Until now. After a yearlong investigation by a team of climate scientists, the World Meteorological Organization, the climate agency of the United Nations, announced this fall that it was throwing out a reading of 136.4 degrees claimed by the city of Al Aziziyah on Sept. 13, 1922. It made official what anyone who has soldiered through a Death Valley summer afternoon here could attest to. There is no place hotter in the world. A 134-degree reading registered on July 10, 1913, at Greenland Ranch here is now the official world record.
And while people were not quite jumping up and down at the honor, the 134-degree reading has inspired the kind of civic pride that for most communities might come with having a winning Little League baseball team.
Promotional leaflets that still boast of Death Valley as being merely the hottest place in the U.S. are being rewritten, and resort owners say they are girding for a crush of heat-seeking visitors come next summer. There is even talk of having an official 100-year celebration of the record-setting measurement next July.
"It's about time for science, but I think we all knew it was coming," said Randy Banis, the editor of
DeathValley.com, an online newsletter promoting the valley. "You don't underestimate Death Valley. Most of us enthusiasts are proud that the extremes that we have known about at Death Valley are indeed the most harsh on earth."
Still, the designation was a momentous event among this nation's community of climatologists — or, as some of them proudly refer to themselves, "weather geeks" — the climax of a long debate set off by a blog item written by Christopher C. Burt, a meteorologist with Weather Underground. Burt cited numerous reasons to be suspicious of the Libyan claim, which he described in an interview the other day as "completely garbage."
"The more we looked at it, the more obvious it appeared to be an error," he said.
Burt brought his blog to the attention of members of the World Meteorological Organization. Randall S. Cerveny, a geology professor at Arizona State University who holds the title rapporteur of climate extremes for the World Climate Organization, appointed a committee of 13 climatologists, including himself and Burt, to resolve what can often be tricky disputes.
"There are a lot of places that do like these records," he said. "It can be a source of pride for that country or a source of contention for other countries. Politics unfortunately is going to play a role sometime in the determining of these records."
It took a year to investigate the claim — the inquiry was hampered by the revolution in Libya, which resulted in the temporary disappearance of a Libyan scientist who was central to the work. The final report found five reasons to disqualify the Libya claim, including questionable instruments, an inexperienced observer who made the reading and the fact that the reading was anomalous for that region and in the context of other temperatures reported in Libya that day.
"The WMO assessment is that the highest recorded surface temperature of 56.7 degrees C (134 degrees F) was measured on 10 July 1913" in Death Valley, the report said.
The announcement was made on Sept. 11, the same day as the attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, and thus drew little notice.
Though it is easy to forget on days when it is so hot that people dare not step out of their cars, part of the allure of Death Valley has always been — besides the staggering beauty of its canyons, mountains and sunsets — the sheer challenge of visiting it.
Burt said he had issues as well with the Death Valley claim of 134 degrees, and suspects it may be wrong. "It's anomalous, even for Death Valley," he said.
But no matter. Even if 134-Death Valley goes the way of 136.4-Libya, the temperature has most assuredly reached 129 degrees here in Furnace Creek at least three times, one of them recorded by Callaghan. And 129 is just as much a world record as 134.
"Death Valley would still win, so to speak, even if the 134 was erroneous," Burt said.
(Adam Nagourney, NYT NEWS SERVICE)
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The storm, which was blamed for at least 16 deaths farther south and west, brought plenty of wind, rain and snow to the Northeast when it blew in Wednesday night. Lights generally remained on and cars mostly stayed on the road, unlike many harder-hit places including Arkansas, where 200,000 homes and businesses lost power.
By afternoon, the precipitation had stopped in parts of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Massachusetts, though snow continued to fall in upstate New York and northern New England. Parts of snow-savvy New Hampshire expected as much as 18 inches.
The Northeast's heaviest snowfall was in northern Pennsylvania, upstate New York and inland sections of several New England states. The storm was expected to head into Canada on Friday, National Weather Service spokesman David Roth said.
While the East Coast's largest cities — New York, Philadelphia and Boston — saw mostly high winds and cold rain, other areas experienced a messy mix of rain and snow that slowed commuters and those still heading home from holiday trips. Some inbound flights were delayed in Philadelphia and New York's La-Guardia Airport, but the weather wasn't leading to delays at other major East Coast airports.
Forty-two students traveling to London and Dublin were stuck in the Nashville airport thanks to weather in the Northeast. The frustrated students, from universities in Tennessee and Kentucky, were supposed to leave Wednesday and arrive in London on Thursday.
Joe Woolley, spokesman for the Cooperative Center for Study Abroad, said he hopes he can get them there just one day late.
"It's a two-week program, so it's shortened already," he said.
On New York's Long Island, a Southwest Airlines jet bound for Tampa, Fla., veered off a taxiway and got stuck in mud Thursday morning. Officials said therewerenoinjuries to the 129 passengers and five crew members. Though the area received heavy rain overnight, Southwest spokesman Paul Flanigan said it was unclear whether that played a role.
In Pittsburgh, a flight that landed safely during the storm Wednesday night got stuck in several inches of snow on the tarmac for about two hours. The American Airlines flight arrived between 8 and 9 p.m. but then ran over a snow patch and got stuck.
Earlier, the storm system spawned tornadoes on Christmas along the Gulf Coast, startling people like Bob and Sherry Sims of Mobile, Ala., who had just finished dinner.
"We heard that very distinct sound, like a freight train," said Bob Sims, who lost electricity but was grateful that he fared better than neighbors whose roofs were peeled away and porches smashed by falling trees.
In Georgiana, Ala., an 81year-old man died Wednesday, a day after a tree fell on his home, emergency officials said.
Deaths from wind-toppled trees also were reported in Texas and Louisiana, but car crashes caused most of the fatalities. Two people were killed in Kentucky crashes, a New York man was killed after his pickup truck skidded on an icy road in northwest Pennsylvania and an Ohio teenager died after losing control of her car and smashing into an oncoming snowplow.
(Holly Ramer, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Hundreds of flights were canceled or delayed, scores of motorists got stuck on icy roads or slid into drifts, and blizzard warnings were issued amid snowy gusts of 30 mph that blanketed roads and windshields, at times causing whiteout conditions.
"The way I've been describing it is as a low-end blizzard, but that's sort of like saying a small Tyrannosaurus rex," said John Kwiatkowski, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Indianapolis.
The system, which spawned Gulf Coast region tornadoes on Christmas Day and a historic amount of snow in Arkansas, pushed through the Upper Ohio Valley and headed toward the Northeast. Forecasts called for 12 to 18 inches of snow inland from western New York to Maine starting late Wednesday and into today and tapering off into a mix of rain and snow closer to the coast, where little accumulation was expected in such cities as New York and Boston.
The storm left freezing temperatures in its aftermath, and forecasters also said parts of the Southeast from Virginia to Florida would see severe thunderstorms.
Schools on break and workers taking holiday vacations meant that many people could avoid messy commutes, but those who had to travel were implored to avoid it. Snow was blamed for scores of vehicle accidents as far east as Maryland, and about two dozen counties in Indiana and Ohio issued snow emergency travel alerts, urging people to go out on the roads only if necessary.
Some 40 vehicles got bogged down trying to make it up a slick hill in central Indiana, and four state snowplows slid off roads as snow fell at the rate of 3 inches an hour in some places.
Two passengers in a car on a sleet-slickened Arkansas highway were killed Wednesday in a head-on collision, and two people, including a 76-year-old Milwaukee woman, were killed Tuesday on Oklahoma highways. Deaths from wind-toppled trees were reported in Texas and Louisiana.
The day after a holiday wasn't expected to be particularly busy for AAA, but its Cincinnati-area branch had its busiest Wednesday of the year. By mid-afternoon, nearly 400 members had been helped with tows, jump starts and other aid, with calls still coming in, spokesman Mike Mills said.
Jennifer Miller, 58, was taking a bus Wednesday from Cincinnati to visit family in Columbus. "I wish this had come yesterday and was gone today," she said, struggling with a rolling suitcase and three smaller bags on a slushy sidewalk near the station. "I'm glad I don't have to drive in this."
Traffic crawled at 25 mph on Interstate 81 in Maryland, where authorities reported scores of accidents.
"We're going to try to go down south and get below" the storm, said Richard Power, traveling from home in Levittown, N.Y., to Kentucky with his wife, two children and their beagle, Lucky. He said they were well on their way until they hit snow in Pennsylvania, then 15-mph traffic on I-81 at Hagerstown, Md. "We're going to go as far as we can go. ... If it doesn't get better, we're going to just get a hotel."
In Arkansas, some of the nearly 200,000 people who lost power could be without it for as long as a week because of snapped poles after ice and 10 inches of snow coated power lines, said the state's largest utility, Entergy Arkansas. Gov. Mike Beebe sent out National Guard teams, and Humvees transported medical workers and patients. Snow hadn't fallen in Little Rock on Christmas since 1926, but the capital ended Tuesday with 10.3 inches of it.
(Dan Sewwell, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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As predicted, conditions were volatile throughout the day and into the night with tornado warnings still out for some parts of Alabama. The storms were blamed for two deaths, several injuries, and left homes from Louisiana to Alabama damaged.
In Mobile, Ala., a tornado or high winds damaged homes, a high school and church, and knocked down power lines and large tree limbs in an area just west of downtown around nightfall. WALA-TV's tower camera captured the image of a large funnel cloud headed toward downtown.
Rick Cauley, his wife, Ashley, and two children were hosting members of both of their families. When the sirens went off, the family headed down the block to take shelter at the athletic field house at Mobile's Murphy High School.
"As luck would have it, that's where the tornado hit," Cauley said. "The pressure dropped and the ears started popping and it got crazy for a second." They were all fine, though the school was damaged. Hours after the storm hit, officials reported no serious injuries in the southwestern Alabama city.
Meanwhile, blizzard conditions hit the nation's midsection.
Earlier in the day, winds toppled a tree onto a pickup truck in the Houston area, killing the driver. Icy roads already were blamed for a 21-vehicle pileup in Oklahoma, and the Highway Patrol there says a 28-year-old woman was killed in a crash on a snowy U.S. highway near Fairview.
The snowstorm that caused numerous accidents pushed out of Oklahoma late Tuesday, carrying with it blizzard warnings for parts of northeast Arkansas, where 10 inches of snow was forecast. Freezing rain clung to trees and utility lines in Arkansas and wind gusts up to 30 mph whipped them around, causing about 71,000 customers to lose electricity for a time.
Blizzard conditions were possible for parts of Illinois, Indiana and western Kentucky with predictions of 4 to 7 inches of snow.
An apparent tornado also caused damage in Grove Hill, about 80 miles north of Mobile.
Trees fell on a few houses in central Louisiana's Rapides Parish, but there were no injuries reported, said sheriff's Lt. Tommy Carnline.
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Armed with index-size cards, beachcombers will log water bottles, buoys, fishing gear and other possessions that might have sailed across the Pacific to the 1,100-mile shoreline.
The March 2011 disaster washed about 5 million tons of debris into the sea. Most of that sank, leaving an estimated 1.5 million tons afloat. No one knows how much debris — strewn across an area three times the size of the United States — is still adrift.
Tsunami flotsam has already touched the Pacific Northwest and Hawaii this year. The West Coast is bracing for more sightings in the coming months as seasonal winds and coastal currents tend to drive marine wreckage ashore.
Like the past winter, scientists expect the bulk of the debris to end up in Alaska, Washington state, Oregon and British Columbia. Last week, the Coast Guard spotted a massive dock that possibly came from Japan on a wilderness beach in Washington state. Given recent storm activity, Northern California could see "scattered and intermittent" episodes, said Peter Murphy, a marine debris expert at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which recently received a $5 million donation from Japan to track and remove tsunami debris.
To prepare, state coastal regulators have launched a cleanup project to document possible tsunami items that churn ashore. Working with environmental groups, volunteers will scour beaches with a checklist. It's like a typical beach cleanup, but the focus will be to locate articles from Japan.
Until now, efforts in California have been haphazard. The goal is to organize tsunami debris cleanups at least once every season stretching from the Oregon state line to the Mexican border and then post the findings online.
Debris from Asia routinely floats to the U.S. It's extremely difficult to link something back to the Japanese tsunami without a serial number, phone number or other marker.
Of the more than 1,400 tsunami debris sightings reported to NOAA, the agency only traced 17 pieces back to the event, including small fishing boats, soccer balls, a dock and a shipping container housing a Harley-Davidson motorcycle with Japanese license plates. No confirmed tsunami debris so far has reached California.
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Even as they prepare for a new normal of intense rain, historic floods and record heat waves, some transportation planners find it too politically sensitive to say aloud the source of their weather worries: climate change.
Political differences are on the minds of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, whose advice on the design and maintenance of roads and bridges is closely followed by states. The association recently changed the name of its Climate Change Steering Committee to the less controversial Sustainable Transportation, Energy Infrastructure and Climate Solutions Steering Committee.
Still, there is a recognition that the association's guidance will need to be updated to reflect the new realities of global warming. "There is a whole series of standards that are going to have to be revisited in light of the change in climate that is coming at us," said John Horsley, the association's executive director.
In the latest and most severe example, Superstorm Sandy inflicted the worst damage to the New York subway system in its 108-year history, halted Amtrak and commuter train service to the city for days, and forced cancellation of thousands of airline flights at airports in New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia.
Wild weather is taking a toll on transportation across the country.
In Washington state, "we joked we were having 100-year storms every year," said Paula Hammond, head of the state's Department of Transportation.
Last year, flooding threatened to swallow up the Omaha, Neb., airport, which sits on a bend in the Missouri River.
States and cities are trying to come to terms with what the change means to them and how they can prepare for it. Transportation engineers build highways and bridges to last 50 or even 100 years. Now they are reconsidering how to do that, or even whether they can, with so much uncertainty.
(Joan Lowy, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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While more than half of the continental U.S. has been in a drought since summer, rain storms had appeared to be easing the situation week by week since late September. But that promising run ended with Wednesday's weekly U.S. Drought Monitor report, which showed increases in the portion of the country in drought and the severity of it.
The report showed that 60.1 percent of the lower 48 states were in some form of drought as of Tuesday, up from 58.8 percent the previous week. The amount of land in extreme or exceptional drought — the two worst classifications — increased from 18.3 percent to 19.04 percent.
The Drought Monitor's map tells the story, with dark red blotches covering the center of the nation and portions of Texas and the Southeast as an indication of where conditions are the most intense. Those areas are surrounded by others in lesser stages of drought, with only the Northwest, Florida and a narrow band from New England south to Mississippi escaping.
A federal meteorologist cautioned that Wednesday's numbers shouldn't be alarming, saying that while drought usually subsides heading into winter, the Drought Monitor report merely reflects a week without rain in a large chunk of the country.
