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Beyond 2050, when climate scientists project temperatures might rise to as much as 6.4°C (11.5°F) over 20th century levels, the planet grows "gloomy" for agriculture, said senior research fellow Gerald Nelson of the International Food Policy Research Institute.
The specialists of the authoritative, Washington-based IFPRI said the fed 15 scenarios of population and income growth into supercomputer models of climate and found that "climate change worsens future human well-being, especially among the world's poorest people."
The study, issued here at the annual U.N. climate conference, said prices will be driven up by a combination of factors: a slowdown in productivity in some places caused by warming and shifting rain patters, and an increase in demand because of population and income growth.
Change apparently already is under way. Returning from northern India, agricultural scientist Andrew Jarvis said wheat farmers there were finding warming was maturing their crops too quickly.
"The temperatures are high and they're getting reduced yields," Jarvis, of the Colombia-based International Center for Tropical Agriculture, told reporters last month.
For most farmers around the world, trying to adapt to these changes "will pose major challenges," Wednesday's IFPRI report said.
Research points to future climate disruption for agricultural zones in much of sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and parts of Latin America, including Mexico. In one combination of climate models and scenarios, "the corn belt in the United States could actually see a significant reduction in productivity potential," Nelson told reporters here. "Unlike the 20th century, when real agricultural prices declined, the first half of the 21st century is likely to see increases in real agricultural prices," the IFPRI report said.
Even with "perfect mitigation," the implausible complete elimination immediately of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions, it said real prices for grain would rise because of growing demand and other factors - by 18% for rice by 2050 under the most optimistic scenario, to up to 34% for corn in the most pessimistic, a scenario envisioning high population growth.
But climate hang "acts as a threat multiplier," making feeding billions more mouths even more challenging, IFPRI said.
With climate change factored in, the increases in real prices by 2050 could range from 31% for rice in the most optimistic scenario, to 100% for corn in the most pessimistic. And IFPRI has estimated that such skyrocketing prices could boost the global population of under-nourished children by 20%, by an additional 25 million children.
(Charles J. Hanley, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Mild, dry Santa Ana winds will snake through San Diego County's inland canyons and foothills, raising temperatures 10 to 15 degrees above normal, the National Weather Service said.
Inland valleys and foothills could hit or surpass 90 degrees, making the region hotter than it is expected to be in Miami. The temperature near the coast will be in the 80s both days, and it will feel a bit hotter as the relative humidity drops below 30% in some places.
The winds also will gust to 35 mph inland. But the weather service isn't planning to issue a red flag alert.
"The criteria for an alert generally means that the humidity will be below 15%, and that the sustained winds will blow 25 mph, or gusts to 35 mph, over a six-hour period," said Ted Mackhenie, a weather service forecaster. "We won't meet that criteria."
The prospect of wildfire also is lower than usual because of October's bountiful rains. Lindbergh Field in San Diego recorded 2.18 in of precipitation, making it the fourth-wettest October since record-keeping began in 1850.
Warm weather in November is unusual, though not unexpected, this time of year. "We tend to go from cold to warm in October and November," Mackhenie said. "This is unusually when we have a lot of variability in the weather." A glimpse of weather records for San Diego proves the point.
The weather service, in an advisory issued Monday, said, "November has a normal maximum temperature of 69.9 degrees and an average minimum of 53.6 degrees, which shows the greatest mean range of any month. It also shows a noticeable cooling trend, and the mean temperature of 61.8 degrees is 5.8 degrees lower than October.
"Since hot, dry easterly winds decrease during the month, maximum temperatures of 90 degrees or higher have occurred less frequently than in September and October. As a rule, temperatures seldom have gone above 80 degrees or below 40 degrees, although 97 degrees was recorded in 1977 and 1976, and 36 degrees in 1919."
The weather service also noted that more sunshine can be expected in November than any other month: "Total possible sunshine is 74 %."
(Garry Robbins, U-T)
NB: the statement that the air will "feel a bit hotter as the relative humidity drops" is incorrect. Air feels hotter as the relative humidity RISES.
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No casualties were reported in Mount Merapi's new blast, which came as Indonesia struggles to respond to an earthquake-generated tsunami that devastated a remote chain of islands. The two disasters unfolding on opposite ends of the country have killed nearly 500 people and strained the government's emergency response network. In both events, the military has been called in to help.
Merapi has killed 38 people since it started erupting a week ago. Monitoring officials have also raised alert levels at some of the 129 active volcanoes in Indonesia, with two under watch for possible eruption within two weeks and 19 showing increased activity - more than double the usual number on the watch list, an official said.
Indonesia, a vast archipelago of 235 million people, is prone to earthquakes and volcanoes because it sits along the Pacific "Ring of Fire," a horseshoe-shaped string of faults that lines the western and eastern Pacific. Scientists could not say for certain what was causing the increased volcanic activity, though two theorized the Earth's tectonic plates could be realigning and one noted growing evidence that volcanoes can affect one [an]other.
About 69,000 villagers have been evacuated from the area around Merapi's once-fertile slopes - now blanketed by gray ash - in central Java, 250 mi east of Jakarta, the capital.
Booming explosions sounded during Monday's eruption, which shot massive clouds from the glowing caldron and sent ash cascading nearly four miles down the southeastern slopes.
Even in the crowded government camps, miles away from the mountain, the sound of the explosions sent evacuees scurrying for shelter.
More than 800 mi to the west, meanwhile, a C-130 transport plane, six helicopters and four motorized boats were ferrying aid to the most distant corners of the Mentawai Islands, where last week's tsunami destroyed hundreds of homes, schools, churches and mosques.
(Slamet Riyadi, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The finding intensifies scrutiny on a U.N. base above a tributary to the Artibonite River that is home to a contingent of recently arrived peacekeepers from Nepal, a South Asian country where cholera is endemic and which saw outbreaks this summer.
It is also a significant step toward answering one of the most important questions about the burgeoning epidemic: How did cholera, a disease never confirmed to have existed in Haiti, suddenly erupt in the vulnerable country's rural center?
Speculation among Haitians has increasingly focused on the U.N. base. The outbreak began among people who live downstream from where the tributary meets the Artibonite and drank from the river. On Friday, hundreds of protesters marched from the nearby city of Mirebalais to demand the Nepalese peacekeepers be sent home.
The Associated Press found questionable sanitation conditions in an unannounced visit to the base last week and an exclusive tour of the facility given by peacekeepers Sunday. The U.N. defends its sanitation practices and has repeatedly denied it was a source of the infections. The peacekeeping mission said officials were looking into the matter Monday following the announcement.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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To many outsiders, the undeclared embargo called off last week looked like a pure power play - a sign China would wield its growing economic might and apply its chokehold on an important industrial resource with little regard for the conventions of international trade.
From the Chinese perspective, though, the issue looks very different. China feels entitled to call the shots because of a brutally simple environmental reckoning: It currently controls most of the globe's rare-earths supply not just because of geologic good fortune, but because the country has been willing to do dirty, toxic and often radioactive work that the rest of the world has long shunned.
Across China, rare-earth mines have scarred valleys by stripping topsoil and pumping thousands of gallons of acid into streambeds. Half of the global supply of rare earths comes from a single iron ore mine in the hills north of Baotou, a smoggy mining and steel city in China's Inner Mongolia. After the iron is removed, the ore is processed at weather-beaten refineries in Baotou's western
outskirts to extract the rare-earth minerals.
The refineries and the iron ore processing mill pump their waste into an artificial lake. The reservoir - four square miles surrounded by an earthen embankment four stories high - holds a dark gray, slightly radioactive sludge laced with toxic chemical compounds.
The deadly lake is not far from the Yellow River watershed, which supplies drinking water to much of northern China.
Baotou authorities have begun a program to reinforce the levee. But the bottom of the reservoir was not properly lined when it was built decades ago, said a rare-earth engineer who insisted on anonymity due to the Chinese government's sensatevity about the problem. The sludge, he said, has caused a slowly spreading stain of faint, but detectable, radioactivity in the groundwater that is spreading 300 yards a year toward the Yellow River, seven miles to the south.
| Element | Atomic No. | Commercial Use |
| Scandium | 21 | Stadium lights |
| Yttrium | 39 | Lasers |
| Lanthanum | 57 | Electric car batteries |
| Cerium | 58 | Lens polishes |
| Praseodymium | 59 | Searchlights, aircraft parts |
| Neodymium | 60 | High-strength magnets |
| Promethium | 61 | Portable X-ray units |
| Samarium | 62 | Glass |
| Europium | 63 | Compact fluorescent bulbs |
| Gadolinium | 64 | Neutron radiology |
| Terbium | 65 | High-strength magnets |
| Dysprosium | 66 | High-strength magnets |
| Holmium | 67 | Glass tint |
| Erbium | 68 | Metal alloys |
| Thulium | 69 | Lasers |
| Ytterbium | 70 | Stainless steel |
| Lutetium | 71 | None |
The hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 90 mph was moving toward the west-northwest and was expected to turn toward Haiti later in the week. The U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said some more weakening is forecast during the next 24 hours before it begins to grow again by midweek.
Daniel Brown, a center forecaster, said Tomas was "likely to strengthen when it's over the central Caribbean" and Haiti could be hit by rains from outer bands in another couple of days.
Brown said it's too early to say how strong Tomas could be later in the week or if Haiti might suffer a direct hit, but "there's certainly going to be the threat of heavy rainfall" to the impoverished nation, where widespread deforestation and ramshackle homes mean even moderate rains can cause devastation.
Aid workers fear the worst if Tomas strikes Haiti, where hundreds of thousands of people have only rudimentary shelter nearly 10 months after the Jan. 12 earthquake, and a cholera epidemic has killed more than 330 and hospitalized nearly 5000.
