Some 170,000 people have been displaced and at least 45 have died as a result of the flooding, the worst to hit the former Portuguese colony since the 2000-2001 floods that killed some 700 people and drove another half a million from their homes.

Aid workers were battling on Monday to supply food and fresh water to a ballooning refugee population, with an estimated 2,000 people each day streaming into temporary accommodation centers set up by the Red Cross and other agencies.

"We still have some food, but it's not enough," said Joao Ribeiro, deputy director of Mozambique's National Institute for Disaster Management (INGC).

Ribeiro said sanitary conditions in the shelters were worsening due to a lack of toilets and poor hygiene, raising fears of potential outbreaks of cholera and dysentery among the estimated 50,000 people living in the makeshift camps.

Mozambican President Armando Guebuza, however, said the relief effort was proceeding smoothly and there was no need for the government to issue a broad appeal for help.

"It's not a declaration on the international front that can help to change the situation. I think we are going in the right direction," Guebuza told reporters in Caia, a central Mozambican town that has become a command center for the relief effort.

Earlier on Monday the Mozambican leader flew over parts of the Zambezi valley that were hard hit by the flooding.

The U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) is already distributing food to refugees in the affected provinces. Neighbouring South Africa and the European Union also have pledged more help for the relief effort.

South Africa will send two helicopters and a mobile water purification plant to its northeastern neighbour this week and could add a field hospital and water and wind resistant tents to its contribution, the SAPA news agency reported on Monday.

But aid workers say the effort to feed and shelter refugees has been complicated by poor roads in Mozambique, which is still rebuilding after a 16-year civil war that ended in 1991.

The struggle to get food and water to flood victims could become more difficult in the coming weeks as more rain falls on the country. March traditionally is one of the wettest periods in Mozambique's rainy season.

"A lot of areas are still very difficult to get through and there are new pockets of disaster areas forming," said Peter Rodrigues, emergency relief coordinator for the WFP in Caia.

"The challenge is that these people are spread out, making it difficult to reach them."

In southern Mozambique, which is home to the bulk of the country's economically important tourist resorts, authorities were assessing the damage from Cyclone Favio, which came ashore on Thursday with winds of up to 270 kph (169 mph).

The cyclone slammed into the coast, knocking down buildings, uprooting trees and killing five people near Vilanculos. Mozambique's military on Monday was attempting to restore water and electricity in the resort city.

2007-02-24T23:00:00.000-05:00

Tornado damages Arkansas town, storm hits Midwest

LITTLE ROCK, Ark., Feb 24 (Reuters) - At least one tornado touched down in Dumas, Arkansas, on Saturday, injuring a number of people and destroying much of the small town's business district, while a strong winter storm moved across Colorado and into the Midwest.

A line of thunderstorms and at least one and possibly two tornadoes struck at about 3 p.m. in Dumas, about 85 miles (135 km) southeast of Little Rock.

"We have lots of injuries, lots. But no reports of fatalities thus far. That's something of a miracle," said Tina Owens, spokeswoman for the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management.

"Most of the businesses along the town's main corridor have been destroyed, and a number of homes immediately behind those businesses have been destroyed as well," she said.

An unidentified woman told a TV station that she and several friends were in a store when the storm hit.

"We all gathered in the center of the store and got down on the floor and covered our heads and prayed. The noise was incredible and I thought, 'This is it -- I'm gonna die.' But we all made it," she said.

Arkansas Lt. Gov. Bill Halter requested National Guard troops be dispatched to the area.

Severe weather also hit Colorado, where fierce winds and blowing snow were blamed for a 35-car pileup east of Denver early on Saturday, said Mindy Crane, spokeswoman for the Colorado Department of Transportation.

Crane said four or five minor injuries were reported.

The storm forced the closure of a 150-mile (240-km) stretch of Interstate 70 east of Denver to the Kansas border, and it remained closed late on Saturday afternoon, Crane said.

"We are still experiencing 50- to 60 mile-per-hour (80-96 kph) winds that are creating whiteout conditions," Crane said.

The storm was moving east and the National Weather Service said northern Illinois and northwest Indiana would be hit with a mix of freezing rain, sleet and snow by Monday.

Wisconsin will take the brunt of the storm, with a blizzard warning in effect for parts of the state, including Milwaukee, the Weather Service reported.

Seven people in Wisconsin died from traffic accidents related to the storm, which is expected to drop 7 to 10 inches (18-25 cm) of snow on the state, the Milwaukee Journal reported.

In the Chicago area, an ice storm warning was in effect until 6 a.m. CST on Sunday.

Airports in the Chicago area prepared for the storm, canceling some 230 flights out of O'Hare International Airport and 70 flights at Midway Airport as of 7 p.m. CST on Saturday, said Wendy Abrams, a spokeswoman for the Chicago Aviation Department.

United Airlines spokeswoman Robin Urbanski said the company had begun canceling flights by early afternoon and by 7 p.m. CST all United flights into O'Hare and Midway were canceled, she said.

Abrams said United was the only airline to cancel all its flights. "The remainder of flights are on time for both airports," she said.

Urbanski said United's cancellation policy was designed to keep customers safe at home rather than stuck in an airport or on an airplane.

"We recover from storms more quickly," she said.

Mozambique island tourists woken by cyclone wrath

MAPUTO, Feb 24 (Reuters) - Peter Thomas was peacefully sleeping in a lavish island resort off Mozambique when the full wrath of tropical cyclone Favio slammed into his chalet.

"I was in my room enjoying my sleep and suddenly found myself in a pool of water and the rooftop was being ripped off," the South African said in the capital Maputo after being airlifted from battered Bazaruto island.

"The front windows were smashed and I could see the roof and satellite dishes flying over our heads," said another tourist, who declined to be identified.

Thomas and other tourists who cowered for 12 hours in bathrooms at the Indigo Bay resort as the cyclone uprooted palm trees and ripped apart buildings were lucky.

At the hotel, 600km north of Maputo, no one died from the cyclone, which killed four people and injured at least 70 in the resort town of Vilanculos since hitting the coast on Thursday.

It was downgraded on Friday to a tropical storm as wind speeds dropped from a peak of 270 kph (170 mph) and dissipated further on Saturday, officials said.

This lessened worries that rain from the storm would exacerbate several weeks of flooding that had already displaced more than 120,000 people.

Neighbouring South Africa said it would help in the relief effort, providing helicopters, tents and water treatment plants.

The European Commission was also planning to help airlift supplies and said it had sent an extra 2 million euros ($2.62 million) in emergency aid, the same amount it sent last week for the flooding victims.

TOURISM IMPACT MUTED

Lodges like Indigo Bay were reduced to rubble by the storm that hit the Bazaruto archipelago, a string of islands 40 km off the coast in the Indian Ocean dotted with luxury resorts.

Resorts there were especially vulnerable since they were constructed of natural materials like reed, thatch and wood to blend in with the tropical surroundings.

"The resort has been completely destroyed and they will have to shut it down for a couple of months," one of the tourists said.

A government official said the cyclone would not have a major impact on overall tourism in the country since other areas were spared by the storms.

"We have beautiful Islands in the northern Cabo Delgado and people still have destinations while we reconstruct Bazaruto," tourism ministry official Albino Mahumane told Reuters.

The former Portuguese colony, recovering from a devastating 16-year political conflict, saw its worst disaster on record in 2000-2001.

A series of cyclones then compounded widespread flooding in southern and central parts of the country, killing 700 people and driving close to half a million from their homes.

2007-02-23T13:57:00.000-05:00

Cyclone Favio leaves destruction in Mozambique

MAPUTO (AFP) - Emergency workers Friday have surveyed damage to areas of Mozambique left devastated by Cyclone Favio, which left at least three people dead, scores and flattened most of the worst-hit town.

Red Cross spokesman Tapiwa Gomo said he had received differing reports that three or four people had been killed in and around the town of Vilankulo in Inhambane province.

"The situation is extremely bad, about 80 percent of the town has been destroyed. The local hospital, which has about 120 patients, was also destroyed," he told AFP.

Government and Red Cross teams were working together in Vilankulo, around 800 kilometers (500 miles) northeast of the capital Maputo, to move the patients into tents.

"The problem right now is that medicine in the hospital was affected, which means there is no medicine," said Gomo.

About 200 tents were being provided for those who had had the roofs of their houses blown off.

Items such as blankets were needed, Gomo added, while aid organisations went on evacuating people and assessing areas which would need assistance.

Meanwhile Favio was downgraded to a tropical depression.

"It is no longer a cyclone, it is now a tropical depression. The winds are strong, from 60 kilometers (37 miles) per hour to 80 kilometers per hour. It is travelling north-west to Zimbabwe," said Helder Sueia, chief forecaster in the national meteorological office.

He would not comment on the dangers of Cyclone Jumede, currently to the east of Mozambique, affecting the country.

Gomo said they were not yet worried about the possibility of a second cyclone as it was "still very far".

UN Childrens Fund spokesman Thierry Delvijne-Jean said emergency material that had been stored in a Maputo warehouse for victims of the flooding, such as chlorine, water, tarpaulin sheets and basic survival kits would be handed out to victims of the cyclone.

Favio was classified as a category four cyclone, which is one that can generate winds of around 200 kilometers an hour.

The cyclone adds to the strain on emergency workers already helping victims of recent flooding that left 80,000 people living alongside the Zambezi river homeless and around 30 dead.

Deluges in Mozambique in 2000-2001 claimed more than 700 lives. The southern African country's peak rainfall season is from the end of February to early March.

Indonesia to try to plug mud volcano with concrete balls

SURABAYA, Indonesia (AP) -- An Indonesian official hit back at critics of a plan to control a gushing mud volcano by dropping concrete balls into its crater, saying something must be done to stop a nine-month-long eruption that has displaced 11,000 people.

A team of geologists and engineers hope the plan, believed to have never been tried before, will reduce the amount of mud flowing from the geyser at a gas exploration site on Java island by up to 70 percent. The mud is now surging out at a rate equivalent to about a million oil drums a day.

The plan follows an abandoned attempt to block the flow by pouring in concrete.

Critics have said they doubt the new attempt will work, and that it may be dangerous or cause the mud to flow out from different points.

"Those experts can say what they want, but we have to do something," said Rudi Novrianto, a spokesman for a government task force handling the disaster. "There is no time to debate and sit around."

The team had planned to begin releasing the balls on Friday, but were forced to postpone the operation until a later date -- possibly as soon as Saturday -- due to technical problems, he said.

Engineers will release five of the chained cement balls, each weighing up to 250 kilograms (550 pounds), and monitor the effect before gradually releasing more balls into the hole, Novrianto said.

He said laboratory tests by geologists at Indonesia's most respected university had indicated the plan will work.

Mud volcanoes are fairly common along volatile tectonic belts such as the one running below Indonesia, and in areas where there are rich oil and natural gas deposits.

Opinions differ about the cause of the mud flow, but experts agree it could continue for years.

Some scientists suggest the rupture was triggered by faulty gas exploration techniques by operator PT Lapindo Brantas. Other research suggests it is the result of increased seismic activity, with the mud flow starting two days after a major earthquake.

The mud has inundated several villagers and scores of factories in one of Java's most densely populated areas.

Some of the mud is being channeled to the sea, while the rest is being contained behind dams.

Lapindo is a subsidiary of PT Energy Mega Persada Tbk, controlled by the family of Indonesian Welfare Minister Aburizal Bakrie. He has said repeatedly the geyser was sparked by the earthquake and that his company bears no financial liability.

2007-02-21T11:54:00.000-05:00

An Indonesian rows a makeshift raft through a flooded Jakarta graveyard on February 9. Devastating floods in the Indonesian capital earlier this month have caused nearly one billion dollars worth of damage and losses.(AFP/File/Adek Berry)

Jakarta flood losses rise to nearly one billion dollars

JAKARTA (AFP) - Devastating floods in the Indonesian capital earlier this month have caused nearly one billion dollars worth of damage and losses.

National Development Planning Minister Paskah Suzetta said direct losses from infrastructure damage and state revenue were at least 5.2 trillion rupiah (572 million dollars), higher than his earlier estimate of 4.1 trillion rupiah.

Potential economic losses were estimated at another 3.6 trillion rupiah, newspapers quoted him as saying.

The floods which hit on February 2 covered much of the city and forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes. Some 85 people were killed in the sprawling city and surrounding districts.

Businesses and private individuals bore the brunt of the flood damage, accounting for 4.5 trillion of the estimated 5.2 trillion rupiah, while the government and related institutions and enterprises suffered about 650 billion rupiah in losses and damage.

He said the figures did not yet include damage to social and public facilities such as schools, clinics and hospitals.

"The flood has the potential to lower Jakarta's GDP growth by 0.59 percent in the industry and trade sector" and also hit growth in surrounding towns, he said.

Environment Minister Rachmat Witoelar has blamed the floods on excessive construction on natural drainage areas, while city governor Sutiyoso has dismissed them as a "cyclical natural phenomenon."

Vice President Jusuf Kalla has told AFP that Sutiyoso and other officials should take responsibility for the devastation because of over-building which had not been accompanied by improved drainage.

"The richer people are, the more villas they build. So the mountains are full of villas. The green areas, including the rivers, are getting smaller and it is not balanced with a proper drainage system," he said.

Old Batavia, the former colonial port under Dutch rule from where Jakarta has expanded, was built on marshland and some areas of the capital are below sea level.

Surprising Solar Storms Rage at Sun's South Pole

Relatively calm weather was the standard forecast for the Sun, which is near the end of another 11-year solar cycle, but raging solar storms just spotted at its south pole now tell a different story.

At the start of a solar cycle, sunspots-regions on the Sun marked by cooler temperatures and intense magnetic activity-tend to appear near the poles and move towards the equator as the cycle concludes.

Scientists were therefore surprised when Ulysses, a joint European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA spacecraft currently embarking on its third tour around the Sun since launch in 1990, spotted intense solar storms near the Sun's south pole.

Solar storms are energetic explosions on the surface of the Sun caused by solar flares or coronal mass ejections, both of which tend to occur near sunspots.

'Particle events of this kind were seen during the second polar passes in 2000 and 2001, at solar maximum,' said Richard Marsden, ESA's Ulysses Project Scientist and Mission Manager. 'We certainly didn't expect to see them at higher latitudes at solar minimum.'

Ulysses also found that the Sun's south pole is currently cooler than its north pole. This is a reversal from 10 years ago, when the northern polar coronal hole was about 7 to 8 percent lower than the southern one. Coronal holes are like bald spots on the Sun: they are regions in the Sun's upper atmosphere, called the corona, where there is less heated gas than average. During solar minimum, coronal holes are mainly found at the Sun's polar regions; during solar maximum, they can be located anywhere.

'This implies that the asymmetry between north and south has switched with the change of the magnetic polarity of the Sun,' said George Gloeckler, Principal Investigator for the Solar Wind Ion Composition Spectrometer (SWICS) aboard Ulysses.

The Sun's magnetic field consists of a north pole, where the field flows out of the Sun, and a south pole, where the field re-enters. During solar maximum, when the Sun's activity is at a peak in its 11-year cycle, the poles exchange places.

2007-02-20T13:55:00.000-05:00

Strong quake hits Indonesia

JAKARTA (AFP) - A strong 6.6-magnitude undersea earthquake has rocked Indonesia's northern Maluku province, prompting initial fears of a tsunami.

The meteorology agency urged residents on Bacan island to be alert for signs of rising sea levels after the quake struck 48 kilometres (30 miles) northwest of the beachside town of Labuha at 5:04 pm (0804 GMT).

But the alert was cancelled an hour later as there were no signs of a tsunami developing, said Suharjono from the agency's headquarters.

"The tsunami warning has now been cancelled," Suharjono told AFP.

The warning was issued because the earthquake was strong and shallow, striking just 18 kilometres under the seabed.