"The places that are getting precipitation, like the Pacific Northwest, are not in drought, while areas that need the rainfall to end the drought aren't getting it," added Richard Heim, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center. "I would expect the drought area to expand again" by next week since little rain is forecast in the Midwest in coming days.
He said there was no clear, scientific explanation for why the drought was lingering or estimate of how long it would last.
"What's driving the weather? It's kind of a car with no one at the steering wheel," Heim said. "None of the atmospheric indicators are really strong. A lot of them are tickling around the edges and fighting about who wants to be king of the hill, but none of them are dominant."
The biggest area of exceptional drought, the most severe of the five categories listed by the Drought Monitor, centers over the Great Plains. Virtually all of Nebraska is in a deep drought, with more than three-fourths in the worst stage.
(Jim Suhr, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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That is a significant drop from a study last year done with slightly older children, which suggested the vaccine cut the malaria risk by about half — although that is far below the protection provided from most vaccines. According to details released on Friday, the three-shot regimen reduced malaria cases by about 30 percent in infants 6 to 12 weeks old, the target age for immunization.
Dr. Jennifer Cohn, a medical coordinator at Doctors Without Borders, described the vaccine's protection levels as "unacceptably low." She was not linked to the study.
Scientists have been working for decades to develop a malaria vaccine, a complicated endeavor since the disease is caused by five different species of parasites. There hasn't been an effective vaccine against a parasite. Worldwide, there are several dozen malaria vaccine candidates being researched.
In 2006, a group of experts led by the World Health Organization said a malaria vaccine should cut the risk of severe disease and death by at least half and should last longer than one year. Malaria is spread by mosquitoes and kills more than 650,000 people a year, mostly young children and pregnant women in Africa.
Without a vaccine, officials have focused on distributing insecticide-treated bed nets, spraying homes with pesticides and ensuring access to good medicines.
In the new study, scientists found that babies who got three doses of the vaccine had about 30 percent fewer cases of malaria than those who didn't get immunized. The research included more than 6,500 infants in Africa. Experts also found the vaccine reduced the amount of severe malaria by about 26 percent, up to 14 months after the babies were immunized.
Scientists said they needed to analyze the data further to understand why the vaccine may be working differently in different regions. For example, babies born in areas with high levels of malaria might inherit some antibodies from their mothers, which could interfere with any vaccination.
"Maybe we should be thinking of a first-generation vaccine that is targeted only for certain children," said Dr. Salim Abdulla of the Ifakara Health Institute in Tanzania, one of the study investigators.
Results were presented at a conference in South Africa on Friday and released online by the New England Journal of Medicine. The study is scheduled to continue until 2014 and is being paid for by Glaxo Smith Kline and the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative.
"The results look bad now, but they will probably be worse later," said Adrian Hill of Oxford University, who is developing a competing malaria vaccine. He noted the study showed the Glaxo vaccine lost its potency after several months. Hill said the vaccine might be a hard sell, compared to other vaccines, such as those for meningitis and pneumococcal disease — which are effective and cheap.
"If it turns out to have a clear 30 percent efficacy, it is probably not worth it to implement this in Africa on a large scale," said Genton Blaise, a malaria expert at the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute in Basel, who also sits on a WHO advisory board. Eleanor Riley of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said the vaccine might be useful if used together with other strategies, like bed nets. She was involved in an earlier study of the vaccine and had hoped for better results. "We're all a bit frustrated that it has proved so hard to make a malaria vaccine," she said. "The question is how much money are the funders willing to keep throwing at it."
Glaxo first developed the vaccine in 1987 and has invested $300 million in it so far.
WHO said it couldn't comment on the incomplete results and would wait until the trial was finished before drawing any conclusions.
(Maria Cheng, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Aldo Dominguez Vasquez was born in Santa Clara and his parents live in the United States, a cousin, Julio Vasquez, said. The boy returned to Guatemala with his mother when he was 1 year old after his parents divorced. Shortly afterward, Aldo's mother returned to the United States to work and left the boy with an aunt and uncle who owned the quarry, Vasquez said on Friday.
Aldo, his uncle and aunt, six of their children and another cousin were working at the quarry when the earthquake hit Wednesday. One son survived, a 19-year-old who stayed home when the others went to the quarry so he could take care of last-minute details for receiving an accounting degree. Ivan Vasquez was the first in his family to have a professional career, and his father, who was killed, had been saving for a party to celebrate the Nov. 23 graduation.
Aldo, who according to his U.S. passport was born Dec. 27, 2000, was one of at least 52 people killed in the quake, which was Guatemala's strongest in 36 years.
He was buried Friday along with seven cousins, the oldest a 14-year-old girl, and his aunt and uncle after an all-night wake in San Cristobal Cucho, a farm town of about 15,000 inhabitants.
Relatives carried the 10 rustic wooden coffins on their shoulders from a hilltop down to a park, where hundreds of people approached them to pay their respects. From there, the coffins were taken to the cemetery while people in the procession sang "beyond the sun, beyond the sun, I have a home, a sweet home."
Ivan Vasquez hugged each of the 10 coffins, then collapsed onto the ground, crying uncontrollably.
Antonia Miranda, Aldo's teacher, said she would miss the boy's warmth.
"He would caress my hair while he talked to me," she said sobbing.
Meanwhile, residents of the mountain town of San Marcos, the most affected area in the country, huddled in the cold streets without communications or power.
President Otto Perez Molina said the powerful quake affected as many as 1.2 million people. He said about 700 people were in shelters, with most opting to stay with family or friends.
"They have no drinking water, no electricity, no communication and are in danger of experiencing more aftershocks," Perez said at a news conference. The president said there had been scores of aftershocks, some as strong as magnitude 4.9.
Damaged homes will be among the biggest problems the country will face in the coming days, Perez added.
(Sonia Perez-Diaz, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The leading edge of the system produced showers Thursday, with more rain expected early this morning. There should be a lull today, followed by another jolt of rain tonight and early Saturday.
"A lot of moist, unstable air will flow in from the ocean on Friday night," says Joe Dandrea, a weather service forecaster. "The moisture will flow up the slopes of the mountains and turn to snow as the air gets colder."
The snow level could drop to 3,000 feet by Saturday, affecting such communities as Julian, Ranchita and Pine Valley. But the heaviest snow — which will be in the eight-inch to one-foot range — will fall on the upper reaches of the mountains.
Forecasters say the wind will gust upward of 50 mph today, posing an additional problem for motorists who plan to use state Routes 78 and 79 and eastern Interstate 8. A winter storm watch will go into effect tonight and last at least until Saturday morning.
(Gary Robbins, U-T)
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The category includes herring, mackerel and sardines, which are consumed by whales, dolphins, sea lions, seabirds and larger fish such as salmon, tuna and white sea bass. Commercial boats and recreational anglers also harvest the small fish for food and bait.
"The commission recognizes the importance of forage species to the marine ecosystem off California's coast," the board policy stated, noting their value to both marine wildlife and commercial and sport fishing.
The commission called for halting new forage fisheries and banning expansion of existing ones until more information is available for "ecosystem-based management" of the small fish, including oceanographic conditions, the effects of forage fishing on predators dependent on the species, and other factors. Fish and Game officials could not be reached for comment, but the marine conservation group Oceana issued a statement supporting the policy.
"Oceana commends the precautionary precedent set today by the commission, which establishes a new direction for fisheries on forage fish by considering how much to leave in the ocean to support the ecological, economic and social values forage fish provide beyond their value in the fishing net," the organization said.
(Deborah Sullivan Brennan, U-T)
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So why, he wondered, was it taking so long to get electricity? A week and a half after Superstorm Sandy slammed the coast and inflicted tens of billions of dollars in damage, hundreds of thousands of customers in New York and New Jersey are waiting for the electricity to come back on, and lots of cold and tired people are losing patience. Some are demanding investigations of utilities they say aren't working fast enough.
An angry New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo joined the calls for an investigation Thursday, ripping the utilities as unprepared and badly managed. "Privately I have used language my daughters couldn't hear," he fumed. He called the delay in getting back power "unacceptable."
The power companies have said they're dealing with damage unprecedented in its scope and doing the best they can. At the peak, more than 8.5 million homes and businesses across 21 states lost power. As of Thursday, that was down to about 750,000, almost entirely in New York and New Jersey. And that is after a nor'easter overnight knocked out power to more than 200,000 customers in New York and New Jersey, erasing some of the progress made by utility crews.
The mounting criticism came as New York City and Long Island followed New Jersey's lead and announced odd-even gasoline rationing to deal with fuel shortages and long lines at gas stations; the Federal Emergency Management Agency started bringing mobile homes into the region. Cuomo said the storm could cost New York State alone $33 billion and New Jersey officials estimated the damage at $50 billion. The storm killed more than 100 people in 10 states.
NB: ... the storm also killed 71 people in the Caribbean.
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The quake, which hit at 10:35 a.m. in the midst of the work day, caused terror over an unusually wide area, with damage reported in all but one of Guatemala's 22 states and shaking felt as far away as Mexico City, 600 miles to the northwest. San Marcos, where more than 30 homes collapsed, bore the brunt of the temblor's fury. More than 300 people, including firefighters, policemen and villagers, tried to dig through a half ton of sand at a quarry in the commercial center of town in a desperate attempt to rescue seven people believed buried alive. Among those under the sand was a 6-year-old boy who had accompanied his grandfather to work.
"I want to see Giovanni! I want to see Giovanni!" the boy's mother, 42-year-old Francisca Ramirez, frantically cried. "He's not dead. Get him out." She said the boy's father had emigrated to the U.S. and there was no way to reach him.
President Otto Perez Molina flew to San Marcos to view the damage. He said the death toll stood at 39, most of it in this lush mountainous region of 50,000 indigenous farmers and ranchers, many belonging to the Mam ethnic group.
"One thing is to hear about what happened and another thing entirely is to see it," Perez said. "As a Guatemalan I feel sad ... to see mothers crying for their lost children."
The president said the government would pay for the funerals of all victims in the poor region.
Many of the colorful adobe buildings in the 10-square-mile center of San Marcos were either cracked or reduced to rubble.
NB: More news at a link to the
New York Times news piece.
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Under ordinary circumstances, a storm of this sort wouldn't be a big deal, but large swathes of the landscape were an open wound, with the electrical system highly fragile and many of Sandy's victims mucking out homes and cars and shivering in the deepening cold. Exactly as authorities feared, the nor'easter brought down tree limbs and electrical wires, and utilities in New York and New Jersey reported that some customers who lost power because of Sandy lost it again as a result of the nor'easter.
"I know everyone's patience is wearing thin," said John Miksad, senior vice president of electric operations at Consolidated Edison, the chief utility in New York City.
As the nor'easter closed in, thousands of people in low-lying neighborhoods staggered by the superstorm just over a week ago were urged to clear out. Authorities warned that rain and 60 mph gusts in the evening and overnight could topple trees wrenched loose by Sandy and erase some of the hard-won progress made in restoring power to millions of customers.
"I am waiting for the locusts and pestilence next," New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said. "We may take a setback in the next 24 hours."
Ahead of the storm, public works crews in New Jersey built up dunes to protect the stripped and battered coast, and new evacuations were ordered in a number of communities emptied by Sandy. New shelters opened.
In New York City, police went to low-lying neighborhoods with loudspeakers, urging residents to leave. But Mayor Michael Bloomberg didn't issue mandatory evacuations, and many people stayed behind, some because they feared looting, others because they figured whatever happens couldn’t be any worse than what they have gone through.
"We're petrified," said James Alexander, a resident of the hard-hit Rockaways section of Queens. "It's like a sequel to a horror movie."
All construction in New York City was halted — a precaution that needed no explanation after a crane collapsed last week in Sandy's high winds and dangled menacingly over the streets of Manhattan. Parks were closed because of the danger of falling trees. A section of the Long Island Expressway was closed in both directions because of icy conditions.
Airlines canceled at least 1,300 U.S. flights in and out of the New York metropolitan area, causing a new round of disruptions that rippled across the country.
NB: More news at a link to the
New York Times news piece.
(Colleen Long, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The Pacific Fishery Management Council, which sets catch limits for ocean fish, voted Sunday to allow fishing operations to harvest 66,495 metric tons — about 73,000 tons — of sardines in 2013.
That's a cut from the 109,409 metric tons permitted in 2012, but more than the 50,526 metric tons caught in 2011. And it's more than the sardine population — which forms a crucial part of the ocean food web — can support, said Geoff Shester, California program director for the marine conservation organization Oceana.
The amount of fish declined by 33 percent over the past year, and has been in a continual downward spiral for six years, dropping from more than 1 million estimated metric tons in 2007 to 435,351 last year.
In addition to their value to commercial fishing operations, sardines are a vital food source for larger fish, whales and other animals.
"We're worried that we're just not learning from our mistakes, and history is repeating itself," Shester said. "This fishery has collapsed before, under very similar circumstances, and here we are again."
However, Kerry Griffin, who supervises sardines and other oceangoing fish for the council, said sardines exhibit dramatic natural population swings, and the council sets catch levels accordingly, allowing fishing operations to take no more than 8 percent to 12 percent of the total amount of fish.
The council drops catch levels in years when sardines decline, and cuts off fishing entirely if their numbers fall below a set threshold, he said.
"While there is much debate about whether the sardine population is collapsing or not, it remains true that our current management has built-in brakes on the fishery, if/when the population does decline," Griffin said.
Shester cited a February publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which compared current cold-water conditions and lower sardine counts to the collapse of the fishery that occurred in the middle of the last century.
Griffin however, pointed to a rebuttal letter published in the same journal in May, stating that fishing regulations have tightened since the "Cannery Row" era, when fisheries were "virtually unregulated" in California and elsewhere.
Although Shester described the council's catch formula as overly aggressive, Griffin said it's purposely conservative and uses the lowest estimate of sardine populations to calculate the permitted catch. "So not only do we have a conservative management scenario, but we purposely underestimate how many are out there," Shester said.
NB: Fisheries somewhat unpredictable. In the last few years, one or several wild salmon fisheries have collapsed to the point that fishing had to cease temporarily. One incident in 2009 was so severe that Grizzly bears were starving in British Columbia and bear hunting was canceled. A year later, Sockeye salmon were plentiful.
Related links to Earth Watch entries:
(Deborah Sullivan Brennan, U-T)
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India has become the focal point for a mosquito-borne plague that is sweeping the globe. Reported in a handful of countries in the 1950s, dengue is now endemic in half the world’s nations.
"The global dengue problem is far worse than most people know, and it keeps getting worse," said Raman Velayudhan, the World Health Organization's lead dengue coordinator.
The tropical disease, though life-threatening for a tiny fraction of those infected, can be extremely painful for many who catch it. Growing numbers of Western tourists are returning from warm weather vacations with the disease, and it’s pierced the shores of the United States and Europe. Last month, health officials in Miami announced a case of locally acquired dengue infection.