"It's just so complex and it's very serious," said Imogen Wall of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. "We are so stretched already with the cholera and we are running a daily earthquake response as well."
By Sunday, two deaths and a few injuries were reported from Tomas in a cluster of islands at the Caribbean Sea's eastern entrance.
St. Lucia Prime Minister Stephenson King told a local radio station that an American tourist drowned Saturday at Cas En Bas beach in the island's north.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Government agencies pulled back boats and helicopters that had been ferrying aid to the most distant corners of the Mentawai islands and instead resorted to airdropping boxes of aid from planes.
On a borrowed 75-ft cruiser, aid workers faced rough seas and sheets of rain - plus miserable seasickness - to bring noodles, sardines and sleeping mats to villages that haven't received help since Monday's earthquake. Dozens of injured survivors of the tsunami, meanwhile, languished at an overwhelmed hospital Friday. "We need doctors, specialists," nurse Anputra said at the tiny hospital in Pagai Utara - one of the four main islands in the Mentawai chain slammed by the tsunami, which was triggered by a 7.7-magnitude earthquake.
(Kristen Gelineau, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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"Suddenly trees, houses and all things in the village were sucked into the sea and nothing was left," Joni Sageru recalled Thursday in one of the first survivor accounts of this week's tsunami that slammed into islands off western Indonesia.
The death toll rose to 393 as officials found more bodies, although hundreds of people remained missing. Harmensyah, the head of the West Sumatra provincial disaster management center who goes by one name, as is common in Indonesia, said rescue teams "believe many, many of the bodies were swept to sea."
Along with the 33 people killed by a volcano that erupted Tuesday more than 800 mi to the east in central Java, the number of dead from the twin disasters has now topped 400. After a lull that allowed mourners to hold a mass burial for victims, Mount Merapi started rumbling again Thursday with three small eruptions and another one early today. There were no reports of new injuries or damage.
The catastrophes struck within 24 hours in different parts of the seismically active country, severely testing Indonesia's emergency response network.
Aid workers trickling into the remote region found giant chunks of coral and rocks in places where homes once stood. Huge swathes of land were submerged. Swollen corpses dotted roads and beaches.
In a rare bright spot, an 18-month-old baby was found alive Wednesday in a clump of trees on Pagai Selatan - the same island where the 30-year-old Sageru lived. Relief coordinator Harmensyah said a 10-year-old boy found the toddler, whose parents are both dead.
More than 100 survivors crowded a makeshift medical center in the main town of Sikakap on Pagai Utara - one of the four main islands in the Mentawai chain located between Sumatra and the Indian Ocean.
Some still wept for lost loved ones as they lay on straw mats or sat on the floor, waiting for medics to treat injuries such as cuts and broken limbs. Outside, some rescuers wore face masks as they wrapped corpses in black body bags.
One of the hardest-hit areas, with 65 dead, was the village of Pro Rogat, on Pagai Seatandug island.
Villagers there huddled under tarps in the rain and told how many people who had fled to the hills were now too afraid to return home.
Mud and palm fronds covered the body of the village's 60-year-old pastor, Simorangkir.
(Kristen Gelineau, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Hundreds were still missing after Monday's tsunami struck the remote Mentawai islands off western Sumatra, where officials were only beginning to chart the scope of the devastation. At least 311 people died as the huge wave, triggered by an undersea earthquake, washed away wooden and bamboo homes, displacing more than 20,000 people.
About 800 mi to the east in central Java, the Mount Merapi volcano was mostly quiet but still a threat after Tuesday's eruption that sent searing ash clouds into the air, killing at least 30 people and injuring 17. Among the dead was a revered elder who had refused to leave his ceremonial post as caretaker of the moutnain's spirits.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono rushed home from a state visit to Vietnam to deal with the catastrophes, which struck within 24 hours along different points of the Pacific "Ring of Fire," a series of fault lines prone to earthquakes and volcanic activity.
The first cargo plane loaded with tents, medicine, food and clothes landed Wednesday in the tsunami-hit area, said disaster official Ade Edward.
Huge swaths of land were underwater and homes were torn apart by the 10-foot wave that hit Pagai Utara island in the Indian Ocean south of Sumatra.
Hundreds of homes were washed away in about 20 villages, displacing more than 20,000 people, Edward said. Many were seeking shelter in makeshift emergency camps or with family and friends.
Vice President Boediono toured devastated villages on pagai Utara and met with survivors and local officials, his office said. At one point, he paused solemnly in front of several corpses in body bags.
The charity SurfAid International is getting "grim news" from village contacts, said Andrew Jduge, head of the group founded by surfers who have been helping deliver aid. He said he is hearing of "more death, large numbers of deaths in some villages."
With the arrival of help, Edward said officials "finally … have a chance now to look for more than 400 still missing."
Officials prepared for the worst, sending hundreds of body bags, said Mujiharto, head of the Health Ministry's crisis center.
The islands lie close to the epicenter of the 7.7-magnitude quake that struck late Monday beneath the ocean floor. The fault line on Sumatra island's coast is the same one that caused the 2004 quake and tsunami that killed 230,000 people in a dozen countries around the Indian Ocean.
(Achmad Ibrahim & Slamet Riyadi, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Voicing anxiety that the treatment center would put nearby schoolchildren at risk of infection, residents threw stones, burned several tents in the treatment compound and blocked the road leading there with tires.
Doctors Without Borders said the new treatment center, which would have relieved some of the burden on St. Nicholas Hospital in St.-Marc, would have posed no additional risk to the population. And its closing, the group said, would disrupt efforts to treat people suffering from cholera and prevent the spread of the infection.
"The ultimate consequence is that we are now unable to respond to the cholera outbreak in the Artibonite region in the most effective manner and under the best possible conditions," Francisco Otero, head of the groups emergency response teams in St.-Marc, said in a statement.
The cholera epidemic has killed at least 303 people nationwide and sickened more than 4700 but its spread has slowed, and treatment and prevention efforts have reduced the fatality rate.
Anxiety about the epidemic, which for the moment appears to be largely contained to the Artibonite region north of here, has provoked a few other tense scenes, too. Earlier this week, displaced people in a tent camp initially fought the creation of a fenced-off cholera clinic in their midst, but they relented after negotiations.
And residents of Mirebalais protested what they feared was the contamination of a local river by human waste from a U.N. force from Nepal. Haitian media coverage of their allegations provoked the U.N. mission here to issue a communique explaining that their septic system met international environmental standards and that none of their waste was dumped in the river.
U.N. investigators took samples of foul-smelling waste trickling behind the base.
Associated Press journalists who were visiting the base unannounced happened upon the investigators. Mission spokesman Vincenzo Pugliese confirmed after the visit that the military team was testing for cholera - the first public acknowledgment that the 12,000-member force is directly investigating allegations its base played a role in the outbreak.
The mission strongly denies its base was a cause of the infection. Pugliese said civilian engineers collected samples from the base on Friday which tested negative for cholera and the mission's military force commander ordered the additional tests to confirm. he said no members of the Nepalese battalion, whose current members arrived in early October for a six-month rotation, have the disease.
The unit's commander declined to comment.
Local politicians including a powerful senator and the mayor of Mirebalais are pointing the finger at the Nepalese peacekeeping base, which is perched above a source of the Meille River, a tributary to the Artibonite River on Haiti's central plateau. The Artibonite River has been the source of most infections.
(Deborah Sontag, NYT NEWS SERVICE)
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No deaths but some injuries were reported.
Spanning from the Dakotas to the eastern Great Lakes, the unusual system mesmerized meteorologists because of its size and because it had barometric pressure similar to a Category 3 hurricane, but with much less destructive power. Scientists said the storm had the force of a blizzard minus the snow. "If it were colder, we'd have a blizzard with this system," said David Imy, operations chief at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla. But temperatures were in the 50s and 60s, instead of the 20s. The agency said the system's pressure reading Tuesday was among the lowest ever in a nontropical storm in the mainland U.S.. Spokeswoman Susan Buchanan said the storm was within the top five strongest storms in terms of low pressure, but may not have been the strongest on record.
Earlier, the agency said the storm's pressure was worse than that produced [by] the Blizzard of 1978, the March 1993 "Storm of the Century" or the November 1975 storm that sank the Edmund Fitzgerald freighter, memorialized in a song by Gordon Lightfoot.
The storm blew in from the Pacific Northwest on the strength of a jet stream that is about one-third stronger than normal for this time of year, Imy said. As the system moved into he nation's heartland, it drew in warm air needed to fuel thunderstorms. Then the winds intensified and tornadoes formed.
Add to that the storm was moving fast, 50 to 60 mph, and the winds became stronger, Imy said.
By Tuesday morning, sustained winds were about 35 to 40 mph and gusting much higher. A gust of 81 mph was recorded in Butlerville, Ohio, and 80 mph in Greenfield, Ind., according to NOAA.
At one point, more than 145,000 homes and businesses were without power in Wisconsin, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio and the St. Louis area.
The storms were headed toward the East Coast by late afternoon, and winds were expected to subside in the evening. But forecasters said the winds could pick up again today. A tornado touched down in Racine County, Wis., where two people were injured when a section of roof was torn off a tractor factory, and in Van Wert County, Ohio, near the Indiana border, where a barn was flattened and flipped over a tractor-trailer and camper. A tornado also touched down in peotone, Ill., where three people were injured when a home's roof came off, and twisters were suspected in several other states.