Another agency official, Fauzi, said there were initial reports that the quake was strongly felt in Labuha but there were no immediate reports of damage or casualties.

An aftershock measuring 5.1 struck 20 minutes later centered just 24 kilometres north-northwest of Labuha, Fauzi told AFP.

A stronger aftershock measuring 5.8 stuck the same area at 11:25 pm but there were no immediate reports of any damage, the meteorology office said.

A telecom operator in Labuha said the first quake was felt strongly in the town and caused light cracks in his office walls.

Atere, the operator, also said the local authorities had not issued an official tsunami warning.

The Indonesian archipelago sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire where continental plates meet, causing frequent seismic and volcanic activity.

Indonesia was the nation worst hit by the earthquake-triggered Asian tsunami in December 2004, which killed some 168,000 people in Aceh province alone.

Jakarta flood losses rise to nearly one billion dollars

JAKARTA (AFP) - Devastating floods in the Indonesian capital earlier this month have caused nearly one billion dollars worth of damage and losses.

National Development Planning Minister Paskah Suzetta said direct losses from infrastructure damage and state revenue were at least 5.2 trillion rupiah (572 million dollars), higher than his earlier estimate of 4.1 trillion rupiah.

Potential economic losses were estimated at another 3.6 trillion rupiah, newspapers quoted him as saying.

The floods which hit on February 2 covered much of the city and forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes. Some 85 people were killed in the sprawling city and surrounding districts.

Businesses and private individuals bore the brunt of the flood damage, accounting for 4.5 trillion of the estimated 5.2 trillion rupiah, while the government and related institutions and enterprises suffered about 650 billion rupiah in losses and damage.

He said the figures did not yet include damage to social and public facilities such as schools, clinics and hospitals.

"The flood has the potential to lower Jakarta's GDP growth by 0.59 percent in the industry and trade sector" and also hit growth in surrounding towns, he said.

Environment Minister Rachmat Witoelar has blamed the floods on excessive construction on natural drainage areas, while city governor Sutiyoso has dismissed them as a "cyclical natural phenomenon."

Vice President Jusuf Kalla has told AFP that Sutiyoso and other officials should take responsibility for the devastation because of over-building which had not been accompanied by improved drainage.

"The richer people are, the more villas they build. So the mountains are full of villas. The green areas, including the rivers, are getting smaller and it is not balanced with a proper drainage system," he said.

Old Batavia, the former colonial port under Dutch rule from where Jakarta has expanded, was built on marshland and some areas of the capital are below sea level.

2007-02-19T13:22:00.000-05:00

Quake shakes Uganda and Congo, no injuries reported

KAMPALA, Feb 19 (Reuters) - An earthquake with a magnitude of 5.7 struck the Lake Albert region of western Uganda and eastern Democratic Republic of Congo on Monday, officials said, but there was no immediate word of casualties or damage.

"An earthquake passed here but it did not hurt anyone or destroy any property," Andrew Diboi, police chief for western Uganda, told Reuters by telephone.

Earthquakes are common in the western Great Rift Valley -- a seismically active fault line straddling western Uganda, eastern DRC and neighbouring Tanzania.

In 1994, a magnitude 6 tremor in the foothills of western Uganda's Rwenzori mountains killed at least six people. In 1966, a magnitude 7 earthquake killed 157 people and injured more than 1,300 in the Semliki Valley, also in western Uganda.

Disease, hunger risk in Mozambique flood struggle

MAPUTO, Feb 19 (Reuters) - Mozambique's national disaster agency, already struggling to get food and clean water to thousands of victims of flooding, warned on Monday the worst could be yet to come as the rainy season gets under way.

Paulo Zucula, the country's top disaster official, said there was only one helicopter working to bring relief supplies to people stranded in isolated evacuation centres, raising the spectre of malnutrition and disease.

"At least 4,000 people in the district of Mopeia have not received food and clean drinking water. They are starving and some diseases such as malaria and cholera are looming," he told Reuters by telephone from Caia, where the central relief office has been established.

Zucula said a number of evacuation centres were not accessible by road, leaving a single U.N. helicopter as the only way to get food and other supplies to the refugees.

"We were not prepared ... it's another disaster," he said.

More than 87,000 people have been affected by several weeks of flooding in Mozambique's Zambezi river valley, which in 2000 and 2001 suffered a major flood disaster that killed 700 people and displaced half a million more.

The reported death toll this year is only about 40, but officials are bracing for a possible surge in the numbers of displaced people as continued rains in Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe drain into the already-flooded Zambezi.

Mozambique officials are attempting to control the situation by regulating water discharge from the country's massive Cahora Bassa Hydro-Electric dam, but this could become more difficult if flood waters continue to flow into the dam.

"We expect that scenario in two or three weeks ... our contingency plan is for 285,000 (displaced) people, but this number is likely to double," Zucula said.

Meanwhile, Mozambique's Red Cross has appealed for $5 million in food assistance to help feed more than 50,000 people scattered in 53 accommodation centres throughout the central provinces of Manica, Tete, Zambezia and Sofala.

"There is not enough food for everybody, some centres (in Zambezia) have not received food at all. We need help to reduce the effects of hunger, Red Cross Secretary-General Fernanda Texeira told the national television on Monday.

2007-02-18T06:51:00.000-05:00

Asians usher in the Year of the Pig

BEIJING - Asians flocked to temples, parks and Disneyland on Sunday to pray, play, eat, and celebrate the first day of the Lunar New Year, ushering in the Year of the Pig.

At the Lama Temple and White Cloud Temple in Beijing, faithful burned incense and tossed coins at incense burners, believing that if they landed in the pot they would have better luck in the New Year.

At a traditional fair in the capital's Ditan Park, performers sang folk songs and snippets of Peking opera for throngs of people snaking through the park, many carrying balloons and pinwheels. Vendors sold pork dumplings and other treats, such as freshly made caramel candy sculpted into chubby pig shapes.

The pig is one of 12 animals (or mythical animals in the case of the dragon) on the 12-year cycle of the Chinese zodiac, which follows the lunar calendar. According to Chinese astrology, people born in pig years are polite, honest, hardworking and loyal. They are also lucky, which is why many Chinese like to have babies in a pig year.

Across China, revelers ushered in the New Year Saturday night and early Sunday morning by exploding firecrackers and fireworks — an ancient New Year tradition meant to drive away bad luck and scare off evil spirits.

In Beijing, the streets were littered with tattered red paper and the cardboard casings from spent fireworks.

The official Xinhua News Agency reported that in Beijing 125 people were reported injured from fireworks, including one person who lost both eyes. Police said shoddy fireworks were to blame.

Chinese President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao made separate visits to remote villages in poorer areas, chatting and cooking with locals in far western Gansu and northern Liaoning provinces.

Such trips have become an annual ritual for the leadership — part of efforts to show that the government cares about those living in the countryside, where incomes average only $400 a year.

Hu fried dough twists with farmers on the outskirts of Gansu's Dingxi city, helped cut traditional door decorations from red paper, and received a basket of potatoes from a poor farmer, state media said.

China's booming economic growth in the last several decades has pulled hundreds of millions out of poverty, but a growing wealth gap in recent years has exposed cracks that Hu and his government have acknowledged threatens social stability.

In Hong Kong, the normally bustling streets were virtually empty as families gathered for feasts of chicken and hot pots piled high with pork, shrimp and vegetables.

At Hong Kong Disneyland, Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse shed their usual Western clothes and wore traditional Chinese clothing. Mickey wore a red beanie with a matching silk shirt trimmed in gold. Minnie showed off a bright red cheongsam — a tight-fitting Chinese women's dress.

Instead of the usual Disney movie tunes, speakers in the park played classical Chinese music. There was also a loud clattering of cymbals and drums as a traditional dragon dance wound its way around the park.

In Taiwan, firecrackers exploded late Saturday and early Sunday to usher in the New Year. Worshippers gathered at temples all around the island, holding incense sticks and bowing in the direction of Buddhist and Taoist deities in an effort to secure good luck throughout the coming year.

Major highways in South Korea were congested on Sunday as millions began returning home after visiting family to celebrate the Lunar New Year.

2007-02-17T11:42:00.000-05:00

Airborne planes' windshields crack in blustery cold

DENVER, Colorado (AP) -- Airlines were investigating why windshields on at least 13 planes cracked at Denver International Airport as winds of up to 100 mph whipped through the foothills in Colorado.

Meanwhile, at least three people in Iowa died Friday night when a Cessna twin-engine airplane crashed during a snow storm in a field southeast of the Council Bluffs airport, officials said.

The names of the victims have not been released, and it's possible there is a fourth victim, said Tony Molinaro, a spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration in Chicago.

According to the National Weather Service, a fast-moving winter storm was pushing through the area when the plane went down, bringing wind gusts of up to 53 mph, snow and poor visibility.

Officials could not say what caused the crash and did not know if weather was a factor.

In Colorado, several major highways that were closed Friday due to blowing snow and whiteout conditions reopened, though some mountain sections remained closed Saturday -- including U.S. 40 over Berthoud Pass, where an avalanche buried two cars last month.

The storm system that brought nearly a foot of fresh powder to ski resorts, was expected to move out of the state Saturday.

SkyWest Airlines reported cracked windshields on eight planes that were taking off or landing Friday as winds gusted up to 50 mph, spokeswoman Marissa Snow said. One plane's windshield cracked while it was airborne.

"Only the outermost layer was affected," Snow said of the windshields, which are made from multiple layers of glass.

SkyWest, a regional carrier for United Airlines, said the planes involved were the Embraer EMB120 Brasilia and Bombardier Canadair Regional Jet, though she did not immediately have numbers.

Two Frontier Airlines Airbus planes had their windshields crack while airborne, while two other windshields cracked while at the gate, airline spokesman Joe Hodas said.

In all instances the planes returned to the airport and/or made it to the gate safely. No emergencies were declared and no injuries were reported.

Hodas said it was unclear whether the high winds were to blame.

"It's not exactly unusual weather for Denver," Hodas said. "We don't know what it is... It's kind of a mystery at this point."

Spokesman Steve Snyder said windshields cracked on several different makes and models of airplanes from several airlines, though he did not immediately know which and how many. None of the pilots reported flying debris, Snyder said.

"Everybody is fairly baffled by it," Snyder said.

At least 55 flights were canceled and others were diverted.
Stranded motorists rescued

In southern Wyoming, parts of Interstate 80 were closed between Cheyenne and Laramie because of windblown snow driven by gusts over 50 mph and icy patches.

Before I-80 was closed, the driver and passenger of a tractor-trailer were killed in a crash at Laramie, the highway patrol said.

In Pennsylvania, the last of hundreds of motorists stranded on a 50-mile stretch of Interstate 78 were freed Friday, but several highways remained shut as crews struggled to clear ice and snow following a monster storm that has been blamed for at least 24 deaths in the Northeast and Midwest.

Gov. Ed Rendell apologized for the state's "totally unacceptable" handling of the storm and the Interstate 78 tie-up, which stranded hundreds of motorists for as long as 24 hours. He blamed an "almost total breakdown in communication" among state agencies.

State Transportation Secretary Allen D. Biehler said I-78 and large portions of I-81 and I-80 would remain closed so workers could clear them.

At least 24 deaths were blamed on the storm system and accompanying cold: six in Ohio; three in Nebraska; two each in Illinois, Indiana, New York, New Jersey and Delaware; and one each in Missouri, Pennsylvania, Virginia, New Hampshire and Louisiana.

MOZAMBIQUE: Cash not food needed to help flood evacuees recovery, says NGO

JOHANNESBURG, 16 February (IRIN) - As floods continue to displace thousands of Mozambicans in the central region, Save the Children UK has urged the humanitarian community to consider cash grants rather than food aid for long term recovery.

"This is not to undermine the validity and importance of food aid interventions for people currently experiencing shortages, but to avoid dependency, to stimulate local markets, to give people the dignity of choice," said Chris McIvor, programme director of the child rights agency. "We believe that some level of debate needs to be had within the humanitarian community as to what might be more appropriate."

According to the UN's World Food Programme (WFP), 85,000 people have had to flee their homes in the four central provinces of Manica, Sofala, Tete and Zambezia following heavy rainfall. Water discharged from Cahora Bassa dam, in Tete Province in the northwest, has also displaced communities downstream. The WFP and its partners have begun distributing food aid to 2,000 people in temporary accommodation centres in Caia district in Sofala Province and 6,100 people in the Mutarara district of Tete Province.

McIvor said procuring food could be a lengthy affair if it has to be imported, and past experience in Mozambique had shown that it could take between three to six months to secure supplies of needed items. Any food procured in the middle of February from outside the country might only be distributed in May, at the earliest. "If direct food aid is required then food should be purchased from those parts of Mozambique that have a surplus and if food is available locally in communities then cash is probably the best option. If people have been given the means to replant and re-establish, there should not be any need of food distribution in June-July," he said.

"Distributing food aid can disrupt the local market, as the prognosis for the harvest in Mozambique has been generally good, and food is available in markets near the affected areas," McIvor added.

The Ministry of Agriculture's Early Warning Department had forecast "better than normal harvests in the centre and north of the country, in the areas not directly affected by flood damage", which meant the staple food, maize, was available in the affected central provinces of Manica, Sofala, Tete and Zambezia, with additional supplies available from Nampula province in the north, McIvor said.

Experience during the "much more serious floods" in 2000 and 2001 along the Limpopo, Save and Zambezi river valleys had shown that markets soon opened near the accommodation camps, because traders were quick to use the opportunity offered by the concentration of people, he pointed out. In 2000 half a million people were made homeless and 700 lost their lives.

Cash grants given out by Save the Children and the development agency, Oxfam, to those affected by the 2005 earthquake in Kashmir, and by his organisation and WFP to Indonesians affected by the Tsunami in 2004, had helped their respective markets to recover.

"If all items distributed to the flood-affected [Mozambican] households are procured outside of the area, none of the benefit will accrue to these [local] economies," McIvor said.

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in Mozambique said it supported the cash transfer intervention. "We have been moving in that direction," said spokesman Tatenda Mutenga. "We have been running a cash voucher scheme for Mozambican small-scale farmers for the past three years. The vouchers give the farmers the freedom to procure what they need - seeds, farming implements or fertilisers."

In its annual report earlier this month, FAO advocated cash transfers over food aid, which it said disrupted local markets. It did make allowances for food aid where emergency assistance was needed.

A cash grant scheme from March through to May would help households cope better when the floodwaters receded, said McIvor. "People will return home and if they have seed, they will re-plant, with the harvest expected in June-July. If food reserves have been lost, families will suffer a food gap from March to July." Food prices would probably remain stable in March, April, May, as this was the harvest period and supply was high.

Cash grants would also help households to re-establish their homes; building if necessary, buying utensils or assets such as animals, agricultural tools or sewing machines and other basic needs destroyed in the floods. More importantly, cash grants helped "to restore the dignity of people who have been affected by a natural disaster - people can quickly take charge of their own lives and are not put in the position of passive recipients of goods/services provided by a third party," he added.

2007-02-16T13:32:00.000-05:00

A painter works on the finishing touches on a memorial cross to commemorate the first year anniversary of a landslide in Guisaugon town, southern Leyte, central Philippines February 16, 2007. More than three thousand residents were killed and buried by landslides in the mountain village of Guisaugon a year ago.
REUTERS/STRINGER/PHILIPPINES

Mysterious ailment wiping out bees

PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania (Reuters) -- A mysterious disease is killing off U.S. honeybees, threatening to disrupt pollination of a range of crops and costing beekeepers hundreds of thousands of dollars, industry experts said on Monday.

Beekeepers in 22 states have reported losses of up to 80 percent of their colonies in recent weeks, leaving many unable to rent the bees to farmers of crops such as almonds and, later in the year, apples and blueberries.

"It's unusual in terms of the widespread distribution and severity," said Jerry Bromenshenk, a professor at the University of Montana at Missoula and chief executive of Bee Alert Technology, a company monitoring the problem.