In India's capital, hospitals are overrun and feverish patients are sharing beds and languishing in hallways. At Kalawati Saran Hospital, a pediatric facility, a large crowd of relatives lay on mats and blankets outside the hospital entrance recently.
Officials say 30,002 people in India had been sickened with dengue fever through October, a 59 percent jump from the 18,860 recorded in 2011. But the real number of Indians who get dengue fever annually is in the millions, several experts said.
"I'd conservatively estimate that there are 37 million dengue infections occurring every year in India, and maybe 227,500 hospitalizations," said Scott Halstead, a tropical disease expert.
A senior Indian government health official, who agreed to speak about the matter only on the condition of anonymity, acknowledged that official figures represent a mere sliver of dengue's toll. The government only counts cases of dengue that come from public hospitals and have been confirmed by laboratories, the official said. Such a census, "which was deliberated at the highest levels," is a small subset that is nonetheless informative and comparable from one year to the next, he said.
"There is no denying that the actual number of cases would be much, much higher," the official said. "Our interest has not been to arrive at an exact figure."
The problem with that policy, said Manish Kakkar, a specialist at the Public Health Foundation of India, is that India's "massive underreporting of cases" has contributed to the disease's spread. Experts from around the world said that India's failure to construct an adequate dengue surveillance system has impeded awareness of the illness's vast reach, discouraged efforts to clean up the sources of the disease and slowed the search for a vaccine.
"When you look at the number of reported cases India has, it's a joke," said Harold Margolis, chief of the dengue branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
Neighboring Sri Lanka, for instance, reported nearly three times as many dengue cases as India through August, according to WHO, even though India's population is 60 times larger.
Part of India's problem is that some officials view reports of dengue infections as politically damaging. A central piece of evidence for those who contend that India suffers hundreds of times more dengue cases than the government acknowledges is a recent and as yet unpublished study of dengue infections in West Bengal that found about the same presence of dengue as in Thailand, where almost every child is infected by dengue at least once before adulthood.
"I would say that anybody over the age of 20 in India has been infected with dengue," said Timothy Endy, chief of infectious disease at Upstate Medical University in Syracuse.
For those who arrive in India as adults, "you have a reasonable expectation of getting dengue after a few months," said Joseph Vinetz, a professor of medicine at the University of California San Diego. "If you stay for a longer period, it's a certainty."
Twenty years ago, 1 of every 50 tourists who returned from the tropics with fever was infected by dengue; now, it is 1 in 6.
(Gardiner Harris, NYT NEWS SERVICE)
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In San Diego, we don't get hurricanes. But there is always the threat of earthquakes. They can come at any time without notice. If a large one happened during the night, it could leave thousands of people not knowing whether they should report to work the next day.
So what does California labor law say about reporting to work in the face of a natural disaster? What if you haven't heard from your boss and you show up to work, only to find out the business is closed?
Answer: Under regular conditions, if an hourly worker shows up — fit to work — for a scheduled shift only to be turned away, state law says the employer must still pay the worker for half of the scheduled hours, at a minimum of two hours but no more than four hours.
However, there is an exception for a natural disaster, said Dan Eaton, an employment attorney with San Diego firm Seltzer Caplan McMahon Vitek. The state's Industrial Welfare Commission says employers don't have to pay you for showing up "When the interruption of work is caused by an Act of God or other cause not within the employer's control, for example, an earthquake." The exception also applies when public authorities recommend a workplace close down.
"So the bottom line is that the intrepid employee who shows up for work only to find his employer incapable of opening due to an earthquake returns home empty-handed," Eaton said.
Now let's consider the opposite of that fearless worker. What if you decide not to brave the elements and report to work because you don't want to risk the conditions? Can you get fired for that? "The answer at least in theory is yes," Eaton said. "That is because of the nature of at-will employee, which allows an employer to terminate an employee for any reason that does not offend a fundamental public policy, such as the laws prohibiting discrimination or the law allowing a worker to stay home to care for a sick close relative."
Eaton said the best way to avoid these issues should an earthquake occur is for employers and employees to remain in touch. "No one should want anyone needlessly to be inconvenienced in the face of a natural disaster or needlessly to put their safety or their jobs at risk," he said. "Employees and employers can usually use the sophisticated communications systems at our disposal to avoid the law getting involved when mother nature strikes a blow."
(Jonathan Horn, U-T)
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The National Weather Service says the winds will intensify today, lifting the high to 88 or 89 degrees in some coastal areas. The same phenomenon will drop the relative humidity below 15 percent inland. Winds are expected to gust 30 mph or higher in the region's valleys and foothills. "You won't feel the winds much at the surface, but they'll be blowing out of the east and they'll get warmer as they travel downslope," said Joe Dandrea, a weather service forecaster. "San Diego won't break the record high for Monday of 92 degrees, but it could get close."
The offshore winds also will send temperatures into the 70s and 80s elsewhere along the coast, and into the low 90s across some valleys and foothills.
The unseasonably warm weather will last through Tuesday — Election Day — then temperatures will become progressively cooler through the rest of the week. A low pressure system out of the Arctic will drop south, mostly through the interior of California, and bring cold weather this weekend. Saturday's high is only expected to reach 63 in San Diego. The system, known as an "inside slider," is not expected to produce heavy rain.
"This isn't unusual," Dandrea says. "Winds blow out of the east, warming things up, then they turn onshore, cooling things off. The difference in the daily high can change 20-30 degrees."
The offshore winds are stirring concern. San Diego's Lindbergh Field has recorded 4.16 inches of rain since Jan. 1. That's almost four inches below normal, and the shortfall in some East County communities is even larger.
(Gary Robbins, U-T)
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"We heard screaming and crying in the dark," 55year-old Thomas Buell recalled as he explained the midnight march through 4-foot-high floodwaters in Belle Harbor by dozens of residents to reach a yacht club on higher ground. "It was a nightmare."
People here know disaster.
On these few blocks of beach community, the Sept. 11 attacks hit hard, followed weeks later by a plane crash that killed 265 people and now Superstorm Sandy, which took lives and touched off fires that destroyed about two dozen homes. But the rescues are the talk of the community, even as residents continue their cleanup, stacking destroyed belongings up to 20 feet high outside their ruined homes.
The heroism included Tommy Woods, who put his 82-year-old mother on a surfboard and ferried her several blocks to his brother's home through the chilly waters.
"He did a good job," Charlie Moran said, speaking quietly and reverently of his nephew, as he stood near the charred wood and concrete that was all that remained of the mostly two-story homes. A blackened firefighter statuette stood guard in front of one home's skeletal remains.
After rescuing his mother and 15-year-old son with the surfboard, Woods returned to the street where homes were burning to the ground to help a neighbor's mother get out by putting her in a kayak and walking her to safety, said Moran, a retired firefighter.
Several men in the burning homes went door-to-door to get everyone out.
Down the street, unaware of Woods' heroics, Buell and his neighbor Troy Bradwisch joined three other men wearing waist-high fisherman's waders to ferry people through the rolling waters to the Belle Harbor Yacht Club. Dozens of others, including an 86-year-old man, formed a human chain and trudged through the water, clutching neighbors to make sure no one was lost.
"There was a lot of current, but people were close together, holding on to each other," Buell said.
"Up the block it was like the apocalypse," he said, explaining why no one protested the move to the yacht club, a social club built high enough to remain dry even after the waters of the ocean met Jamaica Bay. He said the wind-driven storm and subsequent flood at high tide combined with a fire that produced grapefruit-size flaming flakes and clouds of smoke, distorting perceptions and making it impossible to know how near the fire was. Fire trucks couldn't immediately get through.
Those who were walked through the swirling waters in two kayaks, one 9 feet long and the other 15.5 feet, included Bradwisch's wife and children, a woman and her newborn, a pregnant woman and an elderly couple.
"The fire just kept spreading because of the wind," he said. "It was like being in front of a flame thrower. The most harrowing part of it was hearing the screams in the dark."
Bradwisch, a former Navy nurse who now works at a federal prison in Brooklyn, said everyone kept calm during the evacuation "because we had kids."
Once at the yacht club, 40 to 50 of them waited out the storm until morning by the light of lanterns, not knowing if they would have homes when they returned.
(Larry Neumeister, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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With overnight temperatures sinking into the 30s and hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses still without electricity six days after Sandy howled through, people slept in layers of clothes, and New York City officials handed out blankets and urged victims to go to overnight shelters or daytime warming centers.
At the same time, government leaders began to grapple with a daunting longer-term problem: where to find housing for the tens of thousands of people whose homes could be uninhabitable for weeks or months because of a combination of storm damage and cold weather.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg said 30,000 to 40,000 New Yorkers may need to be relocated — a monumental task in a city where housing is scarce and expensive — though he said that number will probably drop to 20,000 within a couple of weeks as power is restored in more places.
In a heavily flooded Staten Island neighborhood, Sara Zavala spent the night under two blankets and layers of clothing because the power was out. She had a propane heater but turned it on for only a couple of hours in the morning. She did not want to sleep with it running at night.
"When I woke up, I was like, 'It's freezing.' And I thought, 'This can't go on too much longer,'" said Zavala, a nursing-home admissions coordinator.
Nearly a week after Sandy slammed into the New Jersey coastline in an assault that killed more than 100 people in 10 states, gasoline shortages persisted across the region, though odd-even rationing got under way in northern New Jersey in an echo of the gas crisis of the 1970s. Nearly 1 million homes and businesses were still without power in New Jersey, and about 650,000 in New York City, its northern suburbs and Long Island.
With more subways running and most city schools reopening today, large swaths of the city were getting back to something resembling normal. But the week could bring new challenges, namely an Election Day without power in hundreds of polling places, and a nor'easter expected to hit by Wednesday, with the potential for 55 mph gusts and more beach erosion, flooding and rain.
"Prepare for more outages," said National Weather Service meteorologist Joe Pollina. "Stay indoors. Stock up again."
"Well, the first storm flooded me out, and my landlord tells me there's a big crack in the ceiling, so I guess there's a chance this storm could do more damage," John Lewis said at a shelter in New Rochelle, N.Y. "I was hoping to get back in there sooner rather than later, but it doesn't look good."
Churchgoers packed the pews Sunday in parkas, scarves and boots and looked for solace in faith.
At the chilly Church of St. Rose in Belmar, N.J., its streets still slippery with foul-smelling mud, Roman Catholic Bishop David O’Connell said he had no good answer for why God would allow such destruction. But he assured parishioners: "There's more good, and there's more joy, and there's more happiness in life than there is the opposite. And it will be back."
In the heart of the Staten Island disaster zone, the Rev. Steve Martino of Movement Church headed a volunteer effort that had scores of people delivering supplies in grocery carts and cleaning out ruined homes. Around midday, the work stopped, and volunteer and victim alike bowed their heads in prayer.
In the crowd was Stacie Piacentino. After a singularly difficult week, she said, "it's good to feel God again."
After the abrupt cancellation of Sunday's New York City Marathon, some of those who had been planning to run the 26.2-mile race through the city streets instead volunteered their time, handing out toothbrushes, batteries, sweatshirts and other supplies on Staten Island.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo said New York state is facing "a massive, massive housing problem" for those whose neighborhoods or buildings are in such bad shape that they won't have power for weeks or months.
"I don't know that anybody has ever taken this number of people and found housing for them overnight," Bloomberg said. "We don't have a lot of empty housing in this city. We're not going to let anybody go sleeping in the streets. ... But it's a challenge, and we're working on it."
(Jennifer Peltz & Michael Hill, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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There were no immediate reports of injuries or damage, and no tsunami warnings were issued.
NB: The magnitude-6.1 quake occurred on 3 Nov 2:17 am local time (2 Nov 18:17 UTC) 5 km north of Burgos, Philippines, in a subduction zone where the Philippine Sea plate to the east subjects beneath the Sunda plate (on which most of the the Philippine island are located) to the west. See
wikipedia.
(U-T)
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The U.S. Geological Survey said the powerful temblor hit the Queen Charlotte Islands just after 8 p.m. Saturday at a depth of about 3 miles and was centered 96 miles south of Masset, British Columbia. It was felt across a wide area in British Columbia, both on its Pacific islands and on the mainland.
"It looks like the damage and the risk are at a very low level," said Shirley Bond, British Columbia's minister responsible for emergency management. "We're certainly grateful."
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center lifted its tsunami advisory for Hawaii Sunday morning just before 4 a.m. local time, three hours after downgrading from a warning and less than six hours after the waves first hit the islands. Meanwhile, the National Weather Service canceled tsunami advisories for Canada, Alaska, Washington, Oregon and California.
Tsunami Warning Center officials said wave heights were diminishing in Hawaii, though swimmers and boaters should be careful of strong or unusual currents. The biggest waves - about 5 feet high - appeared to hit Maui.
There were no immediate reports of damage, though one person died in a fatal crash near a road that was closed because of the threat near Oahu's north shore.
Hawaii Gov. Neil Abercrombie said the state was lucky to avoid more severe surges.
"We're very, very grateful that we can go home tonight counting our blessings," Abercrombie said.
Dennis Sinnott of the Canadian Institute of Ocean Science said a 27-inch wave was recorded off Langara Island on the northeast tip of Haida Gwaii. The islands are home to about 5,000 people, many of them members of the Haida aboriginal group. Another 21-inch wave hit Winter Harbour on the northeast coast of Vancouver Island.
Canadas largest earthquake since 1700 was an 8.1-magnitude quake on August 22, 1949, off the coast of British Columbia.
(Jeremy Hainsworth, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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It appears that the quake occurred on the San Jacinto fault, part of which cuts through San Diego County. The quake was most strongly felt locally in Escondido, Fallbrook, Oceanside and Valley Center. Shaking also was reported in Bonsall, Borrego Springs, Encinitas, Julian, Lakeside, La Mesa, Pauma Valley, Pine Valley, San Marcos, Santee, Vista and Warner Springs.
Sunday's quake began 11 miles deep, which is slightly deeper than most quakes of this size in Southern California.
"That's a common-size quake for the San Jacinto," said Tom Rockwell, a seismologist at San Diego State University.
But scientists closely monitor the fault because it has produced many notable shakers. The 130-mile system appears to have caused the 6.6 Superstition Hills quake in 1987, and a 5.4 quake in 2010 that was an aftershock of the 7.2 Easter Sunday quake, which occurred in northern Baja California of that same year.
(Gary Robbins, U-T)
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Evacuations: 370,000 people in New York City ordered to leave
Travel: Transit systems close, thousands of flights canceled
'Life-threatening' flooding possible when Sandy hits; storm surges could reach 11 feet in New York Harbor
NEW YORK - Hurricane Sandy, a monster of a storm that forecasters said would bring "life-threatening" flooding, churned toward the most heavily populated corridor in the nation on Sunday, prompting widespread evacuations and the shutdown of New York City's transit system.