Sheryl Uthemann, 49, was working first shift at the Case New Holland plant in Mount Pleasant, Wis., when the storm blew through about 8 a.m. and started to lift the roof. "It was just a regular workday and all of a sudden that noise just came and (co-workers) said 'Run! Run! Run!' You didn't have time to think," she said. "I looked up where the noise was coming from and saw pieces of the roof sucked up. I've never been more scaared, ever."
In the Indiana town of Wanatah, about 60 mi southeast of Chicago, a pole barn at a hydraulics company was destroyed, and two homes were severely damaged, although no injuries were reported.
In the Chicago suburb of Lindenhurst, a woman was injured when a branch fell about 65 ft from a large tree, crashed into her car and impaled her abdomen. She was taken to a hospital in fair condition, authorities said.
Meteorologists said the storm's barometric pressure readings were comparable to those of a Category 2 hurricane, but with much weaker winds. The wind gusts were as strong as a tropical storm. Category 3 hurricanes have winds from 111 to 130 mph. Storm pressure works like this: The lower the pressure, the greater the winds. The higher the pressure, the calmer and balmier the weather is. If Tuesday's low-pressure system had been over [tropical ocean] water - where winds get higher - it would have created a major hurricane, Imy said.
Tom Skilling, a meteorologist with WGN-TV in Chicago, said the size of the storm - 31 states were under some sort of weather advisory, from blizzards to thunderstorms to tornadoes - also was unusual.
Severe thunderstorm warnings blanketed much of the Midwest, and tornado atches were issued from Arkansas to Ohio.
eleven states were under a high wind warning: Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Minnesota, Ohio and parts of Kentucky.
Meanwhile, a blizzard warning was issued for much of North Dakota, where the weather service said up to 10 in of snow could fall in some areas into early today and into northern South Dakota. wind gusts of more than 50 mph in many areas would make travel treacherous.
In the Chicago area, morning commuters faced blustery, wind-driven rain as they waited for trains. Some huddled under railway overpasses to stay out of the gusts, dashing to the platform at the last minute.
About 500 flights were canceled and others delayed at O'Hare airport, a major hub for American and United airlines. The storms also disrupted flights at the Cincinnati, Indianapolis and Minneapolis airports.
Chicago's 110-story Willis Tower, the nation's tallest building, closed the Skydeck observatory and retracted "The Ledge" attraction - four glass boxes that jut out from the building's 103rd floor.
In Michigan, wind speeds topped 35 mph on the five-mile Mackinac Bridge.
(Tammy Webber, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Tuesday's eruption of Mount Merapi killed at least 18 people, forced thousands to flee down its slopes and spewed burning ash and smoke high into the air on the island of Java.
Meanwhile, off the coast of Sumatra, about 800 mi west of the volcano, rescuers battled rough seas to reach Indonesia's Mentawai islands, where a 10-ft tsunami triggered by an earthquake Monday night swept away hundreds of homes, killing at least 113 villagers, said a spokesman for the Health Ministry's crisis center. Up to 500 others are missing.
The twin disasters happened hours apart in one of the most seismically active regions on the planet. Scientists have warned than pressure building beneath Merapi's lava dome could trigger its most powerful explosion in years. But Gede Swantika, a government volcanologist, expressed hope the 9737-foot mountain, which sent rocks and debris cascading down its southern slope, could be releasing steam slowly. "It;s too early to know for sure," he said, adding that a big blast could still be coming. "But if it continues like this for a while, we are looking a a slow, long eruption."
A 2006 eruption at Merapi killed two people, one in 1994 killed 60 people, and a1930 blast killed 1300.
After refusing to budge from the volcano's fertile slopes, saying they wanted to tend to their crops and protect their homes, villagers started streaming by the thousands into makeshift emergency shelters late Tuesday. Many carried sleeping mats, bags of clothes and food as the settled in.
Officials said earlier that by closely monitoring the volcano 310 mi southeast of the capital of Jakarta, they thought they could avoid casualties. But the death toll rose quickly.
Police and volunteers were shown on Metro TV pulling at least 14 ash-covered bodies and carrying them to waiting vehicles.
among the dead was a 2-month-old baby, said a hospital worker. The infant's tiny body was draped in a sheet as his mother cried.
Three people at Panti Nugroho hospital died of burns after being hit by a searing could of ash, said Agustinus Parjo, a spokesman.
Even as they contended with the volcano - one of 129 to watch in the world's largest archipelago - officials were trying to assess the impact of Monday night's 7.7-magnitude earthquake off Sumatra that triggered the killer tsunami.
The quake, just 13 mi beneath the ocean floor, was followed by at least 14 aftershocks, the largest measuring 6.2, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
The fault also caused the 2004 quake and monster Indian Ocean tsunami that killed 230,000 people in a dozen countries.
(Slamet Riyadi, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said Richard's top winds were 90 mhp - making it a Category 1 hurricane - when it made landfall about 20 mi south-southwest of Belize City, whose neighborhoods are full of wooden, tin-roof homes that are very vulnerable to winds.
"The winds are very strong … it's getting stronger," said Fanny Llanos, a clerk at the Lazy Iguana bed-and-breakfast on Caye Caulker, a low-lying island known for its coral reefs and crystal-clear waters, located just offshore from Belize City. "All the windows are boarded, and this is a strong house so we will be here," she said, "but we are still afraid."
There were no immediate reports of injuries or deaths, but roads and some low-lying neighborhoods were flooded and some trees were toppled.
The hurricane center said Richard was moving west-northwest and was expected to weaken as it headed over northern Guatemala and southeastern Mexico today.
Tourists had already been evacuated from Caye Caulker and nearby Ambergis Caye, but some local residents decided to ride out the storm.
Rafael Marin, the caretaker at the Anchorage Resort hotel, said strong gusts of wind were already hitting the island and its normally calm waters were being whipped into 3-foot waves lapping at the island's docks.
Earlier, Richard dumped heavy rains on Honduras' Caribbean coast and the Bay Islands, including Roatan ,which is popular with tourists and divers. No deaths or injuries were reported.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Five cholera patients have been reported in Haiti's capital, heightening worries that the disease could reach the sprawling tent slums where abysmal hygiene, poor sanitation and widespread poverty could rapidly spread it. But government officials said sunday that all five apparently got cholera outside Port-au_prince, and they voiced hope that the deadly bacterial disease could be confined to the rural areas where the outbreak originated last week.
"It's not difficult to prevent the spread to Port-au-Prince. We can prevent it," said health Ministry director Gabriel Timothee. He said tightly limiting movement of patients and careful disposal of bodies can stave off a major medical disaster.
If efforts to keep cholera out of the camps fail, "The worst case would be that we have hundreds of thousands of people getting sick at the same time," said Claude Surena, president of the haiti Medical Association. Cholera can cause vomiting and diarrhea so severe it can kill from dehydration in hours.
doctors Without Borders issued a statement saying that some Port-au-Prince residents were suffering from watery diarrhea and were being treated at facilities in the capital city. Cholera infection among the patients had not been confirmed, however, and aid workers stressed that diarrhea has not been uncommon in Port-au-Prince since the earthquake.
"Medical teams have treated many people with watery diarrhea over the last several months," Doctors Without Borders said.
Aid workers in the impoverishednation say the risk is magnified by the extreme poverty faced by people displaced by the Jan. 12 earthquake, which killed as many as 300,000 people and destroyed much of the capital city.
(Jacob Kushner, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The storm was expected to pass "near or over" Honduras' coast late Saturday and become a hurricane today, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami, Florida.
Honduran authorities declared a red, or maximum, alert in four coastal provinces.
Richard is also likely to pas near the Honduran island of Roatan, which is popular with tourists and divers, before making landfall in Belize tonight or early Monday.
Hurricane warnings were issued for all of those areas, and storm warnings were also in place for Mexico's southern Caribbean coast.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Maria, 12, said she had sex with "many" of those men, sometimes for a dollar, while her cousins, 13 and 10, begged European and American tourist for coins. "I was hungry, I lost everything; we didn't know what to do," said Maria, explaining her decision to sell her body on the streets of Boca Chica.
The three children told reporters from El Nuevo Herald and The Miami Herald that they left Port-au-Prince, Haiti, with the help of a smuggler after the January earthquake devastated the city.
Today, the children sell boiled eggs for 10 cents all day, walking in the sun along Duarte Avenue, a bustling runway for juvenile prostitution in the heart of Boca Chica, where newly arrived Haitian girls sashay, offering their bodies to gray-haired tourists.
The story of Maria and her cousins has become commonplace: Since the earthquake, more than 7300 boys and girls have been smuggled out of their homeland to the Dominican Republic by traffickers profiting on the hunger and desperation of Haitian children and their families. In 2009, the figure was 950, according to one human rights group that monitors child trafficking at 10 border points.
Several smugglers told the newspapers they operate in cahoots with crooked authorities in both countries - their versions verified by a UNICEF report and child advocates on both sides of the border. "All the officials know who the traffickers are, but don't report them. It is a problem that is not going to end because the authorities' sources of income would dry up," said Regino Martinez, a Jesuit priest and director of the Border Solidarity Foundation in Dajabon, a Dominican border town.
Martinez has denounced the problem from the pulpit, to community groups and to the heads of CESFRONT, the Dominican Republic's Specialized Corps for Borderland Security.
Leaders in both nations, following the catastrophic earthquake that killed an estimated 300,000 people, pledged to protect children from predatory smuggling, a historic problem.
But the newspapers found the trafficking of children remains, with reporters witnessing smugglers carrying children across a river and handing them to other adults, who put the kids on motorcycles and speed off the shantytowns. Border guards, charged with preventing this, witnessed the incidents and didn't react, the reporters found.
Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive acknowledged there has been a lack of political will to tighten the porous 230-mile border between the nations, which he called a "no man's land and an opening for bigger trafficking."
(Gerardo Reyes, MCT NEWS SERVICE)
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Even as relief organizations rushed doctors, medical supplies and clean-water equipment toward the epicenter of the outbreak - the Artibonite Valley, a rice-producing area about three hours north of the capital, Port-au-Prince - Haitian radio reported cases surfacing elsewhere.
As the WHO warned it was probably impossible to contain the disease near the Artibonite, relief agencies began preparing the urban camps they oversee for the germ's arrival. While normally less crowded than the cities, the Artibonite is host to thousands of earthquake refugees. Many are crowding in with relatives and drinking from the local St. Marc River, into which raw sewage flows. The area is prone to flooding in the rainy season, which is now in progress.
Television pictures showed hospital corridors and parking lots filled with victims lying on the ground, getting intravenous fluids as crowd of screaming relatives were kept outside.
Operation Blessing International, a relief agency, said Friday that one of its filter trucks capable of cleaning 10,000 gallons of water daily had reached Babou La Port, the small town where the first cases appear to have occurred.
"A sea of multicolored buckets surrounded us" as people gathered to get clean water; the agency quoted its disaster relief director, David Darg, as saying. "There were no cheers and little laughter; most of the villagers were stunned, afraid and weak."
The hospital in St.-Marc was "a horror scene," Darg wrote on a CNN blog, describing people lying in courtyards on sheets soaked with rain and feces, children writhing in agony and adults lying motionless, their eyes rolled back as nurses searched for veins.
Because Haiti is so crowded and its people so mobile, the outbreak will almost inevitably spread, said Dr. Michel Thieren, senior program officer in haiti for the Pan American Health Organization. The best hope for minimizing casualties will be a campaign to tell people to drink only treated water and to wash their hands after using the toilet, coupled with bigger efforts to get fresh water and clean latrines to everyone.
(Donald G. McNeil Jr., NYT NEWS SERVICE)
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Gyoergy Hoffmann, a coal miner in Ajka, a city near the spill, called it "just the latest stroke of fate" for a country dominated for centuries by foreign powers - first the Turks, the the Austrians and finally the Soviets, who turned the country into the communist bloc's main producer of alumina.
For decades, Hungary made the aluminum ingredient and shipped it to Russia, which sold the metal back to Hungary and other Soviet bloc nations at world market prices.
Swept by euphoria and national unity after to collapse of communism, Hungary considered itself ahead of its neighbors in cleaning up the environmental sins of the Soviet era. Rusting, polluted factories and abandoned garbage dumps, once common along Hungary's back roads, have become a rare sight.
But alumina plants remained active, including the factory outside the village of Kolontar, where the rupture of a wall holding waste sludge dumped up to 184 million gallons of highly polluted water and mud onto three villages in about an hour Monday. At least seven people were killed by the caustic muck and hundreds were injured.
Hungary's prime minister said Saturday that the cracking wall of the reservoir could collapse at any moment and send a new wave of caustic red sludge into the devastated towns.
Environmental groups, meanwhile, are warning of other potential disasters, among them seven storage ponds about 60 mi northwest of Budapest that hold 12 million tons of sludge accumulated since 1945 - more than 10 times the amount that spilled last week.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Greenpeace experts in Vienna, in Neighboring Austria, said analysis of the sludge showed dangerously high levels of arsenic and mercury that posed a long-term risk to the ecosystem and drinkable water in the area around the town of Kolontar.
The experts charged that the Hungarian government, which had access to the analysis a day after the accident, had concealed the toxicity of the mud, which reached the Danube River on Thursday. "We find it quite strange, to put it mildly, that the Hungarian government and the responsible authorities didn't publicly announce the real amounts of toxic substances," Herwig Schuster, a chemistry expert for Greenpeace, told reporters in Vienna.
Meanwhile, three additional deaths from the spill were confirmed. An 81-year-old patient with chemical burns to 70% of his body died in the hospital, while rescuers found the bodies of two more people. Another person remained missing.
A local Hungarian environmental office said the effluent, from a chemical processing plant, has mostly dissipated since flowing into the Danube. The office said the alkaline level of the river was normal.
Prime Minister Viktor Orban said the situation was under control. "We are fighting to reduce threats to the environment … (and) the Danube River," Orban said.
Greenpeace criticized the authorities for not warning rescue workers of the danger of the alkaline chemicals.
"They let people work with bare hands. Firefighters showed me their hands, which are covered by chemical burns," Greenpeace activist Bernd Schaudinnus said.
Analysis of water in a canal in Kolontar showed arsenic levels 25 times above the threshold for drinking water, the group said.
Arsenic and mercury can damage the human nervous system and other organs.
Greenpeace estimated that it will be years before some of the land around Kolontar will be suitable again for agricultural or other use.
(Andrew Yurkovsy, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The European Union and environmental officials fear an environmental catastrophe affecting half a dozen nations if the red sludge, a waster product of making aluminum, contaminated the Danube, Europe's second-longest river.
Officials from Croatia, Serbia and Romania were taking river samples every few hours Thursday but hoping that the Danube's huge water volume would blunt the impact of the spill.
The Hungarian reservoir break on Monday disgorged a toxic torrent through three villages and creeks that flow into waterways connected to the Danube. Creeks in Kolontar, the western village closest to the spill site, were still swollen and ochre red days later and villagers said the were devoid of fish.
The red sludge reached the western branch of the Danube early Thursday and its broad, main stretch by noon, Hungarian rescue agency spokesman Tibor Dobson told the state MTI news agency.
Dobson said the pH content of the red sludge entering the Danube had dropped and was unlikely to cause further environmental damage.
The Hungarian Academy of Science said sludge samples taken two days ago showed that the muck's heavy metal concentrations do "not come close" to levels considered dangerous to the environment. But the academy said Thursday it still considered the sludge dangerous - apparently due to its caustic characteristics.
The toxic sludge had devastated many local waterways.
"Life in the Marcal River has been extinguished," Dobson told The Associated Press, referring to the river's 25-mi stretch that carried the red waste from Kolontar into the Raba River and onto the Danube.
(Pablo Gorondi, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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After one tornado rumbled through Bellemont around 5:30 a.m. with wind speeds of up to 110 mph, residents armed with flashlights emerged from homes to check the damage - a house splintered, windows smashed, garage doors twisted, but no major injuries. "Running through the house, all the Kansas movies go through your head telling you: 'Move to the basement,'" Breanna Hunt said. "But we don't have a basement."
another tornado struck minutes later east of the small town of a few hundred people bested in the Ponderosa pines just west of Flagstaff. Weather forecasters confirmed a total of four twisters, including one reported at noon along Interstate 17 south of Flagstaff.
National Weather Service meteorologist George Howard said 22 tornado warnings were issued Wednesday. The radar showed many more twisters likely formed but weren't confirmed.
Sparsely populated Arizona typically has four tornadoes a year, but rarely if ever sees twisters come in clusters and cause the kind of damage seen Wednesday, meteorologists said.
"The hammering that northern Arizona is getting right now is exceptional," said National Weather Service meteorologist Ken Waters in Phoenix. "It's not uncommon this time of year to have one or two tornado reports or a warning, but this is quite an outbreak,"
The storm system moved across the West over the last few days, dropping record-setting rain in northern Nevada, pounding Phoenix with hail and dumping enough snow in the Sierra Nevada to close a highway pass.
In Utah, two teenagers were struck be lightning outside their school Tuesday. They were airlifted to a Las Vegas hospital, where they regained consciousness Wednesday.
The extreme weather came from a low-pressure system that has been parked over Central and Southern California. The system was expected to weaken as it drifts northward. Arizona, however, was the hardest hit.
On Tuesday, storms ripped out trees and broke windows in metropolitan Phoenix, flooded roadways, shut airports and dented cars and shatters windows with hail bigger than golf balls in some places.
On Wednesday, semitrailers were sitting along the side of Interstate 40. High winds cast dozens of cars of a freight train off the tracks in Bellemont around 6:30 a.m.. No one was injured and the cars did not contain any hazardous materials.
About 30 homes were so badly damaged that they were uninhabitable and the people who lived in them were evacuated, authorities said. A shelter was set up for them.
Brad Stricker said he and his wife were lying in bed when the tornado struck, spraying shattered glass. But nothing hit them. "Miraculously we're OK," he said..
(Felicia Fonseca, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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City crews have taken several water samples along the river looking for other explanations, such as solvents or chemicals dumped illegally into the river.
But they concluded that the die-off was caused by the growth of algae sucking up oxygen during last week's hot spell, then dying off and using more oxygen as they decayed. By Tuesday, the bloom was largely gone but the dead fish remained along the sides of the river.
"It's natural; it's just not looking very pretty," said Joan Brackin, enforcement chief for the city Storm Water Department.
Conservationists with the San Diego River Park Foundation said at least 150 dead fish were spotted along the river during a cleanup event Sunday. The die-off was discovered near where Camino Del Este crosses the river in Mission Valley. Other reports came from near the dam at Mission Gorge and near Qualcomm Stadium.
Carp, perch, bluegill and koi were among the dead fish. A few measured longer than two feet.
"Some of the fish looked to be about 15 pounds," Brackin said. "we were a little shocked."
The San Diego River is susceptible to algae blooms because it receives lots of fertilizer-laden runoff from urban yards and it winds slowly through Mission valley.
Storm Water Department spokesman Bill Harris said such large-scale fish kills aren't common in the river, but they do happen when conditions promote the rapid growth of algae and its rapid decline.