Dave Hackenberg, a Pennsylvania beekeeper who reported the so-called Colony Collapse Disorder to researchers at Pennsylvania State University in November, said he had lost about 2,000 hives, which can each contain around 50,000 bees during the summer months.

He estimated that he will lose as much as $350,000 after accounting for lost income and the cost of replacing bees.

Researchers from state and federal agriculture agencies have been frustrated in their search for a cause because affected hives are often empty except for the queen and a few bees.

The number of bees in a hive typically diminishes over a period of days to the point where there are very few or none left, Hackenberg said. There is no indication of where the bees have gone or what drove them away, he said.

"The rate of loss is startling," said Jeff Pettis, a bee researcher at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Beltsville, Maryland.

Pettis said the bees may have been killed off by a combination of factors including parasitic mites and a lack of nectar in pollen. Scientists are also looking into whether there is a link with significant recent bee losses in some European countries, particularly Spain.

Bromenshenk of the University of Montana said the symptoms are similar to "Dwindling Disease" that affected the U.S. bee population during the 1960s. Some beekeepers have told him that they have been seeing the problem for up to two years but have not reported it to authorities.

"It remains to be seen whether this is something new," he said.

21st victim dies after Florida tornadoes

LEESBURG, Fla. - An 88-year-old man has become the 21st victim of the deadly tornadoes that struck central Florida earlier this month, officials said Thursday.

Albert Gantner died Wednesday in a hospital from injuries he suffered when a tornado destroyed his home in the middle of the night, Lake County officials and son Roger Gantner said.

He and his wife, Doris, lived in a Lady Lake mobile home belonging to his son. Doris Gantner, 81, was killed the night of the Feb. 2 storms.

Relatives found Albert Gantner about 50 yards from his wife. He suffered a concussion, a broken collarbone and broken vertebrae, his family has said.

He battled Parkinson's Disease and had been confined to a wheelchair for the last several years.

Including Gantner, the storms have left 21 dead and hundreds homeless in a 30-mile path in central Florida.

January hottest on record

WASHINGTON (AP) -- It may be cold comfort during a frigid February, but last month was by far the hottest January ever.

The broken record was fueled by a waning El Nino and a gradually warming world, according to U.S. scientists who reported the data Thursday.

Records on the planet's temperature have been kept since 1880.

Spurred on by unusually warm Siberia, Canada, northern Asia and Europe, the world's land areas were 3.4 degrees Fahrenheit (4 degrees Celsius) warmer than a normal January, according to the U.S. National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, North Carolina.

That didn't just nudge past the old record set in 2002, but broke that mark by 0.81 degrees Fahrenheit (0.56C), which meteorologists said is a lot, since such records often are broken by hundredths of a degree at a time.

"That's pretty unusual for a record to be broken by that much," said the data center's scientific services chief, David Easterling. "I was very surprised."

The scientists went beyond their normal double checking and took the unusual step of running computer climate models "just to make sure that what we're seeing was real," Easterling said.

It was.

"From one standpoint it is not unusual to have a new record because we've become accustomed to having records broken," said Jay Lawrimore, climate monitoring branch chief.

But January, he said, was a bigger jump than the world has seen in about 10 years.

The temperature of the world's land and water combined -- the most effective measurement -- was 1.53 degrees Fahrenheit (0.96C) warmer than normal, breaking the old record by more than one-quarter of a degree.

Ocean temperatures alone didn't set a record. In the Northern Hemisphere, land areas were 4.1 degrees Fahrenheit (2.4C) warmer than normal for January, breaking the old record by about three-quarters of a degree.

But the United States was about normal. The nation was 0.94 degrees Fahrenheit (0.63C) above normal for January, ranking only the 49th warmest since 1895.

The world's temperature record was driven by northern latitudes. Siberia was on average 9 degrees Fahrenheit (5.1C) warmer than normal. Eastern Europe had temperatures averaging 8 degrees Fahrenheit (4.55C) above normal. Canada on average was more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit (2.88C) warmer than normal.

Larger increases in temperature farther north, compared to mid-latitudes, is "sort of the global warming signal," Easterling said.

It is what climate scientists predict happens and will happen more frequently with global warming, according to an authoritative report by hundreds of climate scientists issued this month.

Meteorologists aren't blaming the warmer January on global warming alone, but they said the higher temperature was consistent with climate change.

Easterling said a weakening El Nino -- a warming of the central Pacific Ocean that tends to cause changes in weather across the globe -- was a factor, but not a big one.

But Kevin Trenberth, director of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said El Nino made big changes worldwide that added up.

Temperature records break regularly with global warming, Trenberth said, but "with a little bit of El Nino thrown in, you don't just break records, you smash records."

As much of the United States already knows, February doesn't seem as unusually warm as January was. "Even with global warming, you're not going to keep that cold air bottled up in Alaska and Canada forever," Easterling said.

2007-02-15T12:20:00.000-05:00

Eastern US and Canada digs out of snowstorm

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Residents in the eastern United States and parts of Canada have driven on treacherously icy roads and dug out of the first major snow storm to hit the region this year.

The massive weather system started in the US southwest, then swept through the US midwest, said Dennis Feltgen, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service. The storm then regained strength off the Virginia coast and lumbered up the US east coast, dumping snow along the way.

The low pressure center behind the storm was climbing up the eastern US seaboard and expected to reach Canada's maritime provinces late Thursday, Feltgen said.

"Things will get worse today before they get better," he said.

Blizzard warnings were out in the northeastern United States, the NWS said, amid warnings that with the wind chill factor temperatures on Thursday could drop below minus 20 Fahrenheit (-29 Celsius) in New York state and Vermont, with arctic winds sweeping in from the north.

The National Weather Service said that heavy ice combined with wind gusts of up to 40 miles (64 kilometers) an hour downed trees and power lines across the affected region.

According to CNN early Thursday, the storm killed 13 people in six states, while some 300,000 others were without power across seven states.

In Washington on Thursday, area school districts remained closed for a second day, and the US government announced its area employees could take an unscheduled day off if they could not make it to work.

The US capital awoke Wednesday to an icy mix of snow and sleet that closed airports and slowed the federal government. Bus routes were cancelled and residents urged not to drive, stalling commuters.

Temperatures in the region plunged overnight, freezing the snow slush and turning streets Thursday into dangerously slippery ice rinks.

Heavy snow and freezing rain forced flight cancellations and delays at major airports in Washington, New York and Boston, Massachusetts. Hundreds of flights were also cancelled at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, the country's busiest.

In New York City, meteorologists warned of freezing rain and sleet, with snow accumulating one to three inches (2.5-7.5 centimeters).

At New York's John F. Kennedy Airport, passengers aboard a Jet Blue flight bound for Cancun, Mexico, were trapped inside the plane for eight hours as the pilot awaited clearing to depart.

"There was very little food," a passenger told CNN, describing his ordeal among screaming infants and stressed-out adults inside the airplane. "It was just a nightmare."

The crew "had to open the actual plane doors to get some air," said another passenger.

The airline eventually cancelled the flight and issued a written apology that acknowledged they had "no excuse for why we allowed passengers to sit on the tarmac," according to CNN,

The weather also played havoc with the heating-up 2008 presidential race.

Republican Mitt Romney, who announced the bid for his party's presidential nomination Tuesday, was forced to cancel a campaign stop in the northeastern state of New Hampshire.

In Canada, the worst snowstorm of the season blanketed southern Ontario, forcing several flight cancellations and school closures, and tormenting drivers as it swept eastward.

In Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa, dozens of flights, mostly to large US cities, were cancelled, according to airport authorities.

"It's the first big storm of the year. It's not commonplace, but at the same time, it's not the end of the world," Denis Heroux, an Environment Canada meteorologist at Montreal airport, told AFP.

"It's almost as much snow in one day as has fallen since the beginning of winter," said Heroux, noting that Montreal received only 70 centimeters (27.5 inches) of snow this year, half the normal snowfall.

2007-02-14T16:51:00.000-05:00

Winter's biggest snowstorm chills Valentine's Day in US

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The most powerful snowstorm of the season has pummeled the US, sticking an icy dagger into the heart of Valentine's Day and slowing the federal government in Washington.

A massive weather system -- the biggest this winter -- started in the US southwest, swept through the Midwest, regained strength off the Virginia coast and was lumbering up the East Coast.

"Just in time for Valentine's Day," Dennis Feltgen, a meterologist at the National Weather Service, told AFP Wednesday. But with a romantic spin he said, "If you need an excuse to stay inside and be a good valentine, this is your day."

The storm was expected to clobber the northeastern states, he said, with blizzard warnings posted in most of them.

"Things will get worse today before they get better," he said.

Blizzard warnings were hoisted as heavy snows and high winds were expected to cut visibility to near zero, the service said, warning people in the area to stay indoors.

The weather service issues blizzard warnings when sustained winds or frequent gusts over 35 miles (56 kilometers) per hour are combined with "considerable" falling and drifting snow.

The center of the storm was expected to move out of the northeastern New England region by Thursday at the latest, but the edges of the storm would still be making their power felt, he said.

In Washington, the US capital awoke to an icy mix of snow and sleet that closed airports and slowed the federal government.

As snow covered the layer of ice on Washington streets, roads became treacherous and bus routes were cancelled, stalling commuters.

In a pre-dawn announcement Wednesday, the US government said employees in the Washington area could arrive up to two hours late.

Most schools were closed and service shuttered at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport and Dulles International Airport.

Travel was "treacherous" on the slippery roads as heavy ice downed trees and power lines, the service said. Wind gusts of up to 40 miles (64 kilometers) an hour were forecast for Wednesday afternoon. More snow and ice could cause severe power outages, it warned.

Along the Atlantic seabord, in portions of Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and New Jersey, snow accumulations were expected to reach six to 10 inches (15-25 centimeters).

In New York City, meteorologists warned of freezing rain and sleet, with snow accumulating one to three inches (2.5-7.5 centimeters).

The weather also played havoc with the heating-up 2008 presidential race.

Republican contender Mitt Romney, who announced his bid for his party's nomination Tuesday, was forced to cancel a campaign stop in the northeastern state of New Hampshire.

Three weather-related deaths were reported by the National Weather Service on Tuesday: a snow-plow operator in Missouri was killed and two people died in Nebraska.

Katrina victims pummeled by tornado

NEW ORLEANS - Storm-weary Curtis Jefferson is homeless. Again.

Hurricane Katrina destroyed his home in New Orleans' Gentilly neighborhood more than 17 months ago. Hurricane Rita chased him from a friend's place in Lake Charles a month later. Now he's looking for yet another place to live after a tornado ripped holes in his government-issued trailer early Tuesday.

"It's just bad luck, man," Jefferson, 60, said as he waited in his battered car for a Federal Emergency Management Agency worker to inspect his Uptown trailer, his home for the last eight months.

FEMA workers fanned out across the area to assess the latest damage to the thousands of trailers that have been sheltering displaced residents since Katrina hit on Aug. 29, 2005. The agency had counted at least 50 damaged trailers by Tuesday, but the number was expected to grow. An 85-year-old woman, Stella Chambers, was killed and at least 29 people were injured.

Chambers was almost out of her government-issued trailer. Only one utility hookup remained before she could once again live in her modest red brick home that had taken a year-and-a-half to rebuild after Katrina. Her rebuilt home was flattened by the tornado, which the National Weather Service said Wednesday may have been two twisters.

After Katrina, many questioned the wisdom of placing so many flimsy trailers along the hurricane-prone Gulf Coast. Tuesday's tornadoes confirmed many occupants' fears.

"Don't get one. They're no good," said Chris Usea, a 38-year-old insulation installer who miraculously came out nearly unscathed when the tornado tossed and crushed his FEMA trailer in Westwego like a soda can. "I came out with underwear, a T-shirt, no shoes."

Residents whose trailers were rendered uninhabitable by the latest storm will be provided with a hotel room or another trailer, according to FEMA.

Firefighters went door to door, once again searching for victims. They spray-painted bright orange rectangles on the buildings and trailers and, as with the circles searchers used after Hurricane Katrina, they listed the date of the search and whether bodies were found.

"Some of these houses still have the circle on them from the last search," resident Patrick Clementine said. "Now we're doing it again."

Gov. Kathleen Blanco issued a disaster declaration, a necessary step for Louisiana to seek aid from the federal government. She said the state would send in National Guard troops for security.

Valencia Williams has no clue where she, her 8-month-old baby and her fiance will be living. But she does know one place where they will not be staying: their FEMA trailer in Gretna.

Williams, who was asleep when the tornado drove a large board through the trailer only a few feet from her head, said she doesn't want to live in a trailer any more.

"It's just too scary," she said. "I keep thinking about what could have happened. I think, what if we made it through Katrina and got killed like that."

Gwendolyn Armstrong, 77, who walks with a cane after having her hip replaced, was sleeping in her Gretna trailer when she felt it starting to shake. By the time the storm had roared past, she had windows broken out, siding missing and one side of the trailer bashed in.

"I wasn't hurt, but I sure was scared," Armstrong said. "I had heart surgery and I have high blood pressure. I can't take much more of this, but what am I going to do?"

She's trying to repair her house, next to the trailer, but didn't get as much insurance money as she expected and hasn't received any government grant money to fix her home.

A FEMA employee couldn't tell her much.

"She said they have to go back and have meetings on it. We all know about those meetings," Armstrong said.

Mozambique seeks help in flood refugee crisis

CAIA, Mozambique, Feb 14 (Reuters) - Mozambique may need emergency help to airlift food and other supplies to thousands of flood refugees stranded in evacuation centres that are fast running out of supplies, officials said on Wednesday.

Mozambique's National Institute for Disaster Management (INGC) says the country faces a fresh humanitarian disaster as some 45,000 people crammed into temporary camps run short of food, fuel and basic shelter.

"The people have been there for over a week without proper feeding ... they are isolated and we can't go there by road and we have to airlift some of them and drop food," INGC national director Paulo Zucula told Reuters.

"We now have to change our focus from rescue operations to the accommodation centres. We will consider an emergency appeal if the flooding situation continues," he said.

Mozambique's latest flooding has affected some 80,000 people, many of whom have been cut off from the rest of the country as rising waters from the Zambezi river cut off access roads and wash out bridges.

Zucula, who on Tuesday visited the worst hit region of Mutarara in the northern province of Tete, where more than 17,000 people are living in make-shift shelters of twigs and wet grass, said food and sanitation were now top priorities.

"The rains are making our operations very difficult, probably we will call for help in air assistance in air lifting operations ... we will ask for this help now," he said.

WILD FRUIT

The government says at least 29 people have died as torrential rains pounded the central provinces of Tete, Manica, Sofala and Zambezia over the last two months.

The national broadcaster, TVM, reported on Wednesday that a further 10 people had drowned in the lower Zambezi in the past four days, although this could not be immediately confirmed.

The U.N World Food Programme (WFP) on Tuesday began distributing food to evacuees, but the operation has been complicated by poor access roads.

Some flood victims say they have been surviving for more than a week on wild fruit, some of which pose serious health hazards, and untreated water.

"We have not eaten anything since we arrived here last week. Children will die and we cannot feed them with wild fruit because it's too dangerous," said Johane Balicholo, an official in charge of the Samarusha accommodation centre in Mutarara.

"There are many old people sleeping in a roofless church and we can't do anything for them and they can't even walk. Some women left their children here as they fled in different directions and now they can't come back because all roads have been swamped."

Reuters reporters accompanying officials on a fly-over of the region saw waterlogged farmland split into islands while grass-thatched houses and schools have been submerged along the lower Zambezi.

In make-shift accommodation centres, anxious and hungry children stood in the rain crying for help.

Mozambique saw its worst flood disaster in 2000/2001 when some 700 people died in southern and central regions hit by the biggest floods in some 50 years.