Officials warned that the hurricane, pushing north from the Caribbean after leaving more than 60 people dead in its wake, could disrupt life in the Northeast for days. Hurricane Sandy is on a collision course with two other weather systems that could turn it into one of the most fearsome storms on record in the United States. Forecasters said the hurricane could blow ashore tonight or early Tuesday along the New Jersey coast, then cut across into Pennsylvania and travel up through New York State on Wednesday.
The National Hurricane Center reported that the storm had sustained winds of almost 75 mph. Forecasters said the hurricane was a strikingly powerful storm that could reach far inland. Hurricane-force winds from the storm stretched 175 miles from the center, an unusually wide span, and tropical storm winds extended outward 520 miles.
The hurricane center said through the day on Sunday that Hurricane Sandy was "expected to bring life-threatening storm surge flooding to the mid-Atlantic Coast, including Long Island Sound and New York Harbor."
"We're going to have a lot of impact, starting with the storm surge," said Craig Fugate, the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. "Think, 'Big.' " President Barack Obama met with officials at FEMA headquarters in Washington on Sunday and spoke on a conference call with governors and mayors in a region from North Carolina to New England and west to Ohio.
"At this stage, everybody is confident that the staging process, the prepositioning of resources, commodities, equipment that are going to be needed to respond to this storm, are in place," Obama said afterward. "We don't yet know where it's going to hit, where we're going to see the biggest impacts. And that's exactly why it's so important for us to respond big and respond fast as local information starts coming in."
Airlines canceled more than 7,200 flights and Amtrak began suspending train service across the Northeast. Philadelphia, Washington and Baltimore moved to shut down their subways, buses and trains and said schools would be closed today. Boston also called off school. And all nonessential government offices closed in the nation's capital.
As rain from the leading edges of the monster hurricane began to fall over the Northeast, hundreds of thousands of people from Maryland to Connecticut were ordered to evacuate low-lying coastal areas including in Atlantic City, N.J., where the city's 12 casinos were forced to shut down for only the fourth time ever.
New York City went into emergency mode on Sunday, ordering the evacuations of more than 370,000 people in low-lying communities from Coney Island in Brooklyn to Battery Park City in Manhattan and giving 1.1 million school children a day off today. The city opened evacuation shelters at 76 public schools.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg warned: "If you don't evacuate, you are not only endangering your life, you are also endangering the lives of the first responders who are going in to rescue you. This is a serious and dangerous storm."
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was more blunt: "Don't be stupid. Get out." Louis Uccellini, environmental prediction chief for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told The Associated Press that given Sandy's east-to-west track into New Jersey, the worst of the storm surge could be just to the north, in New York City, on Long Island and in northern New Jersey.
Forecasters said that because of giant waves and high tides made worse by a full moon, the metropolitan area of about 20 million people could get hit with an 11-foot wall of water.
"This is the worst-case scenario," Uccellini said.
The storm surge has the potential to swamp parts of lower Manhattan, flood subway tunnels and cripple the network of electrical and communications lines that are vital to the nation's financial center.
The New York Stock Exchange, which initially said its trading floor would be open today, decided to close the floor and handle trading electronically.
The closing was the first caused by bad weather since Hurricane Gloria in 1985, although the opening bell has been delayed a number of times - once during a blizzard in January 1996 - and the exchange was closed for three days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The Nasdaq exchange, which has long relied on electronic trading, said it would open as usual today.
Officials also postponed today's reopening of the Statue of Liberty, which had been closed for a year for $30 million in renovations.
In beachfront towns from North Carolina to New Jersey, the surf was spitting, and crews were rushing to build sand walls in places where the beaches had been rebuilt after 2011, when many places were hit by what was still Hurricane Irene.
In Brooklyn, many residents along the streets closest to New York Harbor were in their basements checking sump pumps.
Gino Vitale, a builder and landlord there, was delivering sandbags piled high in the back of his white Ford pickup truck to tenants along Conover Street, a block from New York Bay.
"We dodged most of it with Irene," he said, referring to the storm that flooded basements in Red Hook but not much else. "I'm hoping we can do that again."
For the most part, residents appeared to follow officials' advice to stock up on bottled water, canned food and flashlights — so much so that stores ran low on batteries.
In a flood-prone neighborhood in Philadelphia, Michael Dornblum did something he did not do during Tropical Storm Irene or earlier storms that brought high water — he put 80-pound sandbags outside his family's furniture store. In the past, he has lined them up only inside.
Despite the dire warnings, some residents in the storm's path were refusing to budge.
Jonas Clark of Manchester Township, N.J. — right in the area where Sandy was projected to come ashore — stood outside a convenience store, calmly sipping a coffee and wondering why people were working themselves "into a tizzy." "I've seen a lot of major storms in my time, and there's nothing you can do but take reasonable precautions and ride out things the best you can," said Clark, 73. "Nature's going to what it's going to do. It's great that there's so much information out there about what you can do to protect yourself and your home, but it all boils down basically to 'use your common sense.' "
In New Jersey, Denise Faulkner and her boyfriend showed up at the Atlantic City Convention Center with her 7-month-old daughter and two sons, ages 3 and 12, thinking there was a shelter there. She was dismayed to learn that it was just a gathering point for buses to somewhere else. Last year, they were out of their home for two days because of Hurricane Irene.
"I'm real overwhelmed," she said as baby Zahiriah, wrapped in a pink blanket with embroidered elephants, slept in a car seat. "We're at it again. Last year we had to do it. This year we have to do it. And you have to be around all sorts of people — strangers. It's a bit much."
Before leaving their home in Atlantic City, John and Robshima Williams of packed their kids' Halloween costumes so they could go bunk-to-bunk trick-or-treating at a shelter. Her 8-year-old twins are going as the Grim Reaper and a zombie, while her 6-year-old plans to dress as a witch.
"We're just trying to make a bad situation good," the mother said. "We're going to make it fun no matter where we are."
(NYT NEWS SERVICE & ASSOCIATED PRESS)
UNION TRIBUNE BOX 1: WINDS ARE STRONG, BUT VERY DIFFERENT - National Weather Service forecaster cites distinctions between Santa Anas, Sandy
Some of the winds generated by Hurricane Sandy are in the 40 mph to 60 mph range, roughly the same speed as the Santa Anas that whipped inland San Diego County last Thursday and Friday. Are the two weather systems alike?
Not at all, says Phil Gonsalves, a forecaster at the National Weather Service in Rancho Bernardo. Here are edited versions of answers Golsalves provided on Sunday afternoon:
Q:What’s the basic difference between the Santa Ana winds and Hurricane Sandy?
A:The Santa Anas are usually dry winds that blow offshore, from the desert toward the sea. At times, the flow can be moist. But it is usually dry. A hurricane like Sandy moves from the ocean toward land, and it gains power by absorbing warm moisture.
There's also a big difference in where these systems happen. Last week's Santa Anas were blowing out of inland canyons in areas that don't have big populations. Sandy is expected to come ashore in areas that are densely populated.
In addition, the Santa Anas often smooth the face of incoming waves. Hurricanes do the opposite, roiling the water.
Q:Are Santa Ana winds shorter-lived than tropical events?
A:Not necessarily. There are lots of tropical cyclones that develop quickly, then die right away. You don't hear much about those. The bigger events last longer. But there's still a very fundamental difference between these two systems: The Santa Anas are dry, and the tropical storms are wet.
(Gary Robbins, U-T)
UNION TRIBUNE BOX 2: The making of a superstore
Five reasons why Hurricane Sandy is set to be a superstorm:
Both candidates were loath to forfeit face time with voters in battleground states like Virginia that are likely to be afflicted when Hurricane Sandy, a winter storm and a cold front collide to form a freak hybrid storm.
"The storm will throw havoc into the race," said Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va.
Before leaving Washington for Florida Sunday — a day early to beat the storm — Obama got an update from disaster relief officials before speaking by phone to affected governors and mayors.
"Anything they need, we will be there," Obama said. "And we are going to cut through red tape. We are not going to get bogged down with a lot of rules."
Romney nixed three stops in up-for-grabs Virginia on Sunday, opting instead to campaign with running mate Paul Ryan in Ohio before heading today to Wisconsin.
"I know that right now some people in the country are a little nervous about a storm about to hit the coast, and our thoughts and prayers are with people who will find themselves in harm's way," Romney told several hundred supporters crowded into a field house at the University of Findlay, the second of three Sunday rallies.
An opportunity for Obama to demonstrate steady leadership in the face of crisis was offset by the risk that the federal government, as in past emergencies, could be faulted for an ineffective response, with the president left to take the fall.
"My first priority has to be making sure that everything is in place" to help those affected by the storm, Obama told campaign workers Sunday in Orlando. He told the volunteers they would have to "carry the ball" while he was off the campaign trail.
Obama will hold a rally in Orlando today with former President Bill Clinton, but he canceled campaign stops in Virginia and Ohio today and in Colorado on Tuesday. He planned to return to Ohio on Wednesday with stops in Cincinnati and Akron, followed by a Thursday swing through Springfield, Ohio, Boulder, Colo., and Las Vegas.
Romney's campaign confirmed Sunday that he would not travel to New Hampshire on Tuesday as planned. The campaign already canceled an event today in New Hampshire featuring Romney's wife, Ann. Advisers say further travel changes are likely as they monitor the storm's progress.
Vice President Joe Biden canceled an event today in New Hampshire. "The last thing the president and I want to do is get in the way of anything. The most important thing is health and safety," Biden said.
Ryan planned to leave Ohio at midday for three stops in Florida. His Tuesday schedule, however, shifted him to stops in Colorado instead of Virginia.
The prospect that bad weather could hinder early voting and get-out-the-vote efforts is vexing to both Obama and Romney.
"Obviously, we want unfettered access to the polls, because we think the more people that come out, the better we're going to do," said David Axelrod, a top adviser to Obama's campaign. "To the extent that it makes it harder, that's a source of concern."
Romney senior adviser Kevin Madden said that plans could change depending on the severity of the storm and that "our top priority is the safety and security" of those who may be in harm's way.
"We'll have to monitor the storm in case we need to make any adjustments," he said. "But it's hard to predict right now."
In Virginia, one of the most competitive states in the race, election officials eased absentee voting requirements for those affected by the storm.
(Josh Lederman & Steve Peoples, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The looming gap in satellite coverage, which some experts view as almost certain to occur within a few years, could result in shaky forecasts about storms such as Hurricane Sandy, which is expected to hit the East Coast early this week.
The endangered satellites fly pole-to-pole orbits and cross the equator in the afternoon, scanning the entire planet one strip at a time. Along with orbiters on other timetables, they're among the most effective tools used to pin down the paths of major storms about five days ahead.
All last week, forecasters have been relying on such satellites for almost all of the data needed to narrow down what were at first widely divergent computer models of what Hurricane Sandy would do next: explode against the coast, or veer away into the open ocean?
Right on schedule, the five-day models began to agree on the likeliest answer. By Friday afternoon, the storm's center was predicted to approach Delaware on Monday and Tuesday, with powerful winds, torrential rains and dangerous tides ranging over hundreds of miles.
New York and other states declared emergencies; the Navy ordered ships to sea to avoid damage. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York City warned that no matter where or when the storm's center actually landed, the city would not escape its effects. And from the Carolinas to New England, public safety officials were urgently advising tens of millions of residents to prepare for the worst, including the possibility of historic flooding, power failures and snow.
Experiments show that without this kind of satellite data, forecasters would have underestimated by half the huge blizzard that hit Washington in 2010.
"We cannot afford to lose any enhancement that allows us to accurately forecast any weather event coming our way," said Craig J. Craft, commissioner of emergency management for Nassau County, Long Island, where the great hurricane of 1938 killed hundreds.
On Thursday, Craft was seeking more precise forecasts for Sandy and gearing up for possible evacuations of hospitals and nursing homes, as were ordered before Tropical Storm Irene last year. "Without accurate forecasts, it is hard to know when to pull that trigger," he said.
Experts have grown increasingly alarmed in the past two years because the existing polar satellites are nearing or beyond their life expectancies, and the launch of the next replacement, known as JPSS-1, has slipped to 2017, probably too late to avoid a coverage gap of at least a year.
Prodded by lawmakers and auditors, the satellite program's managers are just beginning to think through alternatives when the gap occurs, but these aren't likely to avoid it.
This summer, three independent reviews of the $13 billion program — by the Commerce Department inspector general, the Government Accountability Office and a team of outside experts — each questioned the cost estimates for the program, criticized the managers for not pinning down the designs and called for urgent remedies. The project is run by the Commerce Department's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, along with NASA.
The outside review team, led by A. Thomas Young, an aerospace industry leader, called the management of the program "dysfunctional."
In response, top Commerce and NOAA officials Sept. 18 ordered what they called an urgent restructuring — the latest overhaul of the troubled program. They streamlined the management, said they would fill key vacancies quickly and demanded immediate reports on how the agency planned to cope with the gap.
They have moved quickly to nail down the specific designs of the JPSS-1's components, many of them partly built. And they promised to quickly complete an independent cost estimate to verify the program's budget. Ciaran Clayton, NOAA's communications director, said in a statement that the agency's top priority was to provide timely, accurate forecasts to protect the public, and that it would continue to develop and update plans to cover any potential gap.
(John H. Cushman Jr., NYT NEWS SERVICE)
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"We're looking at impact of greater than 50 to 60 million people," said Louis Uccellini, head of environmental prediction for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. As Hurricane Sandy barreled north from the Caribbean — where it left nearly five dozen dead — to meet two other powerful winter storms, experts said it didn't matter how strong the storm was when it hit land: The rare hybrid storm that follows will cause havoc over 800 miles from the East Coast to the Great Lakes.
"This is not a coastal threat alone," said Craig Fugate, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. "This is a very large area."
New Jersey was set to close its casinos this weekend, New York's governor was considering shutting down the subways to avoid flooding and half a dozen states warned residents to prepare for several days of lost power.
Sandy weakened briefly to a tropical storm early Saturday but was soon back up to Category 1 strength, packing 75 mph winds about 335 miles southeast of Charleston, S.C., as of 5 p.m. Experts said the storm was most likely to hit the southern New Jersey coastline by late Monday or early Tuesday.
Governors from North Carolina, where heavy rain was expected today, to Connecticut declared states of emergency. Delaware ordered mandatory evacuations for coastal communities by 8 p.m. Saturday.
New Jersey's Chris Christie, who was widely criticized for not interrupting a family vacation in Florida while a snowstorm pummeled the state in 2010, broke off campaigning for Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney in North Carolina Friday to return home.
"I can be as cynical as anyone," the pugnacious chief executive said in a bit of understatement Saturday. "But when the storm comes, if it's as bad as they're predicting, you're going to wish you weren't as cynical as you otherwise might have been."