(Mike Lee, [S.D.] UNION TRIBUNE)
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Lindbergh Field recorded almost twice as much rain as the 0.44 of an inch it averages for the entire month of October. For the 24-hour periods ending at 5 p.m. Wednesday, the airport recorded 0.74 of an inch of rain.
The scattered showers could be back this morning, and then it will clear. Temperatures are expected to climb into the 70s and 80s for the rest of the week.
With the showers came minor flooding in Mission Beach and dozens of traffic crashes during the morning commute.
California Highway Patrol officers responded to 97 wrecks from midnight to noon. A typical day has 50 to 75.
In San Diego, along Mission Boulevard between Brighton and Avalon courts, a city crew used a vacuum truck to clear about a foot of standing water.
Mission Beach resident Al Janc, 73, who has an office on Mission, waded through the water in rain boots but wasn't fazed by the flooding.
"It will all just go down the drain in a matter of 30 minutes," Janc said.
In 1983, Jane said, storm waves came over the sea wall and canoes could float along Mission Boulevard. "That was a flood," he said.
(Gary Robbins & Debbi Baker, [S.D.] UNION TRIBUNE)
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Hundreds of people had to be evacuated after a gigantic sludge reservoir burst Monday at a metals plant in Ajka, a town 100 mi southwest of Budapest, the capital.
At least four people were killed, three are still missing and 120 were injured as the unstoppable torrent inundated homes, swept cars off roads and disgorged an estimated 35 million cubic feet of toxic waste onto several nearby towns.
It was still not known Wednesday why part of the reservoir failed. Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban said authorities were caught off guard by the disaster since the plant and reservoir had been inspected only two weeks earlier and no irregularities had been found.
National Police Chief Josef Hatala decided to take over the probe because of its importance and complexity, police spokeswoman Monika Benyi told The Associated Press, adding that a criminal case had been opened by the country's top investigative body into possible on-the-job carelessness.
The huge reservoir, more than 1000 feet long and 500 yards wide[??], was no longer leaking Wednesday but a triple-tiered protective wall was being built around its damaged area, Interior Minister Sandor Pinter said guards have been posted at the site to give an early warning in case of any new emergency.
The red torrent has already reached the Marcal River but it was not clear Wednesday how far down the river it had spread. Emergency workers were pouring 1000 tons of plaster into the water to try to bind the sludge and keep it from flowing into the Danube, 45 mi away.
The Hungarian Water Regulation Authority estimated Tuesday it would take the sludge about five days to reach the Danube, one of Europe's key waterways. South of Hungary, the DAnube flows through Croatia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine and Moldova before emptying into the Black Sea.
Hungary's National Rescue Service said engineers considered diverting the Marcal into nearby fields but decided not to, fearing the damage from the diversion would be too great.
(Pablo Gorondi & Bela Szandelsky, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The flood of caustic red mud triggered a state of emergency declaration by Hungarian officials. At least four people were killed, six were missing and 120 injured, many with burns.
Hundreds were evacuated in the aftermath of the disaster Monday, when a gigantic sludge reservoir burst its banks at an alumina plant in Ajka, a town 100 mi southwest of Budapest, the capital. The torrent of sludge inundated homes, swept cars off roads and damaged bridges.
The material is a waste product in aluminum production that contains heavy metals and is toxic if ingested.
In Kolontar, the town closest to the plant, Erzsebet Veingartner was in her kitchen when the 12-foot-high wave of red slurry hit, sweeping away everything in its path.
"I looked outside and all I saw was the stream swelling like a huge wave," the 61-year-old widow said Tuesday as she surveyed her backyard, still under 6 ft of noxious muck. "I lost all my chickens, my ducks, my Rottweiler, and my potato patch. My late husband's tools and machinery were in the shed and it's all gone," sobbed the woman, who gets by on a $350 monthly pension. "I have a winter's worth of firewood in the basement and it's all useless now."
Emergency workers wearing masks and chemical protection gear rushed to pour 1000 tons of plaster into the Marcal River in an attempt to bind the sludge and keep it from flowing on to the Danube about 45 mi away. Nearby, desperate villagers waded through the toxic mud trying to salvage possessions with little more than rubber gloves as protection.
The 1775-mile-long Danube passes through some of the continent's most pristine vistas from its origins as a Black Forest spring in Germany to its end point as a majestic stretch of water emptying into the Black Sea.
Now a murky green - not blue as immortalized in the Strauss waltz - the river flows through four former communist nations. One of the continent's greatest treasuries of wildlife, it has been the focus of a multibillion dollar post-communist cleanup. Cormorants, swans and other birds are now common sights on the river.
Still, high-risk industries such as Hungary's Ajkai Timfoldgyar alumina plant are still producing waste near some of its tributaries, posing a threat to the waterway.
By Tuesday, about 35.3 million cubic feet of sludge had poured from the reservoir, flooding a 16 square mile area, Environmental Affairs State Secretary Zoltan Illes called the spill an "ecological catastrophe."
Dozens of villagers were burned when the caustic material seeped through their clothing. Two women, a man and a 3-year-old child were killed, and health officials said two of the injured were in critical condition.
(Bela Szandelsky & Pablo Gorondi, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The government delivered blankets and other supplies to survivors and others who fled their unstable homes for fear of more mudslides in Santa Maria do Tlahuitoltepec. Many sheltered under makeshift tents on the hills.
The landslide early Tuesday caused nationwide alarm after local authorities initially said hundreds could be dead i the remote town, which had been blocked off by slides and a washed-out bridge.
But hours later, when rescue workers finally reached the community, 11 people were missing and none confirmed dead.
Heavy rains are beleaguering much of Mexico's south. In neighboring Chiapas state, federal officials said 16 people were killed and 13 injured Wednesday by a landslide in the municipality of Amatan.
"Unfortunately there has been a new landslide in Amatan, Chiapas. We are mobilizing aid to help,: President Felipe Calderon said by Twitter in delivering the first report of 12 dead.
Hours later, the chief of the federal Civil Protection emergency response agency, Laura Gurza, said in an interview with the Televisa network that 16 bodies had been recovered. She also said three people were missing after a landslide in a nearby town.
"There are fears of more landslides in Chiapas, Oaxaca and the mountainous zone in this strip of territory in the country's southeast, since the ground is softened, is saturated," Gurza said.
In the Oaxaca slide, rains and unstable soil forced police and firefighters to suspend the rescue efforts for hours. The search resumed Wednesday with picks, shovels and a bulldozer in the river of mud and stones that swept down the hillside.
The two bodies found were the 18- and 15-year-old daughters of the town's chief health official and his pregnant wife, state officials said. Mayor Antonio Martinez said the parents were among the missing.
The area was battered by the remnants of a hurricane one week and a tropical storm the next.
Oaxaca Gov. Ulises Ruiz initially told a Mexico City television station he had received reports that 300 homes were buried, with as many as 1000 people inside.
(Mark Stevenson, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The money was pledged by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in March for use this year in rebuilding. The U.S. has already spent more that $1.1 billion on post-quake relief, but without long-term funds, the reconstruction of the wrecked capital cannot begin.
With just a week to go before fiscal 2010 ends, the money is still tied up in Washington. At fault: bureaucracy, disorganization and a lack of urgency, The Associated Press learned in interviews with officials in the State Department, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the White House and the U.N. Office of the Special Envoy. One senator, Tom Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma, has held up a key authorization bill because of a $5 million provision he says will be wasteful.
Meanwhile, deaths in Port-au-Prince are mounting, as quake survivors scramble to live without shelter or food.
"There are truly lives at stake, and the idea that folks are spending more time finger-pointing than getting this solved is almost unbelievable," said John Simon, a former U.S. ambassador to the African Union who is now with the Center for Global Development, a Washington think tank.
Nor is Haiti getting much from other donors. About 50 other nations and organizations pledged a total of $8.75 billion for reconstruction, but just $686 million of that has reached Haiti so far - less than 15% of the total promised for 2010-11.
The lack of funds has all but halted reconstruction work by CHF International, the primary U.S.-funded group assigned to remove rubble and build temporary shelters. Just 2% of rubble has been cleared and 13,000 temporary shelters have been built - less that 10% of the number planned.
The Maryland-based agency is asking the U.S. government for $16.5 million to remove more than 21 million cubic feet of additional rubble and build 4000 more temporary houses out of wood and metal.
"It's just a matter of one phone call and the trucks are out again. We have contractors ready to continue removing rubble â¦. We have local suppliers and international suppliers ready to ship the amount of wood and construction materials we need," said CHF country director Alberto Wilde. "It's just a matter of money."
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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"Winds will gust 25 to 30 mph, but they will be fairly localized," said Phil Gonsalves, a National Weather Service forecaster. "We won't be getting the 40-mph winds that blow over a large area, causing wildfires to get out of control."
Temperatures could reach the low 70s along the coast today. Sunday and Monday will be the hottest days of the heat wave, with beaches warming ip quickly to the 80s. Temperatures in the foothills and inland valleys could hit the upper 90s or low 100s Monday. The valleys and foothills also will have the lowest humidity.
Forecasters say conditions won't results in a red-flag warning indication extreme fire danger. That's issued when sustained winds are 25 mph or higher, or gusting to 35 mph or higher, combined with 15% or lower humidity over at least six hours.
Local ocean temperatures remain about 61 to 63 degrees - far below normal. But, Gonsalves said, "Lifeguards are going to be busy. We didn't have much of a summer. People are going to take advantage of every chance they can get to enjoy the beach." .
(Gary Robbins, U-T)
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With the 6-mi2 fire only 25% contained and afternoon winds igniting flare-ups, police said it was too dangerous to let residents in the Salt Lake City suburb of Herriman return to about 450 homes closest to Camp Williams. Three houses were destroyed and a fourth was damaged after the fire started Sunday at the Utah National Guard training base. Authorities ordered the evacuation of more than 1600 homes Sunday night.