The European Commission said on Wednesday it had allocated 2 million euros to help, with the main objective of resettling evacuees in safer areas with access to clean water and adequate health care.

2007-02-13T14:04:00.000-05:00

Tornado hits New Orleans area; 1 dead

NEW ORLEANS - A powerful storm and likely a tornado hit the New Orleans area early Tuesday, killing an elderly woman, injuring dozens of other people, and damaging dozens of homes and business in a region still trying to recover from Hurricane Katrina.

An 85-year-old woman died in the city's Gentilly neighborhood, one of the areas hit hardest by Katrina 18 months earlier.

Another storm cell hit south-central Louisiana, damaging buildings in New Iberia and on the outskirts of Breaux Bridge in St. Martin Parish, but it did less damage and there were no reports of injuries.

In the New Orleans area, FEMA trailers were tossed around, homes collapsed, and the wind tore the roof off a hotel across the river in Westwego. At least 10 to 15 buildings were destroyed in New Orleans, said James Ross, a spokesman for Mayor Ray Nagin. Dozens of other homes and businesses were damaged in Westwego, Mayor Robert Billiot said. City and parish officials said about 30 people were injured.

"There is just so much destruction," Billiot said.

In New Orleans' Gentilly neighborhood, Stella Chambers died after the twister slammed into her FEMA trailer, ripping it and their newly renovated home apart and scattering debris about 200 feet to the Industrial Canal levee.

Neighbor Hellean Lewis said Chambers' daughter banged on her door. "Her face and head were covered with blood. It was running down her side. She was crying and screaming, `Help me! I can't find my mother!'" Lewis said.

Lewis said her son went through the debris and found Chambers, still alive and crying for her daughter.

"Her body was just all mangled," Lewis said.

In Westwego, Tanya Clark, 38, sorted through the pile of rubble that had been her home, looking for whatever she could salvage. Her left arm was in a sling because the shoulder was dislocated when the storm threw her 10 to 15 yards. Her son, Blaise, had a gash on his jaw. They hadn't been able to find their chihuahua and two cats.

"I just hope I don't find my pets under all of this," she said.

Clark said she and Blaise, 17, were asleep when the tornado hit. "The saddest part, I don't have any (homeowners) insurance any more. A single mom, and I couldn't keep it up in the past few months," she said.

At least one nearby house was also destroyed, and a barn had been thrown into the back of a brick apartment building. Huge twisted curlicues of corrugated tin — once roofs — lay here and there.

About 20,000 people were without power in New Orleans, Westwego, and Metairie, a spokesman for Entergy Corp. said. Public, private and parochial schools in Westwego closed for the day. Xavier University in New Orleans shut down for the day because it had no power, said spokesman Warren Bell.

Mike Wiener, spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said FEMA had assessment teams in the areas affected by the storm.

"Right now our concern is with the safety of the travel trailer residents," he said. "We're going to get them adequate housing as soon as possible, whether it be a hotel room or another trailer."

Kevin Gillespie's trailer in Westwego was pulled five feet and shoved next to his steps so he couldn't open the door. A FEMA trailer next door had been yanked from its moorings and flipped into his back yard, Gillespie said.

"My next-door neighbors, they had just moved back into their house from (Hurricane) Katrina. Now it's totaled out again," he said.

He didn't know how badly his own belongings were damaged; a crew had only just cut off the gas. But the storm removed every vehicle he owned: "My car, pickup, motorbike and trailer all went away."

Still, he said, as dawn arrived, "The more damage I see there, the more fortunate we are."

At one point, emergency workers in New Orleans' Uptown neighborhood scrambled to clear a downed magnolia tree so an ambulance could get by. A trailer serving as the fire house for the city's Engine 12 also flipped over, injuring three firefighters.

John Carolan, 50, who lives in the neighborhood, said he was awakened by the storm and got up in time to get into a closet with his wife.

"Ten seconds and it was over," he said.

He said the storm blew the furniture from his porch into the street.

Radar data provides "pretty convincing evidence there was a tornado," said meteorologist Robert Ricks in the National Weather Service office in Slidell. He said the damage appeared to be from one storm cell that was behind a squall line moving east, he said.

"It should be an improving trend the rest of the day," Ricks said.

Midwest snowstorm spawns logistical headaches

CHICAGO (Reuters) - A major snowstorm was moving through the U.S. Midwest causing transportation hang-ups, making it difficult to move grain and livestock to terminal markets, a private forecaster said on Tuesday.

The heaviest snow of 3 to 6 inches fell across central Illinois, Indiana and Ohio in the past day. Snow was still falling Tuesday morning with some Midwest areas expected to see a total of 6 to 12 inches. The hardest hit will be the central sections of Illinois, Indiana and Ohio.

"Certainly transportation will be problematic along and south of Interstate 80 -- northern Iowa, Des Moines and across the eastern Midwest," said Mike Palmerino, a forecaster with DTN Meteorlogix.

Temperatures will be turning colder. Highs east of the Mississippi River will be in the 20s to low 30s Fahrenheit on Tuesday. Then it will turn sharply colder, with highs in the teens and lows below zero to 10 F from Wednesday through Friday.

The western Midwest will be colder, with highs in the single digits and teens and lows from -10 to 5 degrees F.

The sharp turn to colder conditions will cause a flash freeze, Palmerino said.

"That's going to make for treacherous road conditions the next few days," he added.

Livestock producers were already having a difficult time moving hogs on Tuesday.

"We've got a blizzard," said one Indiana hog dealer. "There is a 40 mile-per-hour wind and six to eight inches of snow. There isn't a school that is open."

By Saturday conditions will start to warm up with highs in the 20s and lows in the teens F.

"Chicago temperatures will be above freezing about the middle of next week," he said.

The frigid temperatures over the past week have caused a build-up of ice on the Illinois River, stalling barges carrying grain from the Midwest Corn Belt to U.S. export terminals at the Gulf.

Meteorlogix's six- to 10-day Midwest forecast, Sunday through Thursday, called for near to above-normal temperatures in the western belt and near to below-normal temperatures in the eastern region. Precipitation was expected to be near to below normal.

2007-02-12T13:00:00.000-05:00

New York town may have hit snow record

REDFIELD, N.Y. - The snow just won't stop. Intense lake-effect snow squalls that buried communities along eastern Lake Ontario for nine straight days diminished Sunday — then started up again early Monday.

Unofficially, the squalls have dumped 12 feet, 2 inches of snow at Redfield. If accurate, that would break the state record of 10 feet, 7 inches of snow that fell in nearby Montague over seven days ending Jan. 1, 2002, said Steve McLaughlin, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Buffalo.

A weather service representative was being sent to Redfield on Monday to verify the total.

Residents of this hardy upstate New York village seem unfazed. Redfield, whose economy thrives on snowmobilers and cross-country skiers, receives an annual average of 270 inches — more than 22 feet.

"It's snow. We get a lot of it. So what?" said Allan Babcock, a lifelong resident who owns Shar's Country Diner, a popular eatery in this village of 650 people.

However, Gov. Eliot Spitzer has declared a state disaster emergency in Oswego County. The county's community of Parish had recorded 115 inches by early Sunday. Mexico had 103 inches, North Osceola had 99 and Scriba 94. The city of Oswego had 85 inches.

The persistent snow bands that have wracked the county for a week were expected to finally end later Monday.

"We have a sharp front coming in Monday that's going to kick all this out. We may get one more burst of snow. But then it's over. Finally, some mercy," McLaughlin said.

However, the forecaster noted that a coastal winter storm expected midweek could bring another 6 to 12 inches to areas of upstate New York.

As the bands shifted north into Jefferson County most of Sunday, residents continued recovering from the heavy snow. Roads were mostly cleared as workers turned their attention to removing the snow and trimming down 10- and 12-foot-high snow banks that continued to make driving dangerous.

The snow led to surreal scenes. One house appeared to be in a cocoon. Drifting snow in the front had swallowed the front door and blocked the windows.

"In all my life, I mean my entire life combined, I've never seen this much snow at once," said Jim Bevridge, 47, of Timmonium, Md., who drove up for a long weekend of snowmobiling.

Mozambique floods displace 68,000, more at risk

CAIA, Mozambique (Reuters) - Floods in Mozambique have left 68,000 people homeless and 280,000 more may be forced to evacuate this week as torrential rains lash the impoverished country, a top official said on Monday.

The head of Mozambique's national relief agency INGC told Reuters around 27,000 people had been moved to accommodation centers from areas along the Zambezi river and around 41,000 more had no shelter after their homes were submerged.

Paulo Zucula said 280,000 people -- mostly poor rural folk who live in tiny mud huts and survive by growing vegetables and rearing goats and chickens -- would probably be forced from their homes this week as more rains swept the southern African country.

Experts fear the crisis could surpass the devastating floods of 2000 and 2001, which killed 700 people, displaced half a million and wrecked infrastructure.

"We expect more water than we had in 2001. ... The situation is deteriorating and it will get worse but this time we are better prepared than in 2001," Zucula said in an interview in Caia, one of the worst hit areas, some 1,400 kilometres (875 miles) north of the capital Maputo.

The floods, sparked when rains from neighboring Zimbabwe, Zambia and Malawi poured into the overflowing Cahora Bassa Dam, have killed 29 people and damaged thousands of homes and schools, mainly in the central Zambezia and Sofala provinces.

Many face homelessness for the second time after the floods six years ago wrecked their homes. Even in accommodation centers, food, water and medicine are scarce and shelter limited.

In Chapunga, in Sofala, around 600 people flocked to an accommodation center but tents are scarce and many are sleeping in the open.

"I lost everything, I brought my wife and my two sick children and we are sleeping in the open, there are no tents and there is no food here," said 45-year-old Joaquim Dausse.

"This is the second time I'm facing this flooding... I can't believe it," said Dausse, hunched beside a sick child whose bloated tummy hinted at malnutrition.

2007-02-11T00:54:00.000-05:00

N.Y. sees 110 inches of snow in 7 days

PARISH, N.Y. - With more than 8 feet of snow already coating the ground, it wasn't good news for this winter-weary region when the blue sky turned gray Saturday, signaling another intense snow squall was about to dump some more.

"This is bad," said 67-year-old Dave DeGrau, who has operated an auto repair shop on Main Street for 45 years. "We had a very easy winter until now. Last fall during hunting season it rained every time I went out. I kept saying 'I'm glad this isn't snow.' Now, it's snow."

Persistent bands of lake-effect snow squalls fed by moisture from Lake Ontario have been swinging up and down this part of central New York along the lake's eastern shore since last Sunday.

The National Weather Service said Parish — about 25 miles northeast of Syracuse — reached a milestone early Saturday with 100 inches of snow during the past seven days. Late Saturday, the total had risen to 110 inches. Unofficial reports pegged totals at 123 inches in Orwell and 131 in Redfield, but those measurements include snow from another storm a couple of days before the current weather system. All three towns are in Oswego County.

A warning in effect until Monday morning said 2 to 4 more feet of snow was possible with wind gusting up to 24 mph.

"That's all we need," Mike Avery said as he took a brief break from loading dump trucks with snow to be hauled to a pile outside town. "It's getting monotonous."

The fluffy new snow was a magnet for snowmobilers, but stopping was out of the question.

"You can't stop or you're done," said Dan Hojnacki, 23, of Syracuse, after he ground to a halt in a field. "I never got stuck until today, and I've been snowmobiling for 10 years."

Residents of the nearby town of Mexico see 5- to 6-foot snowfalls every two or three years, but this time even hardened locals are amazed. The only sign of parked SUVs are their radio antennas or roof racks sticking up above the snow. Front doors are buried and footprints lead to second-story windows. Sidewalks that have been dug out look like miniature canyons.

The state transportation department said 125 workers from elsewhere in the state had been sent in with snow equipment to help.

The region is located along the Tug Hill Plateau, the snowiest region this side of the Rocky Mountains. It's a 50-mile wedge of land that rises 2,100 feet from the eastern shore of Lake Ontario. It usually gets about 300 inches — roughly 25 feet — of snow a year.

The hamlet of Hooker, near the boundaries of Jefferson, Lewis, and Oswego counties, holds the state's one-year record with 466.9 inches, about 39 feet, in the winter of 1976-77.

Still, less than a month ago it seemed more like spring.

"Gosh, three weeks ago there was green on the ground. We got spoiled," Parish Mayor Leon Heagle said. "This just came fast. This is not normal. God, we can't catch a break. I feel like getting right in the car and driving south, but I'd probably get in trouble."

The intense blast of snow hasn't been blamed for any deaths in Oswego County. Elsewhere, however, more than a week of bitter cold and slippery roads have contributed to at least 20 deaths across the northeastern quarter of the nation — five in Ohio, four in Illinois, four in Indiana, two in Kentucky, two in Michigan, and one each in Wisconsin, and Maryland and elsewhere in New York, authorities said.

2007-02-10T11:34:00.000-05:00

8 feet of snow in N.Y., and more coming

MEXICO, N.Y. - Before weekend squalls add to the 8 feet of snow already on the ground, the communities along eastern Lake Ontario needed the dry respite they got Friday.

"Have to move fast. Want to at least get it off my roof," said Ray DeLong, 75, as he carved a path to his driveway with a snowblower and two contractors pushed streams of snow from the roof of his two-story home.

Snow squalls off Lake Ontario have dumped snow by the feet onto Oswego County communities since Sunday, leading Gov. Eliot Spitzer to declare a state disaster emergency.

Parish and Scriba had about 8 feet of snow since the squalls started, according to the National Weather Service. Mexico Mayor Terry Grimshaw said his village was blanketed by 7 feet.

On Friday, the squalls shifted south into Syracuse and stayed there, dropping 4 to 8 inches of snow.

But forecasters said heavy snow bands would return to Oswego County later Friday night and likely stall there again. The forecasts call for another 6 to 12 inches, pushing the seven-day total over 100 inches.

While residents enjoyed Friday's lull, snow plows were out in full force to clear roads. An advisory against any nonessential travel remained in effect for Oswego and three nearby counties. Snow banks tower nearly 10 feet tall and have narrowed roads.

Although authorities have reported few problems because of the snow, Oswego Fire Chief Ed Geers said his firefighters have had to help three ambulances that got stuck in the snow.

Schools were closed the entire week. Mexico Superintendent Nelson Bauersfeld said if the district exceeds its allotted six snow days, it would have to shorten its winter or spring breaks.

"We try not to get into vacations if we can help it. So lets just hope once this week is over we can get back to normal and be laughing about this come June," Bauersfeld said.

More than a week of bitter cold and slippery roads have contributed to at least 20 deaths across the northern quarter of the nation — five in Ohio, four in Illinois, four in Indiana, two in Kentucky, two in Michigan, and one each in Wisconsin, New York and Maryland, authorities said. There have been no deaths in Oswego County related to the snow.

Tennessee and northern Alabama tasted a bit of winter weather Friday morning — sleet and freezing rain iced over roadways, and some precipitation briefly turned to snow.

Jakarta residents survey flood damage

JAKARTA, Indonesia - The death toll from massive flooding in Indonesia rose to 80 on Saturday, as some 140,000 people returned to their sodden homes in the capital to clear away piles of mud and rancid debris.

Rivers overflowed in some parts of the sprawling city, much of which remains under water following last week's flooding, the worst in recent memory. But electricity and phone service have been restored to tens of thousands of homes and businesses in recent days.

Many returning residents who have been living in shelters or relatives' homes for days surveyed the damage to their washed out houses for the first time on Saturday.

"My home and everything in it was washed away," said Titi Komala, a 38-year-old widow and mother of three. "Now everything is gone and I can't do anything about it. If I had money I'd move, but I have nothing."

Floods in Jakarta and its surrounding cities last week killed or have been cited as a factor in the deaths of at least 57 people. Some were electrocuted but most drowned, the government said.

Twenty-three others also died in neighboring Banten and West Java provinces last week, said National Disaster Management Coordination Board deputy chief Tabrani, who goes by one name.