The storm forced the presidential campaign to juggle schedules. Romney scrapped plans to campaign today in the swing state of Virginia and switched his schedule for the day to Ohio. First lady Michelle Obama canceled an appearance in New Hampshire for Tuesday, and President Barack Obama moved a planned Monday departure for Florida to tonight to beat the storm.
In Ship Bottom, just north of Atlantic City, Alice and Giovanni Stockton-Rossini spent Saturday packing clothing in the backyard of their home, a few hundred yards from the ocean on Long Beach Island. Their neighborhood was under a voluntary evacuation order, but they didn't need to be forced.
"It's really frightening," Alice Stockton-Rossi said. "But you know how many times they tell you, 'This is it, it's really coming and it’s really the big one' and then it turns out not to be? I'm afraid people will tune it out because of all the false alarms before, and the one time you need to take it seriously, you won't. This one might be the one."
A few blocks away, Russ Linke was taking no chances. He and his wife secured the patio furniture, packed the bicycles into the pickup, and headed off the island. "I've been here since 1997, and I never even put my barbecue grill away during a storm. But I am taking this one seriously," he said.
What makes the storm so dangerous and unusual is it's coming at the end of hurricane season and the beginning of winter storm season, "so it's kind of taking something from both," said Jeff Masters, director of the private service Weather Underground. Masters said the storm could be bigger than the worst East Coast storm on record — the 1938 New England hurricane known as the Long Island Express, which killed nearly 800 people.
"Part hurricane, part nor'easter — all trouble," he said. Experts said to expect high winds over 800 miles and up to 2 feet of snow as well inland as West Virginia. And the storm was so big, and the convergence of the three storms so rare, that "we just can't pinpoint who is going to get the worst of it," said Rick Knabb, director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami.
Officials are particularly worried about the possibility of subway flooding inNew York City, said Uccellini.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo told the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to prepare to shut the city's subways, buses and suburban trains by today, but delayed making a final decision. The city shut the subways down before last year's Hurricane Irene, and a Columbia University study predicted an Irene surge 1 foot higher would have paralyzed lower Manhattan.
The Virginia National Guard was authorized to call up to 500 troops to active duty for debris removal and road-clearing, while homeowners stacked sandbags at their front doors in coastal towns.
(Allen G. Breed, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Emergencies were declared, line crews were summoned, shelters were prepared and command centers opened. People stockpiled food, bought generators and chain saws, taped windows against the wind's blast and prepared to hunker down as Hurricane Sandy conspired with the jet stream and a nor'easter to likely deliver several days of misery and destruction to the most populated section of the nation.
The two big weather models that track storms came to a consensus Friday that Hurricane Sandy would turn inland somewhere to the east of Chesapeake Bay and drench at least eight states as it drives across the Great Lakes into Canada. The storm is expected to become a blizzard before it gets there, dropping up to a foot of snow.
Although Sandy's top winds diminished to 80 mph Friday, that loss of power was seen as temporary. Weather forecasters believe it will reorganize and strengthen today.
Rain is expected to spread over much of the region Sunday afternoon as the leading edge of the storm advances toward land, and people with events planned then and in the days to follow said they were pondering cancellations.
"We expect a long-lasting event - two to three days for most people," said James Franklin, a branch chief for the National Hurricane Center. On Friday morning, the hurricane tore through the Bahamas with 100 mph winds after killing at least 21 people in the Caribbean. By noon, the system was moving north out of the Bahamas. The hurricane was likely to turn northeast late Friday or today, roughly parallel to the Carolina coast, forecasters said.
Coastal areas of the United States, from Florida to North Carolina, were under a tropical storm watch Friday.
Meteorologists said that while early storm projections can be unreliable, this hurricane could cause major disruptions in an area larger than Hurricane Irene in 2011, which caused billions of dollars of damage.
"It really could be an extremely significant, historic storm," said Brian McNoldy, a senior research associate at the University of Miami.
Hurricane Sandy is predicted to run headlong into a trap set by two rivals that may keep its wrath focused on the Washington region for 48 hours. The meteorological trap has been set by the jet stream, which is snaking south from Canada to hem in Sandy from the west, and a strong nor'easter standing in the way of the normal track that delivers hurricanes to a relatively harmless death in the North Atlantic.
A slow-moving hurricane will provide more sustained rainfall, resulting in more flooding.
Governors, including Virginia's and Maryland's, declared official states of emergency. Highway crews prepared to clear debris from roads. The region's utility providers called on companies outside the area to send in as much help as possible.
"This is a dangerous storm on many levels. Trees could be damaged by heavy rains and high winds, making them susceptible to falling," said Melinda Peters, head of the Maryland State Highway Administration. "During the storm, travel conditions will be hazardous, and motorists should expect that there could be delays and detours for days after as crews clean up."
In Manhattan, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the city had activated its coastal storm plan and opened its Office of Emergency Management situation room. The city ordered all construction work to be suspended beginning today.
Officials with D.C. Public Schools and other districts along the East Coast asked parents to check the school systems' websites for updates. "We are taking every step necessary to ensure that our buildings are protected throughout the storm and ready to open on time," said Melissa Salmanowitz, a spokeswoman for D.C. Public Schools.
Also preparing for a shock were mass-transit systems and airports, and airlines recognized that they were facing a situation that could snarl aviation for up to a week. JetBlue, US Airways and Spirit Airlines are allowing customers to reschedule their flights without paying the typical fee of up to $150.
NYT News Service contributed to this report.
(Ashley Halsey III, WASHINGTON POST)
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(U-T)
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The defendants, all prominent scientists or geological and disaster experts, were sentenced to six years in prison.
Earthquake experts worldwide decried the trial as ridiculous, contending there was no way of knowing that a flurry of tremors would lead to a deadly quake.
"It's a sad day for science," said seismologist Susan Hough, of the U.S. Geological Survey in Pasadena. "It's unsettling."
That fellow seismic experts in Italy were singled out in the case "hits you in the gut," she said.
In Italy, convictions aren't definitive until after at least one appeal, so it was unlikely any of the defendants would face jail immediately.
Among those convicted Monday were some of Italy's best known and most internationally respected seismologists and geological experts, including Enzo Boschi, former head of the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology.
"I am dejected, desperate," Boschi said. "I thought I would have been acquitted. I still don't understand what I was convicted of."
The trial began in September 2011 in this Apennine town, whose devastated historic center is still largely deserted.
The defendants were accused of giving "inexact, incomplete and contradictory information" about whether small tremors felt by L'Aquila residents in the weeks and months before the April 6, 2009, quake should have been grounds for a warning.
The 6.3-magnitude temblor killed 308 people in and around the medieval town and forced survivors to live in tent camps for months.
Many much smaller tremors had rattled the area in the previous months, causing frightened people to wonder if they should evacuate.
"I consider myself innocent before God and men," said another convicted defendant, Bernardo De Bernardinis, a former official of the national Civil Protection Agency.
Prosecutors had sought convictions and four-year sentences during the trial. They argued that the L'Aquila disaster was tantamount to "monumental negligence," and cited the devastation wrought in 2005 when levees failed to protect New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.
Relatives of some who perished in the 2009 quake said justice had been done. Ilaria Carosi, sister of one of the victims, told Italian state TV that public officials must be held responsible "for taking their job lightly."
The world's largest multidisciplinary science society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, condemned the charges, verdict and sentencing as a complete misunderstanding about the science behind earthquake probabilities.
(Annalisa Camilli & Frances D'Emilio, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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It took Judge Marco Billi slightly more than four hours to reach the verdict in the trial, which had begun in September 2011. Lawyers have said that they will appeal against the sentence. As convictions are not definitive until after at least one level of appeal in Italy, it is unlikely any of the defendants will immediately face prison.
The seven - all members of the National Commission for the Forecast and Prevention of Major Risks - were accused of having provided "inaccurate, incomplete and contradictory" information about the danger of the tremors felt ahead of 6 April 2009 quake, Italian media report.
In addition to their sentences, all have been barred from ever holding public office again, La Repubblica reports.
In the closing statement, the prosecution quoted one of its witnesses, whose father died in the earthquake.
It described how Guido Fioravanti had called his mother at about 11:00 on the night of the earthquake - straight after the first tremor.
"I remember the fear in her voice. On other occasions they would have fled but that night, with my father, they repeated to themselves what the risk commission had said. And they stayed."
The judge also ordered the defendants to pay court costs and damages. Reacting to the verdict against him, Bernardo De Bernardinis said: "I believe myself to be innocent before God and men."
"My life from tomorrow will change," the former vice-president of the Civil Protection Agency's technical department said, according to La Repubblica.
"But, if I am judged by all stages of the judicial process to be guilty, I will accept my responsibility."
Another, Enzo Boschi, described himself as "dejected" and "desperate" after the verdict was read.
"I thought I would have been acquitted. I still don't understand what I was convicted of." One of the lawyers for the defense, Marcello Petrelli, described the sentences as "hasty" and "incomprehensible".
The case has alarmed many in the scientific community, who feel science itself has been put on trial.
Some scientists have warned that the case might set a damaging precedent, deterring experts from sharing their knowledge with the public for fear of being targeted in lawsuits, the BBC's Alan Johnston in Rome reports.
Among those convicted were some of Italy's most prominent and internationally respected seismologists and geological experts. Earlier, more than 5,000 scientists signed an open letter to Italian President Giorgio Napolitano in support of the group in the dock.
After the verdict was announced, David Rothery, of the UK's Open University, said earthquakes were "inherently unpredictable". "The best estimate at the time was that the low-level seismicity was not likely to herald a bigger quake, but there are no certainties in this game," he said.
Malcolm Sperrin, director of medical physics at the UK's Royal Berkshire Hospital said that the sentence was surprising and could set a worrying precedent.
"If the scientific community is to be penalized for making predictions that turn out to be incorrect, or for not accurately predicting an event that subsequently occurs, then scientific endeavor will be restricted to certainties only and the benefits that are associated with findings from medicine to physics will be stalled."
Link at BBC Europe.
Details on the magnitude-6.3 2009 L'Aquila earthquake can be found at Wikipedia. Other significant earthquakes
occurred in 1706, 1703, 1646, 1501, 1452, 1349, 1315. The 1703 quake was actually a sequence of three magnitude-6 or greater events that may have killed as many as 10,000 people.
(BBC News)
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The U.S. Geological Survey said nearly 5,000 people reported on its website that they felt the magnitude 5.3 quake, when it struck shortly before midnight Saturday near King City, about 40 miles southeast of Salinas.
USGS geophysicist Amy Vaughan says the temblor struck along the San Andreas Fault and was followed by at least four aftershocks that were greater than magnitude 2.5.
The sheriff departments for Monterey and San Luis Obispo counties both said they have no reports of any damage.
"We did have people call in but there no reports of any damage," said Shawna Schaffer, a dispatch with the San Luis Obispo department.
Vaughan said a magnitude 5 quake is capable of causing damage, most often knocking things to fall off shelves and making moderate cracks in walls and foundations.
Link at Fox News.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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When the Witch Creek fire blew through there five years ago, Janet and Dudley Johnson barely had time to escape with their lives. The house burned down. He lost his collection of 3,000 books and she lost her master's thesis.
Next door, Jacey and Bonnie Humes fled with carloads of their possessions and came home three days later to a house that was still standing.
Now they all feel lucky.
The Johnsons got a new house with wood floors and granite countertops and a pool out back. The Humeses got to avoid the heartache of destruction and the hassle of rebuilding.
"How did my house not burn down?" Jacey Humes still wonders, even though he knows the answer: Two neighbors ignored the orders to evacuate and hosed down the house until firefighters arrived. That's another reason he feels lucky. Except for one house down the street stalled in its reconstruction, surrounded by a chain-link fence and still unoccupied, the neighborhood seems back to normal, if a little hodgepodge in appearance. The new houses stand out from the 25-year-old ones that survived.
Throughout Rancho Bernardo, where about 360 homes were destroyed, people remember the fire but don't talk about it all the time. The disaster imparted whatever lessons it had.
"It was a good life experience," said Dudley Johnson, a retired Navy chaplain, as he stood earlier this week on the back patio of his rebuilt - and purposely fireproofed - home. "You learn that everything is temporary. There is nothing in this reality we live in that is permanent."
[When the fire struck] he had a hard time breathing. He thought it was asthma. Then Johnson looked out a back window and saw thick smoke and leaping flames. "We have to go," he told his wife.
It was early in the morning of Oct. 22, 2007. The fire had started the afternoon before, in fierce Santa Ana winds, when sparking power lines ignited brush near Santa Ysabel. The flames spread west and merged with the Guejito fire, also started by power lines in the San Pasqual Valley, before roaring into Rancho Bernardo.[ NB: the Guejito fire was also said to have been sparked by a Cox communications cable]
The Johnsons learned the fate of their house — and a new Hyundai Accent, parked in the driveway — when they saw a U-T photo of both in flames.
The rebuilding went smoothly, they said. They moved back home in early December 2008. The house has no exposed wood on the outside. It has heat-resistant windows and a switch that automatically shuts the chimney flue to keep embers out when it detects a fire outside. The pool has a pump so its water can be sprayed on approaching flames.
"I know I don't want to be burned down again," Dudley Johnson said.
The house is built essentially on the old footprint. His wife designed it. She moved the staircase and added a country kitchen to replace one she never liked anyway. A nurse-educator at UC San Diego, she was able to reconstruct her master's thesis from memory and an early draft a professor had. To her, the biggest nuisance in the fire's aftermath was replacing the dozens of items from everyday life.
"I'd go to get something, and remember it wasn't there, and then I'd realize I had to go shopping again," she said. "I hate shopping."
The Humes family evacuated to San Clemente and stayed with friends. Every so often, Jacey Humes called the house. If the answering machine picked up, he figured everything was OK. The answering machine always picked up.
"We came home, it looked like a war zone," he said. Three neighbors' houses, including the Johnsons', burned down in the cul-de-sac and another was half-scorched. On a street below theirs, Aguamiel Road, visible from their backyard, more than 30 houses were reduced to rubble.
He doesn't envy the neighbors with new everythings. " wouldn't want to go through all that," he said. "Just the cleanup, all the paperwork. Not worth it."
He said the neighbor who stayed behind to play firefighter wondered at one point as he was hosing down the house if the Humeses wouldn't just prefer a new one. "But he decided not to risk it," Humes said. "I'm glad he didn't. That's a debt I'll never be able to repay."
Aguacate Way is a street like many others in San Diego where the neighbors know each other well enough to wave, but don't socialize much as a group. Nobody's planned an anniversary get-together for this weekend.
"There was no great epiphany after the fire, not for me anyway," Humes said. "Things are just pretty much back the way they were before." And that's fine with him, five years later, on the other side of chance.
(John Wilkens, U-T)
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The exploding streak was visible over the San Francisco Bay Area and other parts of Northern California, and there were also reports of a loud boom.
"It looked like a plane crash or rocket," said Philip Terzian, an amateur astronomer who photographed the meteor while atop a ridge near Palo Alto.