Utah Army Guard Gen. Brian Tarbet has apologized for what he called a "systematic failure" that allowed guard members to conduct live-fire training exercises Sunday despite tinder-dry conditions and predictions of high winds at Camp Williams, about 30 mi south of Salt Lake City. Tarbet said no one checked to see that the National Weather Service had posted a "red flag" fire warning.
(Jennifer Dobner, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Gen. Brian Tarbet said he was "deeply sorry" about what he called a "systematic failure" at Camp Williams, about 30 mi south of Salt Lake City. The flames also destroyed three houses and damaged a fourth.
"Our mission is to support our citizens, not to endanger them, and we failed in the yesterday," Tarbet said.
Tarbet said no one checked to see if the National Weather Service had posted a "red flag" high-wind warning before permitting the machine gun exercise to proceed in tinder-dry conditions. He also said guard commanders waited two hours to call outside for agencies for help.
It was only the latest example of military training activities sparking large fires at Camp Williams and other facilities.
Utah National Guard officials say they can usually contain any flames, but local leaders questioned the decision to fire weapons at all. "It's a regular occurrence with any type of training - small flare-ups we deal with,; Lt. Col. Hank McIntire said Monday as the fire retreated to the interior of the camp, which, at 44 sq mi, is nearly twice the size of Manhattan.
The flames were ignited Sunday by practice rounds from a .50-caliber machine gun. National Guard crews thought they had the blaze quickly contained, until overnight winds of more than 40 mph fanned the fire across more than 6 sq-mi. ...
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The debate over the Kalabagh Dam shows how the worst natural disaster in Pakistan's history, affecting some 20 million people, has unearthed deep fissures in its society. There is a chronic mistrust among Pakistan's four provinces and the central government, and critics accuse wealthy landowners of naked self-interest in wanting to ensure the Indus keeps irrigating their crops.
Kalabagh is in eastern Punjab province, the country's most populous and prosperous region, where the Indus moves from mountains to plains and nourishes millions of acres of crops. The dam was first proposed in 1984, but political sensitivities mean it has never passed the planning stage.
In the northwest, politicians and farmers fear the dam could mean more flooding and not less. They say if the dam's reservoir was full, surplus water would be diverted into some districts in the region. South of Punjab, where the Indus runs into the Arabian Sea, they fear the dam would mean drought and poor crops. Both regions ultimately think that it would give Punjab even more economic and political clout.
The governor of Punjab dismisses the arguments as "nonsense."
"It is an emotional issue that they play up and say the 'Punjabis are stealing your water,'", said Salman Taseer, a vocal proponent of the dam. "It is a storage dam, it is not diverting any water. The studies have been done."
This year's floods began six weeks ago int the northwest after exceptionally heavy monsoon rains. The deluge slowly worked its way down the Indus and its tributaries, washing over at least 7.4 million acres of farm land, and destroying or damaging more than 1.8 million homes.
Shams-ul-Mulk, a former chairman of Pakistan's Water and Power Development Authority and a supporter of the dam, said even a "common man" could see that having the dam in place would have mitigated the floods.
No one disputes the electricity that would be supplied from the dam would benefit the whole country. Pakistan has for years struggled with electricity shortages, leading to outages for up to 16 h a day in some areas.
Studies show the dam would generate 3400 megawatts of electricity and could be built in under five years. Still, few outside Punjab support it.
Leaders in the northwestern province of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa say the dam will destroy farmlands in the Peshawar valley - the main source of agriculture in the region - as water from its reservoir would seep into surrounding land, raising the water table.
They also fear the dam would force incoming floodwaters to spread to areas beyond the already vulnerable district of Nowshera, which is susceptible because of its geography and was badly hit in this summer's deluge.
"We will never let it happen," said Bashir Bilour, a senior minister in the northwest province.
(Asif Shahzad, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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An extremely dangerous Category 4 hurricane earlier in the week, Igor was still a Category 2 storm, and officials warned that its pounding rains and driving winds could be deadly.
"His storm will be a long and punishing one," Public Safety Minister David Burch said. "The potential for injury and physical damage is great."
High surf kicked up by the storm has already swept two people out to sea in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, far to the south.
In Mexico, meanwhile, the remnants of Hurricane Karl soaked south-central portions of the country as authorities sent helicopters to rescue scores of people stranded by flooding and hunt for others feared washed away. At least five fatalities were reported.
Tropical-storm-force winds were forecast to start battering Bermuda Saturday night, with the hurricane expected to pass directly overhead or nearby late Sunday or early Monday, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami.
Hotel cancellations were reported across Bermuda, popular with tourists for its pink sand beaches and with businesspeople as an offshore financial haven.
Schools will be closed Monday and Tuesday, and the local newspaper said it will not print a Monday edition.
(Elizabeth Roberts, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The person was killed when a tree fell on a car in Queens, fire officials said. Numerous minor injuries were reported elsewhere.
The storm hit just after 5 p.m., when the National Weather Service issued a tornado warning for Staten Island. Shortly afterward, warnings were issued for Brooklyn and Queens.
The National Weather Service said it would assess the damage to determine whether a tornado actually had touched down.
"A huge tree limb, like 25 ft long, flew right up the street, up the hill and stopped in the middle of the air 50 ft up in this intersection and started spinning," said Steve Carlisle, 54. ... "Then all the garbage cans went up in the air and this spinning tree hits one of them like it was a bat on a ball. The can was launched way, way over there," he said, pointing at a building about 120 ft away where a metal garbage can lay flattened.
Townsend Davis, 47, stood outside of his home on Sterling Place in Brooklyn. A 40-ft tree that was uprooted from the sidewalk and crushed two cars still had a sign in the soil around its roots that read "Respect the trees." ⦠.
The Long Island Rail Road said service was temporarily suspended between Penn Station and Jamaica because of fallen trees. Amtrak and New Jersey Transit ran with delays.
Meanwhile in the Gulf of Mexico, tropical storm Karl reached hurricane force on Thursday and was expected to strengthen more before hitting Mexico's coast near a port and an oil hub today. The U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami said there was a possibility Karl could become a major hurricane with winds of 110 mho or higher before making landfall. The Mexican government issued a hurricane warning for a 186-mi stretch of coast in Veracruz state, stretching northward from the city of the same name. On its predicted path, Karl could make landfall between Veracruz and the oil hub of Poza Rica. Authorities in Veracruz state braced for a hit on opts northern coast, preparing supplies for anyone taking refuge in shelters.
(Charles Sheehan, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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At least 500 buildings, including 90 downtown properties, have been designated as destroyed in the quake that struck at 4:35 a.m. near the South Island city of 400,000 people. But most other buildings sustained only minor damage.
Only two serious injuries were reported from the quake as chimneys and walls of older buildings were reduced to rubble and crumbled to the ground. The prime minister said it was a miracle no one was killed. Power was cut across the region and roads were blocked by debris, officials said.
(Rob Griffith, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The tropical storm, far less intense that feared, brushed past the Northeast and dumped heavy, wind-driven rain on Cape Cod cottages and fishing villages, but caused little damage.
It left clear, blue skies in its wake. It was the perfect start to a Labor Day weekend Cape Cod's restaurants and hotels hoped to salvage after business was decimated ahead of the storm.
"This traditionally for us is a sellout weekend," said Voula Nikolakopoulos, one of the owners of Tidewater Inn in West Yarmouth,
where business was down 80%. "I understand that we have to be careful, but I think all this hype was premature."
Massachusetts suffered a few hundred power outages, a handful of downed power lines and isolated flooding. Maine saw rain and churning surf but no gusts strong enough to produce damage.
After skimming past North Carolina and Massachusetts, Earl finally made landfall Saturday morning near Western Head, Nova Scotia. It was blamed for the death of a man to secure his boat after it became loose from its mooring off a bay near Halifax.
The storm brought heavy sheets of rain and swift gusts, toppling some trees and knocking out power to more than 200,000 customers in Nova Scotia. There were numerous flight and ferry cancellations. Police said the road to the popular Peggy's Cove tourist site near Halifax was closed to keep curious storm-watchers away from the dangerous, pounding surf.
Earl's center later Saturday was in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and was moving northeast at 52 mph. The Canadian Hurricane Center issued a tropical storm warning for parts of Newfoundland.
Earl had swooped into New England waters Friday night as a tropical storm with winds of 70 mph after sideswiping North Carolina's Outer Banks, where it caused flooding but no injuries and little damage. The rain it brought to Cape Cod, Nantucket Island and Martha's Vineyard was more typical of the nor'easters that residents have been dealing with for generations.
Winds on Nantucket blew at around 30 mph, with gusts above 40 mph. The island got more than 2 in of rain.
(Russell Contreras, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Both sides of the main road were crowded with people from Thatta and nearby flooded villages fleeing the floodwaters. Many had spent the night sleeping out in the open.
Hadi Baksh Kalhoro, a Thatta disaster management official, said more than 175,000 people had left the city, leaving few behind.
Some are heading for nearby towns or cities, he said, with thousands also headed for the high ground of an ancient graveyard for Muslim saints.
The floods began in the mountainous northwest about a month ago with the onset of monsoon rains and have moved slowly down the country toward the coast in the south, inundating vast swaths of prime agricultural land and damaging or destroying more than 1 million homes.
More than 8 million people are in need of emergency assistance across the country.
The United Nations, the Pakistani army and a host of local and international relief groups have been rushing aid workers, medicine, food and water to the affected regions, but are unable to reach many people.