At the peak, officials said about half of Jakarta was covered by up to 12 feet of water. Hundreds of square miles of land, mostly rice fields, surrounding the city remained inundated.

Estimates of those made homeless in Jakarta topped out at more than 400,000 out of a population of 12 million. Rustam Pakaya, chief of the Health Ministry's crisis center, said about 140,000 people returned to their homes Saturday.

High water levels had prevented sanitation officials from picking up the garbage that piled up in the streets of some densely packed low-income areas, mixing with the black water during overnight rain.

That has intensified fears about diseases, with the government saying three people have contracted leptospirosis, a potentially fatal disease borne by water contaminated by rat urine. So far no cases of tetanus or other serious waterborne disease have been reported.

Fire-trucks will be deployed Sunday to spray disinfectant in hard-hit areas.

"Residents are complaining about the stench and flies," said Joko Triyanto, an official at the Jakarta Health Department, as hundreds of soldiers helped clean knee-deep mud from the streets, houses, schools and places of worship.

Indonesia is hit by deadly floods each year, and Jakarta is not immune. But this year's have been particularly bad, with some 100,000 homes, shops and businesses swamped in rich and poor areas alike.

The flooding in the capital has caused an estimated $460 million in damage. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono this week promised to seek more funds from the state budget to cover the cost of trying to prevent similar events in the capital in the future.

2007-02-09T00:16:00.000-05:00

More rains hit flood-stricken Indonesian capital

JAKARTA, Feb 8 (Reuters) - More heavy rains struck Indonesia's capital on Thursday, hampering clean-up efforts and piling on misery for hundreds of thousands of people camping under make-shift shelters after days of floods.

However, an official at the Jakarta Flood Crisis centre said the latest flooding was less widespread than in the past week.

The official, Kartawi, added that water levels at sluice gates controlling flows into the largely flat, low-lying city had returned to normal in all cases but one.

The death toll from the floods, Jakarta's worst for at least five years, remained at about 50, the official said, with around 230,000 still displaced.

In the Prumtung cemetery in east Jakarta, hundreds of people were living under tents made of plastic next to gravestones after their homes were flooded, relying on food handouts.

"I've already been here for seven days with four children," said Kusmiah, who uses just one name.

With so many displaced since the floods started late last week, there are concerns about disease and sanitation in the city and its suburbs, home to an estimated 14 million people.

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono pledged to maintain supplies of food and medicine to those affected.

"The overall situation is improving, even though we still expect that the rain will return in Jakarta," he told a news conference.

The heavy overnight rains largely subsided in the capital on Thursday, but the meteorology agency said there could be more rains in the next few days.

Officials and green groups have blamed excessive construction in Jakarta's water catchment areas for making the floods worse.

DESPERATE TO GO HOME

In Kampung Melayu, one of the worst-hit areas, the floods had receded despite the latest rain, although water remained more than 1 metre (3 ft) deep in some places, an official said.

"I still worry that the house floods whenever it rains," resident Saniah told Reuters Television, as she tried to clean her kitchen utensils in water collected after recent rain.

The previous flood disaster in 2002 saw widespread looting, but National Police Chief General Sutanto said there had been no repeat this time and he had dispatched 14,000 police officers to flood-hit areas, Antara news agency reported.

Officials have also been on alert for disease outbreaks. So far, people mainly appear to have been suffering diarrhoea, respiratory infections and skin diseases.

Losses at manufacturing firms in Jakarta could top 1 trillion rupiah ($110.7 million) due to the floods, Sofyan Wanandi of the Indonesian Employers Association told the Jakarta Post newspaper.

Insurance firms may face claims of over $200 million from the floods as the damage is seen to be worse than from floods in the city in 2002, a top industry official said.

"Around 75 percent of the claims may come from insurance policies for commercial buildings like hotels, shopping centres, malls, banks or factories," Frans Sahusilawane, the head of the association of Indonesian non-life insurance firms (AAUI) said.

Bambang Trisulo, the head of Indonesia's Automotive Industry Association, said the floods were delaying output and distribution, although the impact should be short-term.

Most of Indonesia's auto makers have their factories in greater Jakarta area.

Mozambique PM issues flood warning amid evacuation appeal

MAPUTO (AFP) - Mozambican Prime Minister Luisa Diogo has warned that torrential rains could wreak more havoc than heavy floods in 2001 when nearly 1,000 people died, as authorities urged people to start evacuating.

"It's really a dramatic situation and there is a possibility of emergency," Diogo told reporters in Maputo, adding that the swelling waters of the Zambezi river in the centre of the country were of particular concern.

"If the Zambezi river continues growing, the situation can be worse than in 2001. Because, as opposed to 2001, the situation is happening when the rainy season is not yet at its peak."

Incessant downpours have lashed Mozambique since the start of the year, claiming 29 lives, flooding vast swathes of the coastal nation and rendering more than 46,000 homeless.

Authorities in the central town of Tete, bearing the brunt of the flash floods, urged people living along the banks of the Zambezi to leave their homes but the call went largely unheeded, residents told AFP by telephone Thursday.

Meanwhile, the National Water Directorate said the water levels on the Zambezi were flowing above the danger level, forcing the management of the giant Cahora Bassa dam to increase the outflow of water to prevent the dam from bursting.

Cahora Bassa, built during Portuguese colonial rule, is one of Africa's largest hydroelectric projects.

Located on the Zambezi River, the dam has created a 2,000-square-kilometre (800-square-mile) artifical lake which stretches to the point where the borders of Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe converge. It produces some 2,000 megawatts of power annually.

The national water directorate said the dam's management had started discharging more than 6,000 litres of water per minute from Wednesday, which is higher than the level of discharge during the devastating 2001 floods.

According to the National Institute of Calamities Management, 29 people have died thus far in flash flooding or from electrocution and about 46,500 people have seen their homes washed away.

Amarildo Romao, a 31-year-old journalist living in flood-washed Tete, told AFP: "The situation is very dramatic.

"It is not raining in town but there is a lot of rain coming from Zumbo," the area where the Zambezi enters Mozambique from Zambia and Zimbabwe.

"The downtown hotels are all flooded ... The wine, oil and soap factories are also partially flooded."

"People who live on islands on the Zambezi have all moved away. Their houses are also flooded."

The upper sections of Tete, where most of the residential areas are located, have been largely untouched by the rising waters.

Prime Minister Diogo meanwhile underlined that the impoverished country, which is emerging from the ashes of a 16-year civil war which ended in 1992, was better prepared to tackle floods this time around.

"There is a huge difference. In 2001, our early warning systems were not working so well. There has been a vast improvement," she said, adding the top priority for the government would be the evacuation of those living on the banks of the river.

The prime minister however said it was too early to launch a call for international help or declare a natural disaster.

Travel chaos as heavy snow hits UK

LONDON, England (Reuters) -- Britain was hit by travel chaos on Thursday as much of the country was covered by a thick blanket of snow at the height of the morning rush-hour.

Hundreds of schools were closed and there were delays on trains, planes and roads.

Runways at Gatwick, Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Luton and Stansted were closed for part of the morning while workers cleared the snow.

"Nearly 100 flights were cancelled," a Stansted spokeswoman said. "The runway has reopened but there is going to be a knock-on effect."

A Luton airport spokesman said there would be no departures until 12:30 p.m. or arrivals until 1:30 p.m. Passengers should check with their airline before setting off.

At Heathrow, 86 flights were cancelled, although the airport and its runways remained opened. Many flights were cancelled at London City Airport.

There were also cancellations and delays at Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen airports.

The Met Office said many areas will receive 5 to 10 cm (2 to 4 inches) of snow, although the wintry showers will ease during the day.

The Highways Agency (HA) warned drivers to check weather forecasts and road conditions before setting out.

"If the weather is severe, don't travel unless your journey is essential," the HA said.

The agency had put 400 salt-spreading vehicles on standby and all England's motorways and major roads were treated before the snow arrived.

Birmingham City Council said all its schools were closed due to the travel disruption. Dozens more were shut in Bristol, Cheshire, Gloucestershire, Somerset and Staffordshire.

Network Rail said the disruption was "minimal", although there were cancellations and delays across the southeast and on services run by Virgin West Coast, Virgin Cross Country, Chiltern and Central Trains.

Eurostar trains were unaffected by the weather, a spokesman said.

But there were severe delays and closures across the London Underground system. The Bakerloo, Jubilee and Metropolitan lines were among the worst affected.

The snow will peter out during the afternoon on Thursday but temperatures will plummet overnight to as low as minus 4 degrees Celsius (24 Fahrenheit), bringing the risk of icy roads and freezing fog, the Met Office said.

2007-02-06T16:07:00.000-05:00

Deep freeze grips Midwest, Northeast

SYRACUSE, N.Y. - After an unusually warm December and a mostly snow-free January, winter returned with a vengeance Tuesday to the upper Midwest and Northeast, dumping heavy snow on parts of New York and keeping temperatures well below zero in many cities.

The bitter cold and bone-chilling winds forced dozens of schools in New York, Wisconsin and Michigan to close for a second day, including districts in Buffalo, Rochester and Milwaukee.

"I knew we'd have to pay up somewhere down the line for all that nice weather," said Chris Sachel, who owns a drive-in restaurant outside Fulton, northwest of Syracuse.

Cold air from the Arctic stretched from the northern Plains through New England, and temperatures were below zero as far south as the mountains of West Virginia. At least seven deaths had been blamed on slippery roads and the bone-chilling temperatures.

The cold wind picked up moisture from the Great Lakes, creating lake-effect squalls that have dumped 3 to 4 feet of snow this week on parts of New York state at the eastern end of Lake Ontario. Annual snowfall in the area averages more than 20 feet.

The lake-effect squalls continued Tuesday, and meteorologists expected the weather pattern to continue through early next week.

"All we can do at this point is wait it out until Mother Nature is done kicking us," said Randy Bateman, mayor of Oswego, which declared a snow emergency, banning all nonessential travel so plows could clear roads.

East of Oswego, state troopers closed a section of Interstate 81 for an hour to remove cars and trucks that went off the road when blowing snow reduced visibility to zero. Oswego County Sheriff Reuel Todd said hundreds of vehicles slid off the pavement.

"I live about four miles down the road. It took me about 50 minutes to an hour to get here," said Gus Maunder of Parish.

Temperatures began to ease Tuesday in places hit by the worst of the cold air. After Monday's low of 38 below zero, the northern Minnesota town of Hallock reported a Tuesday morning reading of 9 below, according to the National Weather Service.

But pockets of intense cold lingered, including 29 below Tuesday at International Falls, Minn., and minus 20 at Ironwood, Mich.

Meteorologists said temperatures would not rise into the 20s in Michigan until Wednesday and would stay below freezing at least through Sunday.

The cold and slippery roads had contributed to two deaths in Kentucky, two in Michigan, and one each in Maryland, Ohio and Illinois, authorities said.

Indonesian officials warn of disease risk as rain lashes Jakarta

JAKARTA (AFP) - Health officials warned of a growing risk of disease from the filthy floodwaters inundating the Indonesian capital, where hundreds of thousands of people have been forced to flee their homes.

Torrential rains early Tuesday raised water levels still further, bringing more misery to Jakarta and the surrounding area, where the floods have already claimed at least 44 lives.

Officials warned of the risk of leptospirosis, which causes high fever and painful joints, from the contaminated floodwaters.

Jakarta's health office deputy head Salimar Salim urged people in flooded areas to take precautions against the bacterial disease which is mainly spread by rat urine and can survive for months in water and on the ground.

"We urge (people), that when they clean up after the flood, to use rubber gloves and rubber boots," the Detikcom news portal quoted her as saying.

So far nearly 40,000 people have been treated for minor ailments, officials said.

"So far we have had a few cases of diarrhoea, cases of respiratory diseases and also skin irritations, but we have so far no report of cases involving dangerous diseases such as tetanus or leptospirosis," said Rustam Pakaya, head of the health ministry's crisis centre.

"As of today (Tuesday), we have distributed 12 tonnes of medicine for Jakarta, West Java and Banten, and deployed over 3,000 medical staff," he told AFP, adding that 200 doctors were helping in flood relief operations.

Charities and political parties have also set up makeshift clinics.

"My daughter has skin problems," Dini, 29, told a visiting doctor as her seven-month-old baby was examined.

They have taken refuge in a mosque for nearly a week and have to wait for volunteers to deliver food and drinking water.

Medical aid group International SOS also warned of the risk of disease from the polluted waters.

"Flooding can also lead to gastro-intestinal illness like cholera and typhoid, especially if people consume unsafe food and water. Floodwaters are usually polluted with elements like oil and lead, as well as disease causing organisms like the bacterium E. coli," it said in a medical alert.

More than 40,000 police, troops and volunteers were helping to evacuate and bring aid to around 340,000 people displaced by the massive floods.

Jakarta police spokesman Ketut Untung Yoga Ana told reporters the death toll had risen to 44.

Rescuers were trying to evacuate people who had so far refused to leave their flooded homes, said Eman from the East Jakarta disaster mitigation centre.

Many still refuse to leave, saying they fear for their belongings or that conditions at the shelters will be no better.

Hundreds of navy personnel were also evacuating people stranded in north Jakarta.

"We are still focusing our evacuation efforts on the Kelapa Gading area where the water level is still reaching a height of one-and-a-half metres," Lieutenant Colonel Irawan told the state Antara news agency.

Heavy downpours have raised the water levels at all of the city's main floodgates and further rain is forecast until at least Wednesday.

"Our three-day forecast shows that rains will continue to fall, but with less volume than the first five days of this month," meteorology office spokesman Ahmad Zakir said.

Between 12 and 15 centimetres of rain have fallen daily, but he said levels were now likely to drop to around eight to 10 centimetres.

ElShinta radio reported that floodwaters had returned in some areas where they had started to recede, and callers from the south and southwest of the city said water levels were rising again in their areas.

Environment Minister Rachmat Witoelar has blamed the floods on excessive construction on natural drainage areas, but city governor Sutiyoso said it was a "cyclical natural phenomenon."

Old Batavia, the former colonial port under Dutch rule from where Jakarta has expanded, was built on marshland and some areas of the capital are below sea level.

2007-02-05T09:28:00.000-05:00

Indonesian capital on health alert over floods

JAKARTA, Feb 5 (Reuters) - More than 50,000 residents in the Indonesian capital have sought treatment for conditions ranging from coughs to diarrhoea after days of floods and authorities are monitoring for more serious diseases, officials said on Monday.

The flooding has displaced 340,000 people and killed nearly 30. Water in parts of the tropical city of nine million people has been up to 4 metres (13 feet) deep, causing blackouts, cutting telephone lines and blocking key roads.

Indonesia regularly suffers floods during the rainy season, but the devastation of recent days has been the worst in five years, and meteorology officials have warned the city could suffer heavy rains until the end of the month.

Tini Suryanti of the Jakarta health department said 170 medical posts had treated 53,108 patients over two days for mostly minor ailments.

But Health Minister Siti Fadillah Supari told reporters that authorities were on alert for outbreaks of more serious cases of diarrhoea or diseases such as typhoid, cholera and measles.

Ketut Untung Yoga Ana, a Jakarta police spokesman, said 29 people had been killed, mostly electrocuted or drowned, while others died of sickness.

"In Jakarta, Bekasi and Tangerang, 340,000 people have been displaced," Rustam Pakaya, a health ministry official, said by telephone, referring to two areas around the capital.

The Indonesian military said it had deployed more than 4,000 soldiers and provided dozens of dinghys and trucks to help flood-hit residents.

Bayu Krisnamurthi, head of a body tackling bird flu, said the flooding could spread infected poultry and complicate measures against the virus that has killed 63 people in the country.

After heavy overnight rain, sunshine bathed the capital on Monday, although an official at the country's meteorology agency said some downpours were likely with fluctuating intensity.