Terzian had gathered there with a group of other astronomy enthusiasts. The group had not met in some time and happened to be there for the meteor.
"It was a 'Holy Cow!' moment," he said. Other observers described the streak as crescent shaped, and reddish orange in color.
The sound people reported could have been a sonic boom from the meteor traveling faster than the speed of sound, said Jonathan Braidman, an astronomy instructor with the Chabot Space & Science Center in Oakland. "It's like a jet fighter," he said.
Braidman said the meteor was likely metal and rock from the asteroid belt. Astronomers at the center estimated its size as that of a car although Braidman said it probably broke into much smaller pieces before hitting the ground and then scattered over hundreds of miles.
Wednesday's light streak comes as astronomers expect a more dramatic light display this weekend that is part of the large, fast Orionid meteor shower, so-named because it has the Orion constellation as a backdrop. The Orion meteors are space debris from Halley's comet, and they become visible as the earth crosses through their trail, according to The Sacramento Bee.
Braidman said he does not think Wednesday's meteor and this weekend's Orionid shower are connected. The shower's peak is expected Saturday night and Sunday morning.
Wednesday's meteor sighting was at least the second in Northern California in recent months. A meteor that exploded April 22 was seen over a large part of the region and Nevada. That explosion prompted a group of scientists to go up in a slow-moving airship and look for meteorites.
(Sudhin Thanawala, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Schools, businesses and government agencies will come to a stop at 10:18 a.m. and pretend that a major quake has hit the area, producing at least 60 seconds of shaking.
The exercise is meant to give people a chance to practice, "Drop, Cover and Hold On," the three steps that most people can take to reduce their chance of being injured or killed in an earthquake.
Local emergency officials also will hold a demonstration on a parked Amtrak train in San Diego, showing commuters how to safely protect their heads if a major quake occurs. Many train cars do not have tables, which means it can be harder for a person to find cover when the shaking starts.
About 9.3 million people across California are expected to participate in the safety drill. The state is among the seismically active regions in the world, having experienced such deadly events as the 1994 Northridge quake, which killed 57 people, and the Great San Francisco quake of 1906, which killed upward of 3,000 people.
NB: other recent fatal earthquakes in California include the magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake on 17 October 1989 (63 casualties, 3,757 injured, up to 12,000 homeless; check at wikipedia). 42 fatalities occurred when the Cypress Street Viaduct on the Nimitz Freeway (I-880) collapsed. One person died when a segment of the Bay Bridge collapsed. Extensive liquefaction occurred in the Marina District that was built on reclaimed bay-front land. A unique aspect of this quake was that the third Major League Baseball game of the 1989 World Series was about to start, with both Bay Area teams playing, the Oakland Athletics and the San Francisco Giants. People were therefore in the stadium, at home or elsewhere in front of TVs. The quake was the first major U.S. quake broadcast live. Due to the fact that so many people were in front of the TV rather than stuck in traffic, the fatality rate was likely much lower than it could have been. The quake caused an estimated $6 billion in property damage and so was one of the most costly natural disasters in U.S. history, at the time.
More recently, the magnitude 6.5 San Simeon earthquake on 22 December 2003 claimed two lives. The earthquake occurred along a reverse fault and causes severe damage on unreinforced 100+-year-old masonry buildings in Paso Robles. The two fatalities occurred in the collapsed 1892-build Acorn Building. Two sulphur hot springs erupted after the quake. The quakes cause about $250 million in damages. (check at wikipedia)
(Gary Robbins, U-T)
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"It's wonderful to get sand along our coast," said lifelong city resident John Daley, a founding member of the Oceanside Historical Society.
Daley has been tracking the condition of Oceanside beaches for decades and said they had become so eroded that even at low tide, there's hardly any beach left along some stretches of the shore.
Oceanside is getting 292,000 cubic yards pumped onto its beaches by an offshore dredge as part of a $22.5 million sand replenishment project being coordinated by the San Diego Association of Governments.
"We're thrilled we're getting more sand; we just wish it was more," said Leslee Gaul, director of Visit Oceanside, which promotes the city as a tourist hot spot.
Gaul said the replenishment project is "obviously huge for tourism.""The beach is the No. 1 activity that our visitors experience when they come to Oceanside, so having the wide, sandy beach is important," Gaul said.
The city's share of the cost is about $650,000, said Harbor and Beaches director Frank Quan.
The sand is being spread along the beaches roughly between Hayes and Morse streets, Quan said.
When the project is finished, city beaches will be as wide as 200 feet in some spots, he said.
The 315-foot Liberty Island dredge has been at work offshore Oceanside since Friday and will be there through next week, Quan said.
Its next stop will be Encinitas, then Solana Beach in early November, with the south part of Carlsbad's beaches set for replenishment at the end of November.
The original plan was for the dredge to start in Imperial Beach and work its way north, finishing in Oceanside.
The schedule was changed to accommodate lobster fishers, Quan said, so Oceanside moved ahead in line.
Rebuilding city beaches is partly a safety issue. "Aside from the benefit of having a wide beach for tourists, it protects the shoreline," Quan said. "It protects a lot of houses."
When the beaches erode to the point where there's little sand left at high tide, strong waves crash against the boulders — called riprap — that are lined up at the edge of the beach to keep the water from reaching houses and other structures. The sand acts as sort of a cement holding the riprap together, Quan said, and when it erodes, the riprap becomes loose.
Ultimately, the sand pumped onto the beach will probably wash away, but Quan said the beaches should stay in good shape for at least five years.That's what happened after a similar beach replenishment project in 2001, Quan said.
(Ray Huard, U-T)
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Don't restart the San Onofre nuclear power plant. Let's adjust to its absence the inevitable way our eyes adjust to darkness. Let's look elsewhere for permanent, long-term power solutions for heavily populated and plugged-in Southern California. It's time.
The plant's been shut down since January. One third of its workers are being laid off. We just survived a brutal summer without the facility. And the plant's twin operating licenses will expire in 10 years anyway, unless the plant operator seeks and receives a 20-year extension.
What's more, California has banned any new nuclear reactors for years because — D'oh! — the country lacks a permanent repository for nuclear waste.
Not to mention Three Mile Island or Chernobyl or the fact that nuclear power's recent record of safety and reliability pretty much evaporated like radiation in the sky following the March 11, 2011, meltdown at the Fukushima plant in Japan. Good thing we don't live in an earthquake zone. Oh, wait.
Frankly, the question shouldn't be: "Why decommission the San Onofre nuclear power plant?" It should be: "Why wait?"
Who am I to say this? Well, I'm someone whose family uses a lot of electricity. I'm a journalist who covered the San Onofre plant a decade ago. I/m one of the 8.5 million people who live within 50 miles of it. And I'm one of the 1,000 or so people who endured four hours of public testimony on the plant's uncertain future Tuesday night in Dana Point.
Driving to Orange County, I knew that my mind would wander during the meeting's most technical comments. But I still found myself speeding past the twin silos of the plant, which provides one-fifth of San Diego County's power, in eager anticipation precisely because the San Onofre issue is as serious as the testimony would be.
A 13-member panel featured several San Diegans, including a retired nuclear engineer from Leucadia and a Solana Beach mother who measured the radiation levels of her family's food for months while living in Japan last year.
The 850-seat room was so packed that people who left temporarily would have to wait in a line by the fire marshal for someone else to leave so they could trickle back in.
Judging by their T-shirts, half the people in the crowd were union workers pulling for the plant to restart — for the employment opportunities.
Judging by the jeers and cheers, swarms of people showed up to lobby for and against a spectrum of possibilities, from a fast restart to an operating-license amendment requiring greater oversight to a permanent shutdown.
One thing was clear from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission official present Tuesday: One of the plant's reactors, which shut down Jan. 9 for routine maintenance, won't be restarted for months, if not years.
When the other reactor might fire up again is unclear; regulators won't receive a plan for its restart until summer 2013 at the earliest.
Southern California Edison, which runs the plant and owns 78.21 percent of it, shut down that second reactor on Jan. 31 when a major malfunction released a small amount of radiation into the atmosphere.
What was the problem? Some tubes containing radioactive water degraded prematurely. The damage happened in a massive steam generator that had been replaced just a year earlier, and in another that had its replacement 18 months earlier. The total bill for those replacements: more than $670 million.
Before this debacle, the most tubes that had been permanently plugged at any U.S. nuclear power plant as a result of heavy wear or damage was 29. Get this: At San Onofre, 510 tubes had to be permanently plugged in one reactor and 807 in another. It's entirely possible that one of those reactors won't be allowed to restart without new generators.
And don't think Southern California Edison or San Diego Gas & Electric or the city of Riverside — which own 20 percent and 1.79 percent of the plant, respectively — would pay for that expense on their own. Nope. Undoubtedly, ratepayers would be on the hook to cover those hundreds of millions of dollars.
That would be on top of paying costs to operate an inoperable plant for months. Edison and SDG&E ratepayers are being billed about $835 million this year for San Onofre's operation, maintenance and capital costs.
This is California. There are alternatives to nuclear power, wind and solar chief among them.
(Matthew Hall, U-T)
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Plant workers, utility customers and neighbors of the plant packed a 1,000-seat hotel conference room to listen to an hours-long roundtable discussion featuring environmental activists, a union leader, state and federal regulators and the chief nuclear officer for Southern California Edison.
Officials from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said they are only beginning to analyze a restart plan for one reactor from plant operator Southern California Edison.
"It's far from a done deal," said Elmo Collins, regional administrator for the commission. "We think this is going to take a number of months. ... It's our objective to be sure there is a sound technical basis."
Union workers in guild-insignia T-shirts gave a loud ovation to panelist Richard McPherson, a Laguna Niguel resident and nuclear industry consultant.
"I have not lost any faith in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission," he said. "We need to get this power plant back on line as quickly as we can. ... It's a technical problem; the people who are involved know how to fix it."
Other panelists said they were concerned about Edison's plans to restart the plant.
"I am concerned about the safety of starting Unit 2 given problems that it has," said Donald Mosier, a member of the Del Mar City Council, which approved a resolution calling for a lengthy license-amendment review before restart. "This is our money they are talking about using to keep this old nuclear power plant running. ... So it's our decision, not their decision."
Edison has proposed restarting one of the reactors for five months at partial power — a plan that it says would contain destructive vibrations among steam generator tubes. Plans for the other reactor, with more extensive damage, won't be submitted until at least next summer, Edison said.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is considering whether Edison's complex repair and restart proposal for the Unit 2 reactor will require an amendment to San Onofre's operating license amendment. That process — which Edison says is not needed — would involve testimony, hearings and appeals that can drag on for more than a year.
Collins has said the need for a license amendment remains "an open question."
Questions about how the nuclear commission allowed design deficiencies to clear regulatory review were referred to David Pelton, who described an ongoing review of procedures but offered no specific conclusions.
(Morgan Lee, U-T)
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So officials did about the only thing they could: take money from other forest-management programs. But many of the programs were aimed at preventing giant fires in the first place, and raiding their budgets meant putting off the removal of dried brush and dead wood over vast stretches of land — the things that fuel eye-popping blazes, threatening property and lives.
Recently, Congress stepped in and reimbursed the Forest Service and the Interior Department, which plays a far lesser role in fighting fires, with $400 million from the 2013 continuing resolution, allowing fire-prevention work to continue. Forestry experts at state agencies and environmental groups greeted it as good news.
But they also faulted Congress for providing at the start of the fiscal year only about half of the $1 billion it actually cost to fight this year's fires. They argued that the traditional method that members of an appropriations conference committee use to fund wildfire suppression — averaging the cost of fighting wildfires over the previous 10 years — is inadequate when climate change is causing longer periods of dryness and drought, giving fires more fuel to burn and resulting in longer wildfire seasons.
Once running from June to September, the season has expanded over the past 10 years to include May and October. It was once rare to see 5 million cumulative acres burn, according to officials from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which includes the Forest Service. But some recent seasons have recorded millions more than that.
This year's wildfire burn was nearly 8 million acres at the end of August, about the time that the budget allocated to fight them ran dry.
"They knew they were running out of money early on, in May," said Chris Topik, director of North American Forest Restoration for the Nature Conservancy. "They were telling people in May, 'Be careful, don't spend too much (on prevention).' "Over seven years starting in 2002, $2.2 billion was transferred from other accounts for fire suppression when the budget came up short, according to records provided by the Forest Service. Congress at times reimbursed a fraction of those funds.
"We did have to transfer the money," said Jim Hubbard, deputy chief of state and private forestry for the Forest Service. "It disrupts work during the field season. It was not a major impact this season, but would have been if Congress didn't restore it." A spokeswoman for the House Appropriations Committee said its chairman, Rep. Harold Rogers, R-Ky., and members "believe that providing adequate funding for wildfire suppression is of the utmost importance. This is why they fought for hundreds of millions in funding in recent … legislation," as well as in appropriations bills.
Staff members on the committee acknowledged that using the 10-year average cost of wildfire suppression to determine the budget is not ideal. The spokeswoman, Jennifer Hing, said the committee will continue to operate as it has.
Each year that money was removed from brush-disposal and timber-salvage programs, the Forest Service's efforts to prevent fire fell "further and further behind," said Jake Donnay, senior director of forestry for National Association of State Foresters. "Even with the appropriations they get, they're not able to catch up. We're thankful that Congress did act to repay them this time, but that hasn't always been the case."
(Darryl Fears, THE WASHINGTON POST)
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California recyclers also are claiming redemptions for the same containers several times, or for containers that never existed, according to an investigation by the Los Angeles Times.
Government officials recently estimated the fraud at $40 million a year, and an industry expert told the newspaper it could exceed $200 million. The state's $1.1 billion recycling fund paid out $100 million more in expenses last year than it took in from deposits and other sources, the Times said.
More than 8.5 billion recyclable cans were sold in California last year and some 8.3 billion were redeemed for a nickel, making for an improbable return rate of nearly 100 percent. The Times said the recycling rate for certain plastic containers was even higher: 104 percent.
"The law says California has to make it easy to recycle … so anyone with a devious mind, it's so easy, they can just go right in," Los Angeles County Sheriff's Deputy Dave Chapman told the newspaper. Chapman has investigated several recycling fraud rings in recent months.
Under a 25-year-old recycling law, California charges consumers a deposit on most beverage containers sold in the state. Anyone who brings empty containers back to one of about 2,300 privately run recycling centers can collect 5 cents for most cans and bottles and 10 cents for larger containers. Only cans sold in California are eligible, but many recycling centers don't ask where they come from. As a result, thousands of cans are arriving from out of state.
California is the only state in the region besides Oregon with a deposit program, making it a magnet for recycling fraud. And it is the only state besides Hawaii to directly administer the program through private recycling centers.
The Times cited numbers from the state Department of Food and Agriculture that showed 3,500 vehicles carrying used beverage containers arrived in California last summer.