On Saturday, flood victims blocked a road in Thatta to protest the shortage of aid, most of which is randomly thrown from trucks into crowds of needy people.
"The people who come here to give us food treat us like beggars. They just throw the food. It is humiliating," said 80-year-old Karima, who used only one name. She was living in the graveyard with more than two dozen relatives.
The floods also displaced thousands of minority Hindus in southern Sindh province. About 3000 were living at a centuries-old Hindu temple inside the sprawling graveyard.
The Pakistani army has deployed units the length of the river in Sindh to strengthen the embankment on both sides and watch for breaches, said Lt. Col. Asad Jalali, who is in charge of a command center in Thatta.
(Ashraf Kahn, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The U.S. Agency for International Development has donated $100,000 to buy building materials for victims of the Mexicali earthquake, which struck on Easter Sunday and could be felt throughout San Diego County.
Carlos Pascual, U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, said in a statement that the funds would be channeled through the Baja California government. The money is earmarked for people from communities near the quake's epicenter in the Mexicali Valley that have suffered the greatest devastation.
Baja California authorities said last week that the funds are being used to purchase construction materials: 7000 bags of cement mix, 4000 ledges of timber and 2150 pieces of plywood.
The rebuilding projects are targeted at residents with damaged houses who have yet to receive government assistance, said Juan Jose Sanchez, who heads the Mexicali office of the Baja California state housing agency, Indivi.
"It;s going to help a lot," Sanchez said.
The money will be used to supplement existing housing assistance programs aimed at families whose houses were damaged, but not completely destroyed, he said.
Sanchez expects the materials to reach residents next month.
Juan Tintos, head of public relations for the Baja California government, said Sempra Energy also has donated more than $100,000 to buy equipment for the Mexicali Civil Protection Office and repair the General Hospital, which suffered damage in the quake.
(Sandra Dibble, U-T)
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but cloud cover, humidity and mild westerly winds helped firefighters keep the fast-moving blaze in check.
"The topography was against us, and the medium fuels can really burn," said San Diego fire Battalion Chef Glen Holder. The weather is what saved us. It's not that hot, not that sunny and not that windy."
The fire broke out at the bottom of a hill behind the WorldMark by Wyndham time-share units on Camino del Rio South in Mission Valley about 2:30 p.m. The flames charred 4 acres of thick brush up the canyon and burned within feet of homes perched at the top, near Massachusetts Street and Madison Avenue.
A second fire began about 20 min later about 50 yards to the east, apparently ignited by blowing embers, and burned 2 acres. Firefighters also stopped it within feet of homes.
The cause of the fire is under investigation.
Firefighters and police officers evacuated about 30 residents, as well as people from businesses at the bottom of the hill.
Simran Noon was at her home at the top of the canyon when she smelled smoke.
"Immediately, I packed up the baby and sent him with the nanny, then I got the pet crates ready," she said.
She and her husband then set about hosing down the back of their yard as the flames grew closer.
"Thank God the fire department got here as quick as they did," Noon said. "If they hadn't, it would have been a matter of minutes before the fire came up and engulfed the house."
Thursday's conditions were markedly different from those on June 30, 1985, when 84 homes were damaged or destroyed in the Normal Heights fire to the east. Firefighters that day battled Santa Ana winds, 96-degree heat and weak water pressure.
They also didn't have the two helicopters that crews had Thursday. The copters made 46 drops using water from the nearby San Diego River. Dozens of people watched as the copters made sharp turns against the hillside, quickly dropped the water and returned for more.
Forward movement of the first fire was stopped in about 30 min.
"The crews are better trained, better equipped, and we have two helicopters we didn't have back then," said Maurice Luque, spokesman for the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department. "The helicopters were wry instrumental knocking this down. They held it in place and let the firefighters get in there."
The spectacle of the hillside ablaze brought traffic on Interstate 8 to a near standstill. Rob Berwaldt, 49, was riving on Camino del Rio North when he pulled over to watch.
"It moved so fast," he said. "It was 'boom', like that, right up to the houses. I've never seen something like that in this area."
While the fire might have shaken many people, Holder emphasized the silver lining.
"This set up for a nice firebreak for these people this summer," Holder said. "For the whole canyon rim."
San Diego fire Capt. Dieter Klugg was covered in soot as he came down the hill. He said the steep slope made it more difficult for firefighters, who carry between 40 and 60 pounds of gear. "It makes it really tough," he said. "It takes a ton of effort to get to the top."
At the bottom of the hill, Gina Bellus of Gilbert, Ariz., was staying in one of the 167 WorldMark time-share units with her husband and two children when the fire began.
"We heard a really loud crackling sound and went outside and saw the fire going up the hill," she said.
Flames were so close that her husband used a water pitcher to douse smoldering shrubs outside," Bellus said.
Chuck and Cozie Schaffer of Ogden, Utah, were staying at the complex with longtime friends Paul and Shirley Slonaker of Oceanside. They had to walk about a quarter-mile to return to the building because the street was blocked.
Cozie Schaffer uses a wheelchair, and her husband was pushing it. They were good-natured about the inconvenience and glad no one was injured.
"Well, it's an adventure, anyway; I can say that," Paul Slonaker said.
(Kristina Davis and Susan Shroder, U.T. STAFF WRITERS)
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Thirty-eight people were missing, mostly fishermen who were caught by the storm's fury at sea.
More than half of themain northrn island of Luzon, which includes Manila, was without electricity. Officials said it would take several days to restore power.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Test results on tar balls from the Bolivar Peninsula and an east Galveston beach came back negative for relation to the Deepwater spill, said Lionel Bryant, with the Coast Guard in Texas.
Preliminary lab results had indicated that the tar balls were related to the oil spill, but further testing came back negative, Bryant said.
This time of year, natural seeps of oil wash up on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. Last weekend's tar balls could have been pushed in from recent tropical storms. Tar balls were also collected off of McFaddin Beach, east of the Bolivar Peninsula, which came back positive.
Over the past two days, tar balls washed up on Crystal Beach off the Bolivar Peninsula, and south of the Peninsula on Galveston Beach. Samples are still being tested.
"It's not a catastrophe," Bryant said. "We're going to get out there and clean it up, regardless of what the source is."
(Nicole Santa Cruz, LOS ANGELES TIMES)
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A Coast Guard official said on Monday it was possible the oil hitched a ride on a ship and wasn't carried by currents to the barrier islands of the eastern Texas coast, but there was no way to know for sure.
The amount discovered is tiny compared to what has coated beaches in the hardest-hit parts of the Gulf Coast in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and the Florida Panhandle. Nevertheless, it provoked the quick dispatch of cleaning crews and a vow that BP will pay for the trouble. "Any Texas shores impacted by the Deepwater spill will be cleaned up quickly and BP will be picking up the tab," Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson said in a news release.
The oil's arrival in Texas was predicted Friday by an analysis from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, which gave a 40% chance of crude reaching the area.
About five gallons of tar balls were found Saturday on the Bolivar Peninsula, northeast of Galveston, said Capt. Marcus Woodring, the Coast Guard commander for the Houston/Galveston sector. Two gallons were found Sunday on the peninsula and Galveston Island, although tests haven't confirmed its origin. Woodring said the consistency of the tar balls indicates it's possible they could have been spread to Texas water by ships that have worked in the spill. But there's no way to confirm the way they got there.
The distance between the western reach of the ar balls in Texas and the most eastern reports of oil in Florida is about 500 mi. Oil was first spotted on land near the mouth of the Mississippi River on April 29.
The spill is reaching deeper into Louisiana. Strings of oil were seen Monday in the Rigolets, one of two waterways that connect the gulf with Lake Pontchartrain, the large lake north of New Orleans.
Skimming operations across the gulf have scooped up about 23.5 million gallons of oil-fouled water.
DEVELOPMENTS
Temperatures reached into at least the 90s Monday from Maine to Texas, into the Southwest and Death Valley.
In the East, warm air is "sitting over the top of us, and it's not really going to budge much for the next day or two," said Brian Korty, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Camp Springs, Md.
After that, he said, a system coming in off the Atlantic Ocean would bring in lower temperatures.
The extended July Fourth weekend aided utilities by lowering demand for power, a spokeswoman for PPL Electric Utilities in Allentown, Pa., said.
The long weekend had more people out seeking relief. Five Connecticut state parks stopped admitting people because they had reached capacity.
A major utility restricted water use on the New Jersey shore, forbidding residents from watering lawns and washing cars.
About 17,000 customers in northern New Jersey lost power at about 1 p.m. Monday.
In the mid-Atlantic, the heat was expected to get worse today, with highs of up to 102°.Wednesday was forecast to be the most humid day of the stretch.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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La Niña often leads to below-average rainfall in Southern California, which causes the landscape to remain drier for longer periods, raising the wildfire danger.
The grasses that sprouted after last winter's rains have turned brown or yellow in many parts of eastern San Diego County, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said last week that this summer could turn out to be warmer than normal, which would hasten the drying process.
The local landscape flourished in winter and spring, largely because El Ni˜no enhanced some winter storms. For a while, it appeared that San Diego would exceed its average annual rainfall of 10.77 in. But then El Ni˜no faded, and with it the frequency and strength of storms.
San Diego has 10.55 in of rain for the season, which ends Wednesday, and there are no major storms in sight.
"San Diego County remains thirsty. If La Niña conditions hold and intensify, you'll probably be looking at continuing water rationing and perhaps high fire danger in the fall," said Bill Patzert, a climatologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.
"La Niña can lay the fall rains that dampen your Santa Ana-wind fueled fire season. … San Diego residents will have to be vigilant - 80% to 90% of you fires are started by people."