Floods in the city can often spring up in one area and recede in another as water from rain in upstream areas such as Bogor feeds into rivers criss-crossing the city.

GOVERNOR DEFENDS HANDLING OF FLOODS

Newspaper editorials questioned on Monday why more had not been done to prevent flooding in the low-lying city originally built on swampland after severe flooding five years ago.

Jakarta governor Sutiyoso told Elshinta radio that people in areas in danger of flooding must evacuate. He also brushed aside criticism of his administration's handling of the crisis.

"This is a natural phenomenon that happens once every five years, like in 2002, and may happen again five years from now. What is important is how we minimise the losses."

Tap water was not available in several parts of the capital with wealthy residents hiring bowsers for deliveries.

Many residential areas and major roads in West and North Jakarta, as well as at least one key intersection in the city centre, were flooded, triggering huge traffic jams. The toll road to the airport was restricted to high-wheeled vehicles.

In Kelapa Gading, an area of North Jakarta with new malls and many young professionals, some residents evacuated using rafts made of wood, plastic water jugs and inflatable mattresses.

Traders also used floats to sell goods door-to-door.

Around 2,000 people were camped under a flyover in East Jakarta, including a newborn baby boy.

Some businesses closed because of a lack of phone lines, while others put up key staff in hotels.

"I've been trying to find a way to the office but everywhere is blocked by the floods," commuter Tumiran told Reuters Television.

In some supermarkets there was panic buying of essentials and meat prices rose, while the U.S. embassy advised its citizens to keep adequate supplies of food and drinking water at home.

But the rupiah was stable and stocks down just 0.4 percent, as economists played down inflationary worries.

"This will not change the long-term inflation trend," said Purbaya Yudhi Sadewa of the Danareksa Research Institute.

Kartawi, an official at the Jakarta crisis centre, said on Monday that water levels at sluice gates controlling flows into the city were almost back to normal.

Ireland imposes limited ban on British bird imports

DUBLIN, Feb 5 (Reuters) - Ireland banned the import of poultry from Britain for "gatherings and shows" on Monday but described it as a precautionary measure that would not include birds from British-ruled Northern Ireland.

Ireland's Department of Agriculture said the move, which follows an outbreak of the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus in eastern England, would be backed up by re-issuing advice to flock-owners and the public on the need for reporting the deaths of wild birds and maintaining "bio-security" on farms.

"The situation in England will continue to be kept under review," Agriculture Minister Mary Coughlan said in a statement. "In the meantime no additional measures ... are being introduced at this time."

Coughlan said during media interviews over the weekend that the geographical proximity of the latest case of avian flu had increased the risk of an outbreak of the highly pathogenic strain in Ireland.

She stressed, however, that the overall threat remained low given Britain's response -- including a cull of 160,000 turkeys -- and said then that current measures to protect against an Irish outbreak should be adequate.

Ireland had already imposed a number of safety measures, including a wild bird surveillance programme, after other outbreaks of the disease in more distant parts of Europe.

2007-02-04T07:37:00.000-05:00

Indonesia floods leave 200,000 homeless

JAKARTA, Indonesia - At least 20 people have been killed and 200,000 forced from their homes by floods in Indonesia's capital, an official said Sunday, as rivers overflowing from four days of rain inundated the city.

The government dispatched medical teams on rubber rafts into the worst-hit districts amid fears that disease may spread among residents living in squalid conditions with limited access to clean drinking water.

The death toll from flooding in the capital Jakarta had reached 20 as of Sunday afternoon, said Edi Darma at the Jakarta's Flooding Crisis Center.

Some in the city of 12 million people were holding out on the second floors of their homes, refusing to be relocated by soldiers in rubber dinghies, officials said.

"We fear that diarrhea and dysentery may break out, as well as illnesses spread by rats," Dr. Rustam Pakaya, from the health ministry's crisis center. "People must be careful not to drink dirty water."

Waters reaching 13 feet high in places have inundated more than 20,000 homes, school and hospitals in poor and wealthy districts alike, forcing authorities to cut off electricity and water supplies and paralyzing transport networks.

In some districts, residents reported that waters receded slightly Sunday, but in others fresh flooding occurred as heavy rains over the southern hills in Puncak caused rivers to swell across the city.

Yusnizar, a 53-year-old living in housing estate on Jakarta's western outskirts, said some 1,000 houses were awash with 3-feet-high muddy water.

"Fortunately, people here are helping each other," said Yusnizar, who goes by a single name.

Indonesia's meteorological agency was forecasting rain for the next two weeks.

Environment Minister Racmat Witoelar blamed poor urban planning for the disaster.

"Authorities hand out (building permits) even though they clearly violate environmental impact studies," The Jakarta Post newspaper quoted him as saying.

Jakarta Governor Sutiyoso, who was criticized when massive floods struck the city five years ago, blamed widespread deforestation in Puncak, saying it had destroyed water catchment areas.

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 plains.

Jakarta is regularly struck with floods, though not on the scale as in recent days. Dozens of slum areas near rivers are washed out each year. Residents either refuse or are too poor to vacate the districts.

Toll hits 20 in Florida's deadliest storm in nearly 10 years

LADY LAKE, United States (AFP) - The toll from Florida's deadliest storm in almost a decade rose to 20, reports said, as homeowners returned to pick through the rubble of hundreds of tornado-shredded homes.

US President George W. Bush declared a state of emergency in four counties in the central part of the southern state in the wake of pre-dawn storms Friday that carved a trail of destruction and death, wrapping metal around trees and launching some victims into neighboring homes.

"Whatever federal response is needed, we will make it quick and sure," Bush said during a speech in Williamsburg, Virginia.

CNN television network reported that 20 people had died, one more than the officially reported toll of 19 on Friday, as rescue crews ended their search for victims.

The storm also wiped out a flock of 18 rare whooping cranes, all juveniles which had only a month earlier been guided to western Florida on their migration from Canada by an ultralight aircraft.

"My heart is aching both for the young birds we lost and for the dedicated people who have devoted so much of themselves to this project, only to see the lives of these cranes end in this devastating manner," said John Christian, co-chair of the Whooping Crane Eastern Partnership, in a statement.

"It's amazing to see how destructive and how surgical -- the intensity of a tornado," said Florida Governor Charlie Crist, who also declared an emergency in the four counties.

The emergency declarations release disaster assistance funds to help stricken people with temporary housing, rebuilding and other costs. They also help local governments fund their rescue and recovery efforts.

Crist said Florida residents had pulled together.

"They have poured out their hearts to help their fellow man," he told reporters.

"Our search and rescue are completed and we are now in the recovery stage, making sure we're getting needs met," Jennifer Stan, of Florida emergency operations, told AFP.

Some 1,500 homes were damaged or destroyed and an estimated 13,000 people were left without electricity after the line of storms tore through, uprooting trees and felling power lines.

The storms hit around 3:30 am (0830 GMT) Friday, as most people slept. Because few had any warning, many residents were stunned the toll was not higher.

An area of some 51 square kilometers (20 square miles) was ravaged. Residents likened the storms to a freight train that roared and slammed into their homes.

"It woke me out of a dead sleep," local resident David Wholly told the Orlando Sentinel newspaper. "I heard the noise, and it sounded like a train coming, and I ran to the bathroom. The tree went right through the bedroom window where my head was."

Residents sifted through the remains of their splintered homes Saturday, desperate to find any souvenir, a family memento or a picture frame.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, so criticized for its performance when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in 2005, made sure that Bush signed an emergency measure for the four Florida counties, releasing needed funds, said FEMA director David Paulison.

He said FEMA trailers were on their way with food, water and other supplies, but stressed that FEMA cannot work alone.

"It's neighbors helping neighbors," he said. "If we work together, we can do this."

Friday's storms struck on the ninth anniversary of Florida's ferocious "Groundhog Day Storm" of 1998, when seven tornadoes and fierce storms killed 42 people in Florida.

In December, more than a dozen people were injured and more than 200 homes destroyed when storms and tornadoes ripped through the same area of central Florida.

The area of devastation is northwest of the Walt Disney World Resort, which was not affected by the bad weather.

2007-02-03T12:13:00.000-05:00

100,000 displaced by floods in Indonesian capital

JAKARTA (AFP) - At least five people have been killed in floods in Jakarta with more than 100,000 others forced to camp out at roadsides and in emergency shelters after days of torrential downpours.

With more rain forecast, disaster officials said they were struggling to cope. Hundreds of troops and navy personnel equipped with inflatable boats and rafts were deployed to help the capital's worst-hit areas.

"We have done the optimum effort to evacuate people but because of the number and the vast area to cover we hope people understand (the problems we are facing)," Sugeng Triutomo from the national disaster management body (Bakornas) told ElShinta radio.

More than 100,000 people had been displaced by the rainy-season floods, the state Antara news agency reported, citing Bakornas figures.

Bakornas official Sunardi said five people were killed and tens of thousands of homes flooded.

"We have yet to count offices, school buildings and hospitals inundated by the floods because we are still focusing on evacuating flood victims," he told Antara as the rains started again Saturday evening.

Hundreds of families were seen huddled together by roads on higher ground after fleeing their flooded homes in the city, which is criss-crossed by 13 rivers.

Water up to two metres (more than six feet) submerged areas of the city, including the upmarket Kelapa Gading housing complex in the north, which is usually less prone to flooding.

"I had to put my motorcycle in the university out there and walk in the floods to my house last night (Friday)," Kelapa Gading resident Najmi said.

"The water in front of my house is about one metre. We have been trapped here since yesterday morning," he told AFP Saturday.

Several other Kelapa Gading residents called ElShinta, saying some old people and pregnant women were trapped in their houses and needed evacuation.

Water, electricity supplies and telecommunications have been cut in several areas of the city due to the floods.

Search and rescue workers and nurses in inflatable boats were offering medical help to flood victims along the main Ciliwung river, Hadianto, head of the independent Jakarta Rescue group said.

"Areas that we go to are very far from the reach of cars. We have to hop from roof to roof of people's houses," he told AFP.

Hadianto said the main complaints so far were diarrhoea and skin problems, with children and old people suffering the most.

Indonesian Red Cross and other volunteers were cooking and delivering food to the thousands of people stranded in their flooded homes or sheltering at the side of roads.

City water control officials warned that the floods could worsen, with continuing rains in nearby Bogor city expected to exacerbate the situation by nightfall.

"Katulampa watergate is 70 centimetres (28 inches) above normal and the water level is rising," a Jakarta water control officer told AFP, referring to the main sluice gate controlling the flow of water from Bogor, which is at a higher elevation.

More rain was forecast over the weekend.

Environment Minister Rachmat Witoelar blamed the floods on excessive construction in water catchment areas, Antara reported.

"There are too many malls in the capital city," he said, complaining that many developers had not paid enough attention to the ecological impact of construction projects.

Old Batavia, the former colonial port under the Dutch from where Jakarta has expanded, was built on marshland and some areas of the capital are below sea level.

In 2002, floods killed up to 40 people and some 300,000 were forced to seek refuge in mosques, schools and even cemeteries.

19 dead as tornado blasts lethal path across central Florida

LADY LAKE, Unnited States (AFP) - Rescue workers are picking over rubble searching for bodies after Florida's deadliest storm in almost a decade let loose a tornado that obliterated hundreds of homes and killed at least 19 people, authorities said.

State governor Charlie Crist declared a state of emergency in four counties after pre-dawn storms Friday carved a trail of destruction and death, wrapping metal around trees and launching some victims into neighboring homes.

"The devastation is unimaginable," an emotional Crist told CNN television after touring the scene. "It's like a bomb went off in central Florida."

There were 13 fatalities in Paisley and six in Lady Lake, Christopher Patton, a spokesman for Lake County told AFP Saturday.

Typical of the often surreal aftermath of a direct tornado hit, the twister hopped and jumped across the pancake-flat landscape, grinding some homes into dust, while leaving a next-door neighbor virtually unscathed.

The storms hit around 3.30 am (0880 GMT Friday) as most people slept, and as few had any warning, many residents were stunned the toll was not higher.

Lake County school superintendent Anna Cowin said two of her students had been confirmed dead. "One family was hit with much tragedy. Both parents were killed. There are four in the family and one of their children also died," she said.

The director of Lake County emergency services, Jerry Smith, told a news conference the search continued for survivors. "We are doing house-to-house searches at this time," he said.

A area of some 51 square kilometers (20 square miles) was ravaged by the storms.

"There are probably thousands of homes in that area. It's going to take a significant amount of time to get specific answers about how much damage is in that area," he said.

An estimated 13,000 people were left without electricity after the storm, which uprooted trees, and felled power lines.

Residents likened the storms to a freight train that roared and slammed into their homes.

"It woke me out of a dead sleep," local resident David Wholly told the Orlando Sentinel newspaper. "I heard the noise, and it sounded like a train coming, and I ran to the bathroom. The tree went right through the bedroom window where my head was."

Television images showed the ground littered with the debris of scores of homes, with residents sifting through the remains of their belongings. Many were in shock and desperate to find any souvenir of normality -- a family memento, or a picture frame.

Search and rescue teams worked to free survivors. "They are having to get emergency equipment to help lift walls to search for injured persons," said Christie Mysinger, a spokeswoman for the Lake County sheriff's office.

Sheriff Gary Borders said two persons were reported missing.

Crist's declaration of a state of emergency frees up emergency supplies and funding.

"The state emergency operations center obviously is in full mode. ... Our priority today is search and rescue," Crist told reporters.

He said the White House, heavily criticized for its failure to respond swiftly to the devastating Hurricane Katrina in 2005, pledged its "full support." President George W. Bush "was very encouraging and said that we should expect help very soon," Crist added.

Florida Representative Tom Feeney (news, bio, voting record) said a 30-person assessment team was in place "and trucks filled with water, food and ice are headed to the devastated areas."

Authorities opened shelters for those left homeless.

The Lady Lake Church of God was completely destroyed, an AFP photographer said. Parishoners said they hoped to hold a service Sunday, under the open sky.

Experts said the severe weather was spawned by El Nino, which occurs when water in the eastern Pacific Ocean becomes unusually warm and can trigger storms over the southern United States.

"This was a pretty classic El Nino event," said Robert Molleda, National Weather Service warnings coordinator for South Florida.

Friday's storms struck on the ninth anniversary of Florida's ferocious "Groundhog Day Storm" of 1998, when seven tornadoes and fierce storms killed 42 people in Florida.

In December, more than a dozen people were injured and more than 200 homes destroyed when storms and tornadoes ripped through the same area of central Florida.

The area of devastation is northwest of the Walt Disney World Resort, which was not affected by the bad weather.

2007-02-02T16:51:00.000-05:00

Revelation 11:17 "We give you thanks, Lord God, the Almighty, the one who is and who was; because you have taken your great power, and reigned.

Revelation 11:18 The nations were angry, and your wrath came, as did the time for the dead to be judged, and to give your bondservants the prophets, their reward, as well as to the saints, and those who fear your name, to the small and the great; and to destroy those who destroy the earth."

Damaged homes in the Lake Sumter Landing subdivision of The Villages, Florida

Storms, tornado kill 19 in central Florida

ORLANDO, Florida (Reuters) - Severe thunderstorms and at least one tornado killed 19 people on Friday when they ripped through Florida in the dead of night, tearing homes to shreds, toppling heavy trucks and leaving a trail of rubble.

More than 500 homes, buildings and churches were damaged or destroyed across a wide area of central Florida north of the key tourism region around Orlando. But two of the area's biggest attractions, Walt Disney Co.'s Disney World and Universal Studios Florida, were not affected.

Rescue teams fanned out in the morning to search for survivors and victims who might still be trapped under flattened homes.

Crunched cars were flung onto porches, and battered sofas and fridges stood in piles of debris scattered over the exposed concrete foundations of houses.

The storm hit at 3:15 a.m. (0815 GMT) and a spokesman for the Lake County sheriff's office said at least one and perhaps two tornadoes touched down in a state that ranks only behind the infamous "Tornado Alley" in the U.S. Midwest for the number of tornado strikes. Most, such as a twister on Christmas Day last year, cause no fatalities.

"The death toll is up to 19 now," said Kevin Lenhart, spokesman for the Lake County emergency operations center.

Christopher Patton, another official at the emergency center, said three were killed in Lady Lake, about 40 miles (64 km) northwest of Orlando, and 11 in nearby Paisley, on the edge of the Ocala National Forest. It was not immediately clear where the other five people died.

Pastor Howard Roszak of the First Baptist Church in Paisley said two teenage boys who belonged to his church were killed. One of the boys died along with his father, while both parents of the other teen were killed.

'NOTHING LEFT'

"I know all these kids real good. I love these kids. I hear there is nothing left ... just absolutely nothing," Roszak said, referring to the home of one of the boys.

About 1,000 tornadoes hit the United States annually, killing on average 80 people a year, and winter tornadoes appear to be more prevalent during El Nino years, when the waters of the eastern Pacific become unusually warm.

"This is something that we've seen here in the past in our state when we've had El Nino conditions in place," said state meteorologist Ben Nelson.

In February 1998, a swarm of tornadoes killed more than 40 people in central Florida and injured scores more. One narrowly missed the crowded tourist area that includes Disney World, Universal Studios Florida and Sea World.

The National Weather Service said it believed more than one tornado touched down on Friday but had yet to ascertain that.

Florida Highway Patrol spokeswoman Kim Miller said the tornado blew over five tractor-trailer rigs on the interstate highway in Volusia County at about 3:45 a.m.

"We saw tractor-trailers littered all over the interstate," she told CNN. "We had a few cars mixed into that."

The storm knocked out power to more than 42,000 utility customers but only 7,800 were still without electricity by mid-afternoon, an official with the local utility, Progress Energy, said.

Florida's $9 billion citrus industry "truly dodged a bullet" since the storms hit on the northern edge of the orange-growing region, said Mike Sparks, chief executive officer of Florida Citrus Mutual. He said the impact to citrus was insignificant.

Florida Gov. Charlie Crist declared a state of emergency in four affected counties, allowing emergency funds to be distributed as needed, and went on a tour of the damage.

The Red Cross opened shelters for people left homeless.

Worst floods in five years swamp Indonesian capital

JAKARTA, Feb 2 (Reuters) - Torrential rain triggered the worst floods in five years in the Indonesian capital on Friday, as torrents of muddy water up to 2 metres (6.7 ft) deep swamped roads and stranded residents, police and witnesses said.

A police official at the Duren Sawit area of East Jakarta said officers were checking on a report two people had died from electrocution related to the floods.

Floods during the rainy season in Indonesia are common, but the heavy rains this week have caused chaos on roads and shut some train lines around Jakarta, police said.

"There is waist-deep water outside my building," said Rhea Chand, who works in development and lives in South Jakarta.

Mutiara Padmosantjojo, a 31-year-old child counsellor also living in South Jakarta, said the floods knocked out power.

"We've had a black out since last night. My house is not flooded, thank God, but I cannot go anywhere. I feel as if I live on an island surrounded by water."

Pratiwi, an official at the country's electricity company, said 293 electrical relay stations had been shut in Jakarta due to flooding.

A major toll road leading to the airport was closed briefly and telephone lines were also down in some parts of the city of 9 million as flooding affected underground cables, officials said.

Soldiers evacuated some residents in rubber boats in flooded slum areas, while outside the capital, train and road lines were cut in the Tangerang district west of Jakarta, Antara said.

The rain affected a large swath of West Java including the capital, Tangerang and the city of Bogor, home to famed botanical gardens, said Kukuh Ribudianto of the Meteorology agency.

In the capital, the rain had stopped by Friday afternoon, but another official at the agency said more downpours were likely until Saturday.

1,000 turkeys killed by bird flu

About 1,000 turkeys at a farm in Suffolk have died from bird flu, government vets have confirmed.
Vets from the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said the birds had tested positive for H5 avian flu.

It is not yet known if it is the H5N1 strain, which can be passed to humans.

Further tests are being carried out on the birds which died at a farm believed to be owned by Bernard Matthews, in Holton near Halesworth.

'Significant mortality'

Defra said reports from the farm were received late on Thursday night and the premises were immediately placed under restrictions.

"A full investigation began at 0900 GMT this (Friday) morning, with samples being sent to Veterinary Laboratories Agency, Weybridge, for testing," she said.

Sources at Defra have told the BBC that the alarm was raised by the farmer after he noticed "significant mortality" among his flock.

About 80% to 90% of the turkeys in the shed were showing signs of illness - going off their food and general malaise, which are among the symptoms of avian flu.

Chickens culled

There are 15 types of bird, or avian, flu. The most contagious strains, which are usually fatal in birds, are H5 and H7.

There are nine different types of H5. The nine all take different forms - some are highly pathogenic, while some are pretty harmless.

The type currently causing concern is the deadly strain H5N1, which can prove fatal to humans.

In May last year, more than 50,000 chickens were culled after an outbreak of the H7 bird flu in farms in the neighbouring county of Norfolk.

2007-02-01T11:34:00.000-05:00

Winter storm spreads snow, ice from Oklahoma to N.C.

OKLAHOMA CITY — A second winter storm in as many days hit Oklahoma and Arkansas early Thursday, closing schools and keeping roads slick and dangerous.

The storm followed snow and freezing drizzle that fell on the area Wednesday, causing dozens of accidents and four deaths.

The first storm, meanwhile, moved into Georgia and the Carolinas on Thursday, and forecasters warned that up to 4 inches of snow along with freezing rain could knock out power and plague drivers.

Schools and businesses across the area closed or opened late.

Chip Huffman, owner of Ace Hardware in Hickory, N.C., said his customers were mostly inquiring about heaters and kerosene.

"This morning we've got very little snow accumulation on the ground," Huffman said. "People still don't believe what's going to happen yet."

The storm led to three traffic deaths in Oklahoma, including one when a trucker lost control on an icy overpass, killing a man walking on a bridge. A woman died in Arkansas when her vehicle slid across a highway median and crashed with a tractor-trailer.

Oklahoma troopers said travel was improving Thursday, but roads throughout central and northeastern Oklahoma were still hazardous because of the second storm.

Up to 2 inches of snow is expected to fall by early afternoon, said meteorologist Cheryl Sharpe with the National Weather Service.

A three-day storm that hit Oklahoma beginning Jan. 12 caused 32 deaths and left more than 120,000 power outages across eastern Oklahoma.

Quake strikes under sea near New Zealand

WELLINGTON, New Zealand - A powerful earthquake struck under the Pacific Ocean near a remote and uninhabited New Zealand island on Wednesday, seismologists said. Officials said there was no threat of an ocean-wide tsunami.

A magnitude-6.5 temblor hit about 25 miles south of Raoul Island in the Kermadec group that lies within a marine park far north of New Zealand, the U.S. Geological Survey said.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii said "no destructive Pacific-wide tsunami threat exists based on historical earthquake and tsunami data."

Suspected cholera outbreak kills scores in Somalia

JOWHAR, Somalia, Feb 1 (Reuters) - A suspected outbreak of cholera has killed up to 121 people in Somalia in the past week, hospital sources and local elders said on Thursday.

Doctors say some samples of watery diarrhoea stools taken from the victims had tested positive for cholera, with the worst affected region being the central Hiraan area where at least 105 people have died.

In neighbouring Middle Shabele region, 16 people are thought to have died from the disease, which can be transmitted through contaminated food and water. In both areas, nearly 200 people have been admitted to hospital with suspected cases of cholera.

Both regions were badly hit by floods late last year.

"There is no hospital here. Victims are being taken care of by relatives," said Abdulle Adan, a local elder. "Forty two people have died this week in Buuloberde from the outbreak. Some of the dead are being buried today."

Residents of the affected areas fear the death toll will rise saying drugs are expensive and hospitals are ill-equipped to deal with the cases. Hospitals and aid workers are trying to contain the outbreak.

"Some of the samples taken to (Kenyan capital) Nairobi for testing have confirmed cholera," the director of Baladwayne hospital Mohamed Hussein Halane told Reuters by telephone. "We have admitted 160 cases and 14 have died in just a week."

Jowhar hospital in Middle Shabele was forced to quarantine cholera victims fearing the outbreak may spread, officials said.

2007-01-31T12:49:00.000-05:00

Lake-effect storms dump snow in western New York

FULTON, N.Y. (AP) — A woman died after her car collided with a stranded minivan during whiteout conditions along eastern Lake Ontario, where overnight lake-effect squalls produced up to three feet of snow.
Fulton officials declared a snow emergency Monday night and advised against any unnecessary travel. Some surrounding areas in northwestern Oswego County received up to three feet of snow before the squalls weakened early Tuesday.

State police said they are investigating whether a medical condition may have caused the death of Kathleen Pluff, 56, of Fulton, late Monday afternoon.

Pluff was in her 1999 Dodge Durango on Route 481 when she drove off the shoulder and hit a minivan that had become stuck in a snow bank. The minivan was one of several vehicles forced off the road by slick conditions and extremely heavy snowfall. The other driver was unhurt and the collision caused only minor damage to both vehicles, troopers said.

Authorities said there were no serious injuries among the 42 students from the Red Creek School District who were aboard a school bus when it overturned Monday afternoon in a ditch in Cayuga County.

The heavy snow also caused officials to shut down portions of Interstate 481 in the Syracuse area.

In western New York, a foot to two feet of snow has fallen in areas of northern Chautauqua and Cattaraugus counties south of Buffalo.

Magnitude 6.5 Quake - KERMADEC ISLANDS, NEW ZEALAND

2007-01-30T00:39:00.000-05:00

Floods, storms topped '06 natural disasters
U.N. report tracked sharp increase in flooding; heat waves also a factor

GENEVA - Floods and storms were the most frequent natural global disasters in 2006, while extreme temperatures raised the death toll in Europe by five-percent compared to the average for the past five years, the United Nations said Monday.

There were 21,796 disaster-related deaths around the world last year, according to the U.N. International Strategy for Disaster Reduction — a big drop from the 92,000 who died in 2005, the year of the Asian tsunami.

“The 2006 figures confirm the trends that we have been observing since 2000,” said Debarati Guha-Sapir of Louvain University in Belgium, which compiled the figures. The number of people killed by disasters has been falling for five years, with the exception of the rise in 2005 caused by the Indian Ocean tsunami and the Pakistan earthquake, she added.

Asia, which continues to be the continent most hit by natural disasters, saw a 10-percent decrease in disaster-deaths in 2006, compared with the five-year average, according to ISDR.

Most of last year’s disaster-deaths occurred in Indonesia where an earthquake in May killed 5,778 people. Typhoon Durian left 1,399 people dead in the Philippines in December, and a landslide earlier in the year killed 1,112 people on the archipelago.

But heatwaves in the Netherlands and Belgium led to unusually high numbers of disaster-related deaths in Europe — 1,000 and 940 respectively — according to the U.N. agency. A cold snap in Ukraine early last year left 801 people dead.

“European countries are by far not protected adequately against natural disasters,” Guha-Sapir said, warning that European countries were not giving sufficient attention to natural disasters and reporting of them was poor.

There were 226 floods last year — a sharp increase compared with the average of 162 floods over the previous five years. Floods accounted for most of the 26 disasters which occurred in the United States, just nine disasters less than China, the country that was most hit by natural disasters last year.

The overall number of people affected by natural disasters in the world was 140 million, a slight fall compared with 157 million in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina hit the south of the United States.

The United Nations calculates “affected people” as those reported injured, homeless or in need of emergency assistance such as food or shelter as a result natural disasters.

Earthquake rocks Australian island

SYDNEY, Australia - An earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 6.7 rocked the coast of Australia's remote Macquarie Island Tuesday, the U.S. Geological Survey said.

The quake struck at 2:54 p.m. local time and was centered six miles below the seabed. The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said the quake was unlikely to cause a Pacific-wide tsunami.

The isolated, sparsely populated island lies about 835 miles south of the island state of Tasmania.

2007-01-29T15:10:00.000-05:00

146 U.S. levees may fail in flood

WASHINGTON — The Army Corps of Engineers has identified 146 levees nationwide that it says pose an unacceptable risk of failing in a major flood.
The deficiencies, mostly due to poor maintenance, are forcing communities from Connecticut to California to invest millions of dollars in repairs. If the levees aren't fixed, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) could determine that they are no longer adequate flood controls. If that happens, property owners behind the levees would have to buy flood insurance costing hundreds of dollars a year or more.

The substandard levees are being identified under a corps inspection program that has grown more aggressive since Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed levees across the Gulf Coast in August 2005. Thousands of residents who lost property did not have flood insurance because those levees were considered adequate; later reviews found many were not well maintained.

"The corps and FEMA are saying, 'We've been lax as a nation in our operation and maintenance of these levees, and it's time to tighten up,' " says Larry Larson, director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers, an organization for officials who run flood-control systems. "You're talking about risking a lot of lives if one of these fails."

After Katrina, Congress directed the corps and FEMA, which administers federal flood insurance, to identify at-risk levees. The corps inspects about 2,000 levees nationwide, mostly larger ones. The corps provided USA TODAY only with a list of how many faulty levees have been found in each state.

Spokesman Pete Pierce says the corps does not want to release the list of the 146 places where levees have been identified as inadequate until all levees are inspected and all communities with faulty levees are notified. USA TODAY has filed a request for that list under the Freedom of Information Act.

Thousands of levees are spread across every state. They range from miles-long levees protecting major cities to small berms shielding crops. Many were built by the corps and turned over to local authorities, which are responsible for maintaining them.

Local officials fear that some cities cannot afford upgrades. Hartford, Conn., spent $5 million last year to meet the corps' demands for repairs. Otherwise, thousands of properties worth almost $2 billion would have needed flood insurance, City Engineer John McGrane says. "It's a tremendous burden," he says.

The corps is allowing a one-time, one-year grace period to do the work, says Maj. Gen. Don Riley, the corps' director of civil works. "We want communities to clearly understand the risks of not maintaining these levees and take responsibility," he says.

Angola cholera cases rise sharply after deadly floods

LUANDA, Jan 29 (Reuters) - Cholera cases have surged to "alarming" levels in Angola after deadly floods left thousands of people without clean drinking water and access to sewage facilities, aid workers said on Monday.

An average of 90 cases of the potentially fatal intestinal infection are being reported each day in the province of Luanda, which includes the capital, compared to an average of 15 to 20 cases before heavy rains triggered floods last week.

"There has been a five-fold increase in the number of cases in relation to one week ago, which is a lot. Yes, it's quite alarming," said Mark van Boekel, head of Medicins Sans Frontieres Holland in Angola.

There have been a handful of deaths, but the authorities cannot say whether these are directly related to the recent flooding.

But with parts of Luanda, including its slums, submerged in fetid water and more rain forecast, aid workers say the outbreak may worsen in the coming weeks and the death toll could eclipse that of the floods, which have killed at least 90 people.

Cholera is spread through feces-contaminated water and food and usually marked by vomiting and acute diarrhoea. Children and the elderly are especially vulnerable to the disease, often dying from severe dehydration within 24 hours after infection.

An oil-rich nation that is emerging from a 27-year civil war that shattered bridges, roads and drainage systems, Angola has faced a number of cholera outbreaks in recent years. More than 1,800 people died last year in its worst outbreak in a decade.

Millions of Angolans lack access to health care, including the antibiotics and rehydration salts that easily treat cholera, and the country routinely struggles to get basic medical supplies to areas cut off by poor or non-existent roads.

One-quarter of all children in the former Portuguese colony, sub-Saharan Africa's second largest oil producer after Nigeria, do not survive to their fifth birthday.

With the end of the civil war in 2002 and the beginning of an oil-financed reconstruction boom, Angola's leaders have said they are committed to improving basic health care and developing other social programmes.

But the government has been criticised for reacting slowly to the cholera epidemic and the health sector as a whole.

"They are making billions in oil revenues, but their general priorities do not seem to include health," one foreign aid worker told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

But others credit the government in Luanda for making progress, albeit slowly, in the health sector and learning from its most recent brush with cholera. Van Boekel noted that Angola seemed to be better equipped now than it was last year.

"There is a better preparedness among the population, the international agencies and authorities," he said.

"(But) in poor neighbourhoods there isn't always potable water to drink and the sanitary conditions are bad. So the preparedness doesn't change the cause, it only improves the response," he added.

Fears of a jump in cholera cases are not confined to Angola.

Authorities in Mozambique and Zambia have said they are concerned about outbreaks of the disease after floods prompted thousands to flee to crowded emergency camps and unsheltered higher ground in the two southern African nations.

2007-01-26T15:19:00.000-05:00

Angolans face killer floods, death toll up to 81

LUANDA (AFP) - Relief and repair workers struggled to deal with havoc wreaked by torrential rain and flash floods in Angola, where the death toll around the seaside capital Luanda rose to 81.

"During search operations 10 more bodies were found in Luanda. The toll is now 81," fire service spokesman Faustino Sebastiao told AFP, adding that 18 people were known to be missing.

Fifty-nine of the deaths were in Cacuaco, one of the worst-hit areas just north of the capital, a local official said over radio.

Other parts of southern Africa have been hit by heavy downpours, including Malawi, Mozambique and Zambia.

Central Luanda was cut off from Monday when three key bridges were damaged by heavy rain, but two of those have been repaired, linking the downtown area to the south and north east.

Officials said makeshift shelters had been set up to house 1,300 displaced families while residents of the sprawling but rundown city of 4.5 million struggled to cope with the rising waters.

Despite Angola's oil riches, Luanda has a skeletal infrastructure, which still bears the scars of a brutal 27-year civil war that ravaged the former Portuguese colony.

Telephone lines which were been badly hit were slowly being repaired and it had become possible to make international calls again, the head of the state-run telephone company said over radio.

Meanwhile, heart-rending scenes were witnessed in Cacuaco, home to some 900,000 people, which was still cut off from Luanda since a link bridge has been damaged.

A young man on the beach in Cacuaco wept copiously by the side of his wife's body, recovered by troops who are helping in rescue and search operations.

"At least I have seen her body," he said. "When the rains started lashing our area, we climbed on the roof. But the currents were too strong and our house collapsed. After that I lost sight of her."

Businesswomen and shoppers meanwhile traversed the river separating Cacuaco and Luanda on rocks they have put alongside the destroyed bridge.

On Thursday, Angolan President Jose Eduardo dos Santos visited Cacuaco and urge officials there to "get to work".

The capital was eerily still Friday with most vehicles off the roads.

"I walked four kilometres (three miles) before coming to a road where I could take a taxi," Marcos Costa said.

Luanda's governor Job Capapinha told an emergency meeting his three main priorities were providing emergency relief, restoring road links and ensuring proper sanitation to stem the tide of cholera, which has claimed more than 2,000 lives across the country since February last year.

The cholera epidemic broke out then in a sprawling Luanda slum and has been blamed on poor sanitation, an acute shortage of drinking water and inadequate infrastructure.

In March 2005, flooding in northern Angola left over 10,000 people without shelter.

2007-01-25T11:52:00.000-05:00

Malaysian rain warning triggers fears of more floods

KUALA LUMPUR (AFP) - Malaysia has issued its highest "red stage" rain warning for the southern state of Johor, triggering fears of a third wave of flooding after weeks of chaos caused by torrential downpours.

The Meteorological Services Department said in a statement late Wednesday that moderate to heavy rain was expected to persist until Sunday in Johor, which borders Singapore, and central Pahang state.

Residents in the flood zone, where tens of thousands were forced to shelter in evacuation centres during the crisis which has peaked twice since late December, said they were not bothering to do repairs yet in light of the warning.

"I only cleaned up the house a little because we fear the floods will come again, for the third time," 61-year-old Hassan Saadon told the official Bernama news agency.

Hassan said his family cleared up the flood damage after the first wave of floods in the closing days of 2006, only to be devastated again just two days later when bad weather returned.

State Drainage and Irrigation Department chief Chong Chee Han said river levels had already beached their danger mark.

"We never had heavy flooding twice within a month, but that too has occurred. All we can hope for is that a third wave does not happen," he told The Star newspaper.

The floods, the worst in a century, have claimed 17 lives and caused damage worth 350 million ringgit (100 million dollars) to infrastructure in the south. The private sector has reportedly estimated economic losses at 2.4 billion ringgit.

Oklahoma ice storm power outages at about 5,700

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — Twelve days after an ice storm knocked down power poles and snapped transmission lines across the state, about 5,700 Oklahoma homes and businesses remained without electrical service Wednesday.

At the height of the storm, an estimated 125,000 people were without power in the state.

Most of those still without power are in remote, rural areas of far northeastern Oklahoma, where power lines are hard to get to and even harder to repair.

"We maintain thousands of miles of electrical line in rural areas," said Sid Sperry, spokesman for the Oklahoma Association of Electric Cooperatives.

"When our trucks go down the road, theyre not driving on asphalt or concrete. Theyre in pastures and fields in snow, ice or getting stuck in mud."

There are 1,200 electrical linemen working for Oklahomas 30 rural electric cooperative. Of those 1,200 linemen, 450 Oklahoma linemen are working to help restore power to customers in eastern Oklahoma, plus 1,100 linemen from other states.

State officials estimate rural electric cooperatives and the 23 eastern Oklahoma counties hit hardest by the storm received about $39 million in damage. The damage estimate was included in Gov. Brad Henrys request for federal aid.

Temperatures reached into the high 40s and low 50s under sunny skies Wednesday, melting much of the snow and ice that remained from the storm that began moving through the state on Jan. 12.

A winter storm brewing over northern Mexico was forecast to move into Oklahoma and North Texas by Friday afternoon and possibly bring rain and snow, according to the National Weather Service.

This storm, however, isn't expected to dump much precipitation and should exit the area by Saturday afternoon, forecasters said.

Rain and snow
Our engines have been receiving your
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Lost in the forest

2007-01-24T12:50:00.000-05:00

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.

2007-01-23T09:24:00.000-05:00

Five killed, 3,500 homeless after heavy rains in Mozambique

MAPUTO (AFP) - Torrential rains in central Mozambique have claimed five lives and rendered more than 3,500 homeless since the weekend, the National Institute for Disaster Management said.

"Three people died of electrocution in Quelimane and two have drowned in Namacurra district. More than 3,500 people have been housed in makeshift shelters as their homes have been flooded," institute director Paulo Zucula told AFP Tuesday.

"The situation is alarming in Quelimane," he said adding that almost the entire length of the coastal town in the northern Zambezia province was flooded.

"For the moment there is only cholera but no other epidemics," he added.

In early 2000, about 1,000 people lost their lives in floods that caused widespread devastation in the southern African nation, which is also struggling to rebuild after a 16-year civil war that ended in 1992.

2007-01-22T11:05:00.000-05:00

Rare snow storm surprises Arizona

PHOENIX - More than a foot of snow fell on parts of northern Arizona, and several more inches were possible Monday, while children as far south as Tucson got a rare chance to play in the snow as one of the strongest storms of the winter moved through the state.

Sunday's storm came amid a wave of winter storms that have brought snow, ice and strong winds to the Plains region, but also to the Southwest, including Arizona, Texas and New Mexico.

The harsh, frigid conditions were blamed for 11 traffic fatalities in the Plains over the weekend.

Although the heaviest snowfall in Arizona on Sunday was in the north, snow also fell in downtown Phoenix and Tucson, which received up to 1 1/2 inches, according to the National Weather Service.

Danita D'Water said there were huge snowflakes in her neighborhood in far northeast Phoenix.

"The children are running up and down the street, riding their scooters in the snow," she said. "The kids are pretty excited but the adults were out taking pictures."

More than a foot fell in Forest Lakes, Pinetop and at the Sunrise Ski Resort, among other places in northern Arizona. Between one and three inches fell in Flagstaff, said Robert Bohlin, meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

A winter storm warning remained in effect until noon Monday for parts of northern and northeastern Arizona, with the National Weather Service forecasting up to an additional three inches of snow.

Dense fog and icy roads created hazardous driving conditions Monday morning in the Tucson area.

In Colorado, 3 to 6 inches of snow fell across much of the Front Range, with more in the in the eastern plains and the mountains. Strong winds created whiteout conditions on the state's eastern plains.

On Sunday, officials closed a long stretch of Interstate 70, from near Denver International Airport almost to the Kansas state line because of high winds, blowing snow, poor visibility and ice. The road had reopened by Monday morning.

Snow and icy roads caused accidents that shut down southbound Interstate 25 near Fort Collins for two hours Sunday morning. State Patrol Master Trooper Ron Watkins said no injuries were reported.

In Oklahoma, where an ice storm disrupted power to as many as 125,000 homes and businesses more than a week ago, about 20,000 electrical customers remained without power early Monday — mostly in the eastern part of the state.

Hundreds of utility linemen worked through the night in hopes of fully restoring power by Monday or Tuesday, authorities said.

Warmer temperatures in the state led to melting ice and snow that have turned roads into slushy rivers, yards into quagmires and streams into rushing torrents.

A pickup truck carrying radioactive materials used in pipeline scanning equipment was swept from a bridge and disappeared in a swollen creek in Oklahoma's Pittsburg County, said Undersheriff Richard Sexton.

The truck's two occupants escaped unharmed, but efforts to locate the truck and its radioactive cargo were suspended after dark. He said officials hope the creek's level will fall enough on Monday to reveal the truck's whereabouts. A container with the material is bolted to the truck.

"The radioactive materials are still in the truck, and that's what we're worried about," Sexton said.

In Missouri, more than 45,000 people remained in the dark from the same storm.

Winter weather has also hit hard on the East Coast, bringing snow, sleet and freezing rain to Virginia, Washington, D.C., and Maryland and making roads treacherous. An accident on Interstate 81 in Virginia killed one person and injured five, authorities said.

Earthquake in Indonesia leaves 4 dead

MANADO, Indonesia - A powerful earthquake in northeastern Indonesia left four people dead and four injured when it rattled buildings, causing panicked residents to flee homes, churches and shopping malls, officials and witnesses said Monday.

Three men died after collapsing as they fled their houses Sunday in seaside Tuminting neighborhood in northern Manado, a regional capital on Sulawesi island, said Hani Solang, a subdistrict chief.

The fourth dead victim was a woman who suffered a heart attack, apparently triggered by the shock of the quake, and one of those hurt broke his leg after jumping from the fourth floor of a building, said a doctor in Manado.

The U.S. Geological Survey put the earthquake at magnitude 7.3 and the Indonesian seismological institute issued a tsunami alert via television and radio, but the feared wave never came.

The quake struck six miles beneath the Molucca Sea and was centered 80 miles from the Maluku capital of Ternate and 1,400 miles northeast of the capital of Jakarta, the USGS said.

Some buildings in Manado were left with cracks and other damage. Tsunami fears sent hundreds of people running inland to higher ground or racing off in cars and on motorcycles, causing massive traffic jams, witnesses said.

Indonesia is prone to seismic upheaval due to its location on the so-called Pacific "Ring of Fire," an arc of volcanos and fault lines encircling the Pacific Basin.

In December 2004, a massive earthquake off Indonesia's Sumatra island triggered a tsunami that battered much of the Indian Ocean coastline and killed more than 230,000 people — 131,000 of them in Indonesia's Aceh province alone.

A tsunami off Java island last year killed nearly 5,000.

2007-01-21T00:41:00.000-05:00

Earthquake rattles northeastern Indonesia

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — A 7.3 magnitude earthquake struck under the sea of northeastern Indonesia Sunday, damaging a church and injuring three people, the U.S. Geological Survey and witnesses said.
It was large enough to cause a tsunami, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said in a statement, but there were no immediate reports of high waves in regional coastal areas.

The Indonesian seismological institute, which put the tremor at 6.7 magnitude, issued a tsunami alert via local television and radio after the earthquake hit around 10 kilometers (6 miles) under the Molucca Sea, the U.S. Geological Survey said.

In the regional capital of Sulawesi, Manado, a witness told The Associated Press that residents ran in panic and that three people had been hurt after a church was damaged.

The epicenter was 130 kilometers (around 80 miles) from the city of Ternate, the capital of North Maluku province, where residents ran to higher ground in panic.

An official with the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii told AP that a basin-wide tsunami — one that travels a great distance or across an ocean — is not expected, though a tsunami near the earthquake's site is "always possible."

"Given the size of the earthquake, we think a basin-wide tsunami isn't likely, though a local tsunami could be possible," said Brian Shiro, a geophysicist at the tsunami center.

Indonesia, the world's largest archipelago, is prone to seismic upheaval due to its location on the so-called Pacific "Ring of Fire," an arc of volcanos and fault lines encircling the Pacific Basin.

In December 2004, a massive earthquake struck off Indonesia's Sumatra island and triggered a tsunami that killed more than 230,000 lives — 131,000 people in Indonesia's Aceh province alone. A tsunami off Java island last year killed nearly 5,000.

Earthquake demolishes homes in 2 Turkish villages

ANKARA, Turkey (AP) -- A moderate earthquake shook eastern Turkey on Sunday, demolishing homes in at least two villages in the eastern Turkish province of Agri, Governor Halil Ibrahim Akpinar said. There were no immediate reports of any deaths.

The quake, with a preliminary magnitude of 5.0, was centered in the town of Tutak, in Agri province, which borders Iran, the Istanbul-based Kandilli Observatory said. It struck at 9:38 a.m. (0738 GMT).

The quake knocked down a number of homes in the villages of Yukarikosk and Cobanova, Akpinar said. Snow was slowing down access to some of the villages in the province, he said.

Derya Ozer, the daughter of the local administrator in Cobanova village, said some houses and barns came down in the temblor, while others had suffered cracks or other types of damage.

"But thank God there is nothing serious," she told CNN-Turk television. "Everyone is waiting outside. Nobody will go back into their homes."

The tremor also caused a power outage in the village, she said.

The quake was felt in several areas around Agri and sent residents running out of their homes in panic.

A magnitude-5 earthquake can potentially cause considerable damage

Earthquakes are frequent in Turkey, which lies on active fault lines.

Two devastating earthquakes hit northwestern Turkey in 1999, killing some 18,000 people.

Snow storm rolls across Plains; 8 dead

HUTCHINSON, Kan. (AP) — A winter storm marched across the Plains, causing numerous accidents that killed at least eight people in three states, including four in Nebraska.
Heavy snow hit parts of Nebraska on Saturday, limiting visibility and creating hazardous driving conditions.

A car slid across the median on Interstate 80 near Kearney in central Nebraska and was struck by a tractor-trailer, killing the car's 28-year-old driver and her two children, ages 5 and 3, police said.

On U.S. 281 south of St. Paul, a 76-year-old man was killed when the car he was in crossed the center line and was struck by a pickup. The man's 59-year old wife was seriously injured.

In western Kansas, a couple and their 20-month-old daughter died when their car drove off U.S. 50 and collided with two others cars, authorities said. The couple's 6-year-old daughter was critically injured, they said.

In Oklahoma, a 5-year-old boy died after being thrown from a sport-utility vehicle that veered off a snow-covered highway and rolled.

Up to 6 inches of snow were forecast for some sections of Kansas on Sunday, with more to follow.

Farther south, the storm spared much of Oklahoma, though snow fell in western and north-central regions. The Oklahoma Corporation Commission reported Saturday night that about 36,000 customers in the state remained without power a week after a crippling ice storm.