Officials with the state Department of Justice told the newspaper they have filed approximately 10 criminal cases this year against fraud rings bringing in cans from outside California.
Gov. Jerry Brown signed a law last month that will require those importing more than 25 pounds of aluminum or plastic or 250 pounds of glass to declare at the border what their purpose is and the source and destination of the material, the Times reported.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Pakistan has suffered devastating floods in the past two years, including the worst in its history in 2010, when catastrophic inundations across the country killed almost 1800 people and affected 21 million.
As in 2010 and 2011, most of those hit by the latest floods are in Sindh province, where the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) said 2.8 million were affected, with nearly 890,000 in Punjab and 700,000 in Baluchistan.
Nearly 290,000 people around the country have been forced to seek shelter in relief camps, NDMA said in figures published on its website.
The floods began in early September, with nearly 80 killed in flash floods, mostly in the northwest and Pakistan-administered Kashmir.
An NDMA spokesman said the government was not yet appealing for foreign assistance.
"The government's point of view is that the situation will be handled from own resources," Ahmad Kamal said.
More than a million acres (400,000 hectares) of crops have been destroyed by the floods across the country, NDMA said, and nearly 8,000 cattle have been killed.
UN children's agency UNICEF, quoting a separate flood assessment, said at least 2.8 million people had been affected, including 1.4 million children, of whom more than 390,000 are under five.
UNICEF said it was providing 183,000 people a day with drinking water but warned it urgently needed more funds.
"Children from very poor families are among the worst affected by the severe flooding and they need our immediate help," said UNICEF Pakistan Deputy Representative Karen Allen.
"UNICEF urgently needs $15.4 million to scale up its water, sanitation and hygiene response to reach around 400,000 people over the next three to six months."
UNICEF said that according to its assessment, more than half of those affected by the floods were concentrated in just five districts, two each in Sindh and Baluchistan and one in Punjab.
It said 360,000 people had been left without shelter and three quarters of children in the five worst-affected districts were unable to go to school, either because the buildings have been destroyed or because they are being used as temporary shelters.
The UN agency voiced particular concern about children forced from their homes, saying loss of access to safe water supplies left them vulnerable to diseases such as diarrhoea, malaria, measles, polio and pneumonia.
More than 20,000 families in Sindh have been provided with hygiene kits including water purification tablets, UNICEF said, as part of efforts to prevent deadly water-borne diseases.
NB: The original article, together with a map, can be accessed at Australian Network News.
(AFP)
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Authorities have not yet identified the deceased, but neighbors said it was an 82-year-old man who did not heed orders to evacuate his home on Sunday after the fire started around 12:15 p.m.
It is not known whether police contacted the man in person or reached him by telephone. The Sheriff's Department made reverse 911 calls to 77 addresses in the Tierra del Sol neighborhood on two occasions Sunday, first to issue a voluntary evacuation order and then to say it was mandatory, said sheriff's Lt. Rose Kurupas.
"He felt that he was going to be OK if he stayed," Kurupas said.
As of Monday night, evacuation orders remained in effect for Tierra del Sol but had been lifted for the communities of Boulevard and Jewell Valley, Cal Fire unit Chief Thomas Porter said.
The Shockey fire had burned 2,450 acres and destroyed 20 homes and 15 other structures by Monday evening. It was 40 percent contained; the cause was under investigation.
Authorities were looking into reports that the fire might have been started by someone shooting tracer bullets on or near the Campo Indian Reservation, said Kelly Zombro, Cal Fire's deputy chief of operations.
None of those reports had been confirmed, officials said.
Finding the cause of the fire has taken on added importance because there is a fatality. If someone is responsible for starting the blaze, that person could face more serious criminal charges.
Downed power lines were blamed for the October 2007 wildfires that swept through San Diego County, but Porter said no electrical lines appeared to be in the area where Sunday's fire originated — near Shockey Truck Trail and state Route 94, east of Campo.
Robbie Richard, a San Marcos firefighter who was working the blaze, said that 25 structures continued to be threatened Monday night, down from a high of 80 earlier in the day.
Most of the structures that had been destroyed were along Tierra del Sol Road, about 2.5 miles south of Route 94, near Boulevard.
Shasta Way and Tierra del Sol Road remained closed at Route 94 on Monday night. All other roads had been reopened, Richard said.
At least 336 firefighters from Cal Fire, the U.S. Forest Service, Indian reservation fire departments and fire agencies throughout the county were battling the Shockey blaze. Cal Fire reported that 57 fire engines, six air tankers, six helicopters, five bulldozers and nine water tenders were being used in the firefight.
The fire has been pushed by strong winds and fueled by bone-dry vegetation.
Overnight, firefighters planned to aggressively attack the blaze's northern and southern flanks, Porter said. Fire officials are concerned about the winds shifting to the west and going toward Campo, he said.
Five people stayed Monday night at the Red Cross shelter, opened at Mountain Empire High School on Buckman Springs Road in Pine Valley, said Red Cross spokeswoman Courtney Pendleton. That was down from 11 on Sunday night, The shelter was to remain open as long as there was a need, Pendleton said.
Outside the high school, the San Diego Humane Society set up a white trailer for evacuees' pets. Three dogs and three cats were staying there Monday night, Pendleton said.
Classes at all Mountain Empire School District campuses were canceled on Monday, but they will resume on Tuesday, Superintendent Steve Van Zant said.
Van Zant said the decision to reopen the schools was made after Cal Fire told the district it was safe. The district will continue to work with San Diego County to help families in need, he said.
One location narrowly spared by the blaze was a 40-acre Clydesdale horse farm. The fire came right to the edge of the Somewhere Farm Clydesdales on Tierra del Sol Road.
But after it burned a nearby church camp, a legion of firetrucks arrived in time and could be seen lined up along the road for as far as farm owner Bob Gookin could see.
"Somebody called up and asked if we were worried," he said. "I said no. You ought to see my fire line."
(Debbi Baker, J. Harry Jones & Nathan Max, U-T)
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The apparent low point for 2012 was reached Sunday, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, which said that sea ice that day covered about 1.32 million square miles, or 24 percent, of the surface of the Arctic Ocean. The previous low, set in 2007, was 29 percent.
When satellite tracking began in the late 1970s, sea ice at its lowest point in the summer typically covered about half the Arctic Ocean, but it has been declining in fits and starts over the decades.
"The Arctic is the Earth's air conditioner," said Walt Meier, a research scientist at the snow and ice center, an agency sponsored by the government. "We're losing that. It's not just that polar bears might go extinct, or that native communities might have to adapt, which we're already seeing — there are larger climate effects."
His agency waited a few days before announcing the low to be sure sea ice had started to refreeze, as it usually does at this time of year, when winter closes in rapidly in the high Arctic. A shell of ice will cover much of the Arctic Ocean in coming months, but it is likely to be thin and prone to melting when summer returns.
Scientists consider the rapid warming of the region to be a consequence of the human release of greenhouse gases, and they see the melting as an early warning of big changes to come in the rest of the world.
The sea ice is declining much faster than had been predicted in the last big U.N. report on the state of the climate, published in 2007.
In a panel discussion on Wednesday in New York sponsored by Greenpeace, the environmental group, James Hansen, a prominent NASA climate scientist, said the Arctic melting should serve as a warning.
"The scientific community realizes that we have a planetary emergency," Hansen said. "It's hard for the public to recognize this because they stick their head out the window and don't see that much going on."
(Justin Gillis, NYT NEWS SERVICE)
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The 2012 wildfire season isn't over yet, but already this year is shaping up to be the one of the worst on record in the American West. According to the National Interagency Fire Center, with nearly two months still to go in the fire season, the total area already burned this year is 30 percent more than in an average year, and fires have consumed more than 8.6 million acres, an area larger than the state of Maryland.
Yet, what defines a "typical" wildfire year in the West is changing. In the past 40 years, rising spring and summer temperatures, along with shrinking winter snowpack, have increased the risk of wildfires in most parts of the West.
Studies show that continued climate change is going to make wildfires much more common in the coming decades.
The National Research Council reports that for every degree Celsius (1.8°F) of temperature increase, the size of the area burned in the Western U.S. could quadruple. According to the IPCC 4th Assessment Report, summer temperatures in western North America could increase between 3.6oF and 9oF by the middle of this century.
Key Findings
Our analysis of 42 years of U.S. Forest Service records for 11 Western states shows that:
The waters are also threatening Pakistan's greatest archaeological site, the ruins of Mohenjo-Daro, which sit just over a mile from the Indus River in the southern province of Sindh. In its heyday in about 2500 B.C., Mohenjo-Daro was the most important city of the Indus Valley Civilization. Now its grid of streets and covered drainage system, one of the most extensive of the Bronze Age, are inundated. Fissures are appearing on the site's imposing stupa, and parts of the base structure near the Great Bath have begun to collapse.
The Sindh provincial government, which was put in charge of Mohenjo-Daro two years ago, had allocated about $32,000 to bolster it before the monsoon season. But it failed to complete the work on time.
Now conservation staff are trying to pump water out of the ruins, and have hired laborers to collect rainwater in buckets from the most vulnerable areas. But the workers, who are untrained and overwhelmed, are reportedly emptying the containers elsewhere in the ancient city — protecting one structure at the expense of another.
The caretakers' evident inexperience suggests that official apathy, rather than climate change, poses the greatest threat to Pakistan’s rich heritage.
This lack of preparedness is unforgivable, especially since Mohenjo-Daro narrowly escaped irreparable damage in the summer of 2010, after unprecedented flooding. Even before that the site had been left to fall into disrepair: Pakistani conservationists can't figure out how to prevent saline ground water from eating away at the site's ancient bricks. One archaeologist predicted that "the site will not last more than 20 years."
Mohenjo-Daro isn't the only historical treasure in Pakistan that is threatened by a lack of expertise or, worse, disinterest in preserving the country's cultural heritage. Earlier this year, armed thugs squatted an open-air mosque adjacent to the ancient Makli necropolis, a Unesco World Heritage Site, damaging some ancient tombs in the process.
For decades, the government has also failed to enforce laws banning the excavation, movement and sale of antiquities. Artifacts from the Buddhist Gandhara civilization, which thrived between 600 B.C. and 1100 A.D., are routinely smuggled out of the country. (This summer, though, the police foiled one such plot.)
And, of course, Pakistan's archaeological treasures have suffered from the country's deteriorating security situation. In the northwest, the Taliban have repeatedly attacked ancient Buddhist sites. In 2006 in the southwestern province of Baluchistan, a Pakistan Army operation against a tribal chief reportedly destroyed the fossilized remains of a Baluchitherium, the largest mammal that ever lived.
Meanwhile, government officials have failed to take preserving Pakistan's cultural heritage seriously. Former Prime Ministers Yousaf Raza Gilani and Nawaz Sharif, among others, have even hosted lavish dinner parties for foreign dignitaries at the Lahore Fort and the famed Shalimar Gardens, as well as other Mughal monuments. Guests were allowed to trample the ruins. The wood fires used for cooking blackened ancient walls. Fireworks shows broke off sections of historic buildings.
With Pakistan threatening to fragment along ethnic, sectarian and class lines, reminding Pakistanis of their culture's glorious common heritage seems like an essential way of shaping a cohesive national identity. But by not protecting the country's past, its politicians are endangering its future.
NB: This news article can be found at the International Herald Tribune, the global edition of the New York Times.
(Huma Yusuf, Pakistani Newspaper DAWN)
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Guatemala's head of emergency evacuations, Sergio Cabanas, said the evacuees were ordered to leave about 17 villages around the Volcan del Fuego, which sits about six miles southwest of the colonial city of Antigua, home to 45,000 people. The ash was blowing south-southeast and authorities said the tourist center of the country was not currently in danger, although they expected the eruption to last for at least 12 more hours.
Hundreds of cars, trucks and buses, completely blanketed with charcoal gray ash, sped away from the volcano along the a two-lane paved highway toward Guatemala City. Dozens of people crammed into the backs of trucks. Thick clouds of ash reduced visibility to less than 10 feet in the area of sugarcane fields surrounding the volcano. The elderly, women and children filled old school buses and ambulances that carried them from the area.
The agency said lava rolled nearly 2,000 feet down slopes billowing with ash around the Volcan del Fuego, a 12,346-foot volcano whose name translates as "Volcano of Fire."
"A paroxysm of an eruption is taking place, a great volcanic eruption, with strong explosions and columns of ash," said Gustavo Chicna, a volcanologist with the National Institute of Seismology, Vulcanology, Meteorology and Hydrology. He said cinders spewing from the volcano were settling a half-inch thick in some places.
He said extremely hot gases were also rolling down the sides of the volcano, which was almost entirely wreathed in ash and smoke. The emergency agency warned that flights through the area could be affected.
There was a red alert, the highest level, south and southeast of the mountain, where, Chicna said, "it's almost in total darkness."
He said ash was landing as far as 50 miles south of the volcano.
Teresa Marroquin, disaster coordinator for the Guatemalan Red Cross, said the organization had set up 10 emergency shelters and was sending hygiene kits and water.
Many of those living around the volcano are indigenous Kakchikeles people who live in relatively poor and isolated communities, and authorities said they expected to encounter difficulties in evacuating all the affected people from the area.
(Romina Ruiz-Goiriena & Alberto Arce, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Winds and temperatures remain high in parts of the region, worrying officials who had hoped cooler temperatures and moisture would eventually tamp down the threat. The National Weather service issued red-flag warnings for wide swaths of eastern Washington and Oregon, Idaho, Montana and all of Wyoming, meaning conditions could exacerbate blazes.
In Wyoming, authorities evacuated 500 people from homes and cabins as a wildfire about 10 miles southeast of Casper quickly grew.
The Sheep Herder Hill Fire started Sunday and burned at least six structures overnight. State Forester Bill Crapser wasn't sure if any of the structures were homes but said even more buildings may have been lost.
The fire had scorched more than 15 square miles of pine forest and sagebrush by Monday afternoon.
Gov. Matt Mead activated two Wyoming Army National Guard UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters, each with 600-gallon buckets, to dump water on the fire. A total of 12 Wyoming Army and Air National Guard troops were activated, including a liaison to coordinate possible aid to a Jackson-area fire in northwest Wyoming.
About 1,000 residents had been told to prepare to leave as the Little Horsethief Fire burned about 2,000 acres in a mountainous area less than two miles south of Jackson. But officials said Monday evening it appeared the town of about 9,500 residents would be able to get through the night without any evacuations.
The blaze was about 15 percent contained.
In Washington state, rains that fell in the Seattle area after a 48- day dry stretch didn't make it over the Cascade Mountains that divide the state's western and eastern halves. And the forecast was for gusts that could fan the flames of dozens of blazes.
Only a shed has been lost near Wenatchee, and no injuries have been reported at what appeared to be the most-threatening of many wildfires sparked by lightning in the state Saturday.
Residents of about 180 homes on the west side of Wenatchee, about 140 miles east of Seattle, were told to evacuate Sunday.
(Shannone Dininny, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Damage was preventing rescuers from reaching outlying towns, and communications were disrupted after the midday quakes hit along the borders of Guizhou and Yunnan provinces, a region of small farms and mines where some of China's poorest people live.
The first magnitude-5.6 quake struck just before 11:30 a.m. and was followed by an equally strong quake shortly after noon, joined by dozens of aftershocks. Though of moderate strength, the quakes were shallow, which often causes more damage.
Hardest hit was Yiliang County, where all but one of the deaths occurred, according to the Yunnan provincial government's official website. An additional 730 people in the area were injured, the state-run Xinhua News Agency said. Yiliang's high population density, flimsy building construction and landslide-prone hillsides were blamed for the relatively high death toll.
China Central Television showed roads littered with rocks and boulders and pillars of dust rising over hilltops from the landslides. One image taken just as one quake struck showed people running out of a supermarket as the ground shook.
Other footage showed several hundred people crowding into a school athletic field in Yiliang's county seat, a sizable city spread along a river in a valley, as well as soldiers carrying injured people and rescue materials.
Though quakes occur in the area frequently, buildings in rural areas and China's fast-growing smaller cities and towns are often constructed poorly. A magnitude- 7.9 quake that hit Sichuan Province, just north of Yunnan, in 2008 killed nearly 90,000 people, with many of the deaths blamed on poorly built structures, including schools.
Friday's quakes destroyed 6,650 homes across several counties and townships, Xinhua said. The Yunnan seismology bureau said more than 100,000 people were evacuated from their homes.
In Luozehe, a town in Yiliang near a zinc mine, residents and state media said boulders hurtled off hillsides and houses collapsed.
"It is scary. My brother was killed by falling rocks. The aftershocks struck again and again. We are so afraid," Xinhua quoted miner Peng Zhuwen as saying.
The Red Cross spokesman for East Asia, Francis Markus, said 2,000 quilts, 2,000 jackets and 500 tents were being rushed to the area, which is largely inhabited by members of the Yi ethnic minority.
Mobile phone services were down and regular phone lines disrupted. Phones were cut off to clinics in four villages in Qiaoshan, another town in Yiliang, which has about half a million people.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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"When we felt the earthquake, we held on to each other because we kept falling," said Rosa Pichardo, 45, who was walking on the beach in the town of Samara with her family when the quake hit.
"I've never felt anything like this. We just couldn't stay standing. My feet gave out under me. It was terrible, terrible," she said.
Officials said the quake collapsed some houses and at least one bridge and caused landslides that blocked highways. But Costa Rica President Laura Chinchilla said there were no reports of major damage and called for calm.
Residents described being shocked by the force of the quake, which was felt as far away as Panama and Nicaragua and was the biggest since a magnitude-7.6 quake in 1991 left 47 people dead.
Michelle Landwer, owner of the Belvedere Hotel in Samara, north of the epicenter, said she was having breakfast with about 10 people when the quake hit.
"The whole building was moving, I couldn't even walk," Landwer said. "Everything was falling, like glasses and everything." Still, she added, "Here in my building there was no real damage."
The quake was somewhat deep — 25 miles below the surface. Quakes that occur deeper underground tend to be less damaging, but more widely felt.
"If it was a shallower event, it would be a significantly higher hazard," said seismologist Daniel McNamara of the U.S. Geological Survey.
The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake was centered about 38 miles from the town of Liberia and 87 miles west of the capital, San Jose. The magnitude initially was estimated at 7.9, but was quickly downgraded to 7.6.
The area is a seismically active zone where the Cocos tectonic plate dives beneath the Caribbean plate. "All along the Pacific coast of Central America, you can expect fairly big earthquakes," McNamara said.
The quake was followed by three strong aftershocks of magnitudes 4.6, 4.5 and 4.4.
The Guanacaste region around the epicenter is a popular tourist destination known for its pristine beaches and nature and marine reserves. Officials initially warned of a possible tsunami, and Samara local police supervisor Jose Angel Gomez said about 5,000 people — 80 percent of the town's population — had been evacuated from coastal towns in and near the quake's epicenter. By midday they were allowed to return.
In San Jose, frightened residents ran into the streets, and cell phone and Internet service failed across the city. Some neighborhoods lost electricity.
At the hospitals of Nicoya and Liberia, in Guanacaste, hundreds of people packed emergency rooms asking to be treated for shock and minor injuries.
One death was confirmed, a man who died of a heart attack, said Carlos Miranda, a Red Cross worker in the city of Liberia.
Douglas Salgado, a geographer with Costa Rica's National Commission of Risk Prevention and Emergency Attention, said a landslide hit the main highway that connects the capital to the Pacific coast city of Puntarenas, and hotels and other structures had cracked walls and items knocked from shelves.
In the town of Hojancha, a few miles from the epicenter, city official Kenia Campos said the quake knocked down some houses and landslides blocked several roads.
"So far, we don't have victims," she said. "People were really scared ... We have had moderate quakes but an earthquake (this strong) hadn't happened in ... years." In the past four decades, the region has been rocked by 30 earthquakes of magnitude- 6 and larger. The last deadly quake to strike Costa Rica was in 2009, when 40 people died in a magnitude6.1 temblor.
(Danica Coto, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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A single such well can require 5 million gallons of water, and energy companies are flocking to water auctions, farm ponds, irrigation ditches and municipal fire hydrants to get what they need.
That thirst is helping to drive an explosion of oil production here, but it is also complicating the long and emotional struggle over who drinks and who does not in the arid and fast-growing West. Farmers and environmental activists say they are worried that deep-pocketed energy companies will have purchase on increasingly scarce water supplies as they drill deep new wells that use the technique of hydraulic fracturing.
And this summer's record- breaking drought, which dried up wells and ruined crops, has only amplified those concerns.
"It's not a level playing field," said Peter Anderson, who grows corn and alfalfa on the parched plains of eastern Colorado.
But industry officials say that critics are exaggerating the effect on water supplies.
In average years, farmers and ranchers like Anderson say they pay about $30 for an acre foot of water — equal to about 326,000 gallons — a price that can rise to $100 when water is scarce. Oil and gas companies in parts of Colorado are paying as much as $1,000 to $2,000 for an equal amount of treated water from city pipes.
"Energy companies are moving quickly to shore up supplies," said Reagan Waskom, director of the Colorado Water Institute at Colorado State University. "They're going to find it, and they're going to pay what they need to pay, and it’s on an order of magnitude of what crop producers can afford to pay. That changes the whole deal."
Oil and gas companies estimate that they will use about 6.5 billion gallons of water in Colorado this year.
(NYT NEWS SERVICE)
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Like thousands of other Americans getting stuck with huge repair bills, DeVaughan learned that the intense drought baking much of the country's lawns, fields and forests this summer also has been sucking moisture from underground, causing shifting that can lead to cracked basements and foundations, as well as damage above ground. Repairs often cost tens of thousands of dollars and can even top $100,000, and they rarely are covered by insurance, as shocked homeowners have been discovering.
DeVaughan, a retired Presbyterian minister, said she expects it will cost more than $25,000 to fix the split-level home in Manchester, Mo., where she has lived for 27 years.
"I had retired," said DeVaughan, 70. "I guess I'll keep working."
Home repair businesses, especially those specializing in repairs to basements and foundations, can barely keep up with demand. Drought-related home damage is reported in 40 of the 48 contiguous states, and experts say damage to homes could exceed $1 billion.
Dan Jaggers, a board member of the Basement Health Association, a Dayton, Ohio-based trade group for basement and foundation repair businesses, said this year's drought is probably the worst for homes since the late 1950s. Houses in the central U.S. -- from Louisiana up through the Dakotas -- are getting the worst of it, but significant damage is being reported all across the country, he said.
The lack of moisture in the ground has been causing the soil to crack open and pull away from homes' concrete bases.
"It's very common right now to walk around the outside of somebody's home and see gaps in the soil wide enough to put your fist in," said Jason Courtney of the St. Louis-area repair firm Helitech.
All of the movement from the shifting soil can cause cracks in basement walls or floors. But the damage doesn't necessarily stop there.
"When the foundations move, they cause structural damage that can lead to problems above the ground," said Matt Stock, owner of U.S. Waterproofing in the Chicago area. "Windows don't open properly. You can get large cracks in the foundation wall, cracks in brick work and mortar, cracks in drywall."
Repairs are expensive because they involve more than simply patching up the cracks. Oftentimes, piers must be installed beneath a home to help it better withstand shifts in the soil.
Scott Knoche, a 48-year-old physical therapist, is installing 33 piers that cost about $1,000 each at his two-story home in the Kansas City suburb of Lee's Summit. Throw in the new driveway, sidewalk and landscaping, and his total bill is expected to reach $50,000.
Knoche said he began noticing problems last summer, when drywall in the home began cracking and doors wouldn't open. But things got much worse during this year's drought. The back deck sank about 10 inches into the ground, and rooms inside began to tilt -- some up to 4 inches, making it awkward to even walk.
"We called it the fun house," Knoche said.
More Details: Take precautions, tackle problems
Insurance typically covers the cost of sudden disasters only, such as floods or fires. Drought-related damage is seldom covered.
Experts say the best bet is to take precautions to protect the foundation. Homeowners should watch for gaps in the soil near the foundation and should keep that soil as moist as possible. Some experts also suggest placing mulch, which can slow evaporation, around landscaping near the foundation.
Jason Courtney of Helitech in the St. Louis area, which does such repairs, said that once a problem is suspected, homeowners should act quickly.
"As soon as you see cracks or doors and windows stick, it's best to get a reputable company out there to look at it," Courtney said. "The longer you go, the more expensive it's going to become."
The original article is available at Detroit Free Press.
(Jim Salter, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The quake set off car alarms, shook items off shelves and sent many coastal residents fleeing for higher ground before the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center lifted all tsunami alerts it had issued for the Philippines and neighboring countries from Indonesia to Japan, and for Pacific islands as far away as the Northern Marianas.
"It was very strong. My house was making sounds," Bemruel Noel, a member of the Philippine House of Representatives, said in a telephone interview from Tacloban city on the eastern coast of Leyte island, where the quake set off a small stampede of residents.
"You talk to God with an earthquake that strong," he said.
Tacloban resident Digna Marco said the quake toppled a figurine on top of her TV set and that her son had to hold their desktop computer to prevent it from falling to the floor. The lights over her dining room were swinging, she said.
One house collapsed in southern Cagayan de Oro city, on the main southern island of Mindanao, killing a 54-year-old woman and injuring her 5-year-old grandson, who was being treated in a hospital, said Vicente Emano, the city's mayor.
The quake generated only small tsunami waves of about just over an inch along the eastern Philippine coast near Legazpi city and another nearby location, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said.
Initial tsunami warnings had prompted many residents to head inland.
Benito Ramos, a retired general who heads the country's disaster-response agency, said in an advisory broadcast nationwide that residents should be on the alert for more quakes.
"Don't sleep, especially those in the eastern seaboard … because there might be aftershocks," he said.
The quake, with preliminary magnitude 7.6, hit at a depth of 21.7 miles and was centered 66 miles east of Samar Island, the U.S. Geological Survey said.
The quake knocked out power in several towns and cities across the central and southern Philippines, though it was restored in some areas later Friday, according to rescuers and local radio reports.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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"The (computer) models show that there will be both more daytime heat waves and ones where it is warmer and more humid at night," said researcher Kristen Guirguis, who wrote the study with her Scripps colleague Alexander Gershunov.
Guirguis was referring to the type of uncomfortably warm nighttime weather that people in coastal San Diego County experienced in the middle of this month.
The study does not say how much stronger heat waves will get, or how frequent they will become. It simply points to a general pattern that Scripps says is already occurring, notably during summer months.
"Given the high coastal population density and low acclimatization to heat, especially humid heat, this trend bodes ill for coastal communities, jeopardizing public health and stressing energy resources," the study says.
(Gary Robbins, U-T)
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Two to 3 feet of water inundated state Route 79 near Oak Grove, one mile west of Chihuahua Valley Road, according to the California Highway Patrol. Some vehicles were stranded in the flow, which included some large tree branches, around 2:30 p.m.
To the east in the desert, a 2-foot boulder washed onto state Route 78 near Shelter Valley. A plow was used to push the boulder off the road about 3 p.m.
San Felipe, between Julian and Borrego Springs, recorded 1.1 inches of rain. In Riverside County, flash flooding was reported near March Air Reserve Base, which recorded 1.53 inches of rain in an hour and 2.27 inches in two hours. A wind gust of 61 mph was also recorded at the base.
"It's been a pretty active day, with all the lightning, wind and rain," National Weather Service forecaster Mark Moede said in San Diego.
Rainfall totals included Oak Grove, 0.28; Ranchita, 0.03; Julian, 0.71; Descanso, 0.76; Mount Laguna, 0.09; Borrego Springs, 0.69; and Ocotillo Wells, 0.37. Palomar Mountain (0.56 of an inch) and Campo (0.24) each set rainfall records for the date.
A chance of thunderstorms remains in the mountains and deserts at least through today.
Weather service forecasters say there's a chance that remnant moisture from Hurricane Ileana, which is southwest of the tip of Baja California, could move over Southern California late Saturday night. If that happens, areas west of the mountains could get some light sprinkles.
A high-surf advisory is in effect for the county coastline through 6 p.m. Monday due to waves kicked by Ileana and storms in the Southern Hemisphere.
On Wednesday night, residents in East County got an unexpected lightning show.
A thunderstorm that formed over the mountains moved east to the inland valleys, and lightning was seen in areas including Jamul, Harbison Canyon, Granite Hills, El Cajon, La Mesa and Spring Valley, Moede said.
He said the storm was unusual in that forecasters did not expect winds to push the cell into the valleys.
(Rob Krier, U-T)
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Fire spokeswoman Madonna Lengerich said evacuation orders remained in effect Thursday for hundreds of residents in northwest Siskiyou County as the Goff fire continued to threaten about 80 homes in Seiad Valley. Lengerich said residents may be allowed to return home today as crews continue reinforcing containment lines. The fire was 25 percent contained after scorching 27 square miles.
Meanwhile, 2,000 firefighters were extinguishing hot spots and strengthening control lines in the rugged North Pass Fire northeast of Covelo in Mendocino County. Spokesman Stanley Bercovitz said Thursday the fire threatened 64 homes and an additional 70 structures. At least 11 have been destroyed. The blaze remained 28 percent contained after burning more than 53 square miles.
Also Thursday, rapidly expanding wildfires across a broad swath of southern Montana have caused injuries and burned homes, buildings and vehicles, authorities said.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The huge spiral weather system weakened to a tropical depression as it crawled inland, but it