Weather experts urged special vigilance in East County. Noel Isla, a weather service forecaster, said county deserts average about half the annual rainfall of San Diego, making them more prone to wildfires.
SIDEBAR: San Diego Rainfall by the numbers: The historic average annual rainfall at Lindbergh Field, as measured from July 1 through June 30, is 10.77 in.
| 2009-10: | 10.55 in |
| 2008-09: | 9.15 in |
| 2007-08: | 7.25 in |
| 2005-07: | 3.85 in |
| 2005-06: | 5.42 in |
Now that a 10,000-acre wildfire is burning nearby,
stoner is unsure how much of that scenery will remain intact. As he evacuated his home Sunday, he looked out that window and saw flames shooting up above the trees.
"That's scary,: he said from a shelter where a community briefing was held Monday. "It moves fast."
The combination of high temperatures, low humidity and strong winds have challenged firefighters on the ground and in the air. Sustained winds of up to 20 mph with gusts of more than 30 mho grounded heavy air tankers Monday.
Fire crews battling the Schultz fire were focused Monday on protecting homes in the fire's path by digging trenches, clearing out dry brush and spraying them down. The flames reached the backyards of some homes and came within a few hundred feet of others, incident commander Dugger Hughes said. No structure have burned.
"The homes are looking very secure right now," Hughes said.
Residents of several hundred homes remained under evacuation orders, and Coconino County Sheriff Bill Pribil urged them to be patient while crews worked to suppress the blaze.
The fire is believed to have been started by an abandoned campfire.
The fire is burning in rough terrain, consuming ponderosa pine, mixed conifer and dry brush.
Rolling clouds of black and gray smoke choked out the sky north of Flagstaff, and bright red and orange flames shot more than 60 ft in the air. The smoke lingered over roadways, forcing drivers to use headlights in daylight hours.
Flagstaff, a mountain town of about 60,000, is a popular place for tourists and home to Northern Arizona University. Areas just north of Flagstaff that are under evacuation orders are a mix of upscale, manufactured, ranch-style and second homes at the foot of the mountains and beyond.
The fire also abuts U.S. Highway 89, a key route to Grand Canyon National Park.
Officials remained concerned that high winds could cause the fire to leap across the roadway.
A federal management team took over direction of the firefighting effort Monday, a move that expanded access to resources.
More than 800 firefighters were beetling the blaze.
The fire was the second that broke out on two days in the Flagstaff area, both of which spurred evacuations. A third fire 11 mi northeast of Williams is 60% contained after burning 3420 acres.
(Felicia Fonseca, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Also Sunday, evacuation orders for the first fire, in southeastern Flagstaff, were lifted after fire officials reported the blaze 305 contained. A California man named Randall Wayne Nicholson was arrested in connection with that fire, accused of starting it by allegedly dumping coals from a campfire on the ground, city spokeswoman Kimberly Ott said.
Authorities revised the number of evacuations for both wildfires Sunday evening. They didn't specify how many hikers were missing but said "two active searches" were under way. They also announced that a third blaze was rerouted near Interstate 40 in western Flagstaff, caused by a vehicle fire that spread into a wooded area, but there was no word on its size.
Ott said residents of hundreds of homes on 1044 parcels just north of Flagstaff were being advised to leave because of the Schultz fire, which was repotted Sunday morning and quickly charred 3000 acres. Four helicopters and 300 firefighters were battling the blaze, and more crews were on the way, Ott said.
U.S. Route 89 northeast of the northern Arizona city of about 60,000 was closed because of smoke from the Schultz fire. Its cause was unknown.
Residents of the 116 homes evacuated because of the Hardy fire in southeastern Flagstaff were being allowed to return, Ott said.
Nicholson, 54, the California man, was arrested on suspicion of starting the fire, which erupted Saturday, by allegedly leaving behind hot coals at a campsite in a wooded area about two mi from downtown Flagstaff.
"As far as we understand, this was not a deliberate act. It was a careless act," Ott said.
Nicholson, whose hometown was not immediately available, was being held on a $2500 bond at the Coconino County jail.
Fires also had crews busy Sunday near Williams, Ariz., and in Colorado and New Mexico.
High winds and rugged terrain kept ground crews and aircraft from getting close to a wildfire, which grew to 4500 acres, in southern Colorado's Great Sand Dunes National Park. In New Mexico, crews were making progress on the South Fork fire, which had charred more than 11,150 acres.
(Felicia Fonseca, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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(Peggy Peattie, UNION TRIBUNE)
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No injuries were reported. A tsunami wave up to 10 feet high plowed into the coast Monday following a [magnitude] 7.2 temblor.
More than 1000 people were affected after 200 houses were destroyed on Rendova, an island of 3600 people 190 miles from the capital, Honiara.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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No injuries were reported some 24 hours after the biggest of a series of quakes churned a tsunami that was up to 10 feet high as it crashed ashore. A magnitude-7.2 quake sent a tsunami slamming into the shores of Rendova Island and nearby Tetepare Island about 9:30 a.m. local time yesterday. Many people were awake and able to flee easily.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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An emergency agency said initially that no deaths were reported but about 20,000 people were left homeless by Saturday's 5.3-magnitude quake that hit the Pamir Mountains. But yesterday, an emergency official said on-site inspections revealed that only 783 people were left homeless.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Most took it in stride, but some took it too far: Vermont State Police cited a man after stopping him pulling a sled - with a rider in it - behind his car on Interstate 89 on sunday. He was cited for driving with a suspended license.
... It was a similar scene in upstate New York, where so-called "lake effect snow" blanketed parts of the state with more than 3 feet. The weather caused hundreds of school closings and delays in Arkansas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and the North Carolina mountains.
... In Maine, the search continued for an 18-year-old snowmobiler who disappeared shortly after the storm started Friday night. ... In Nashville, Tenn., where the overnight low was 12°F, police believe an 81-year-old man with Alzheimer's disease wandered outside in his bathrobe and froze to death, The Tennessean reported. His body was found early yesterday. Wrecks on icy roads killed at least two other people. A woman died near Mount Nebo, W.Va., when she liost control of her pickup Sunday. and in Washington, D.C., a man died after his car ran off the road Sunday and plunged under a sheet of ice covering a creek.
Homeless shelters, especially in the Southeast, braced for a crush of people and said they would not turn anyone away. The duration of the cold snap in unusual, especially in the South, where the weather is typically chilly for just a day or two before temperatures rebound into the 50s.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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It has long been known that chemical compounds in seawater, including boric acid, absorb sound because energy from sound waves stimulates certain reactions. As the oceans grow more acidic, a result of increasing absorption of atmospheric CO2, the seawater chemistry changes, resulting in fewer reactions and less acoustic energy used. The means sounds will travel farther and be louder at a given distance from a sound source.
Tatiana Ilyina and Richard E. Zeebe of the University of hawaii and Peter G. Brewer of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute looked at the future impact of this phenomenon. Using a global ocean model and projections of CO2 emissions, they predicted regional changes in acidity, and thus sound absorption.
Writing in the journal Nature Geoscience, they report that in high latitudes and deep-water formations (where acidification is expected to be greater), sound absorption could fall 60% by 2100.
So the oceans will not be as quiet, what's wrong with that? Plenty, potentially.
Most of the chemical absorption of sound occurs at relatively low frequencies, from about 1000 to 5000 Hz (hertz). Propeller noise and other ship sounds fall in the same range, as does some military and reserach sonar. So this "background" noise, especially prevalent near shipping lanes, will be louder. That may be bad news for marine mammals, which use sounds in the same range for communication and echolocation while foraging.
"We're not saying that during the next 100 years all dolphins will be deafened," Zeebe said. "But the background noise could essentially override or mask the sounds that they're depending on."
Then again, he said, because sounds will travel farther, the animals may be able to communicate over longer distances. The reserachers are continuing their studies using more sophisticated models and more precise sound sources.
(Henry Fountain, NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE)
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The amount isn't comparable to levels of organic matter from a forested watershed, but the source is likely the same. Reserachers believe the organic carbon comes from forests that once thrived along the Gulf of Alaska 2,500 to 7,000 years ago. Now, as climate change prompts greater and faster melting of glaciers, these long-gone forests (in the form of organic carbon) are washing out to sea. Some of the carbon has been dated back to more than 4,000 years ago.
Once at sea, the carbon is used by organisms at the base of the marine food chain and may be essential to their survival. But as the glaciers melt ever faster, it's unclear whether all that carbon may prove too much of a good thing.
(Scott Lafee, SAN DIEGO UNION TRIBUNE)
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Mayor Tuca Jordao, of Angra dos Reis, said main roads had been blocked by landslides and could
obstruct any evacuation in the case of an emergency. He said the plants - Angra I and Angra II - were not damaged or threatened but should be shut down as a precaution. ... the plants' operators said their closure would not affect power supplies to Rio de Janeiro - 150km (93 miles) north - which has alternative sources.
A landslide that hit a nearby resort on Friday killed at least 29 people. Floods and landslides have killed more than 70 people in southern Brazil. ...
Angra dos Reis overlooks the island resort of Ilha Grande, where Friday's landslide smashed
houses and a holiday lodge, killing at least 29 people. Rescue crews are continuing to search for victims among the mud and rubble at the Sankay lodge.
Another 15 people have been killed in the centre of Angra, and the total number of deaths across
Rio de Janeiro state has risen to more than 60. At least six more people died in flooding and landslides in Sao Paulo state, and another three in Minas Gerais.
The disasters have been triggered by torrential rain across the region. More than 4,000 people
have had to evacuate their homes, civil defence officials said.
(BBC NEWS)
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(Felipe Dana, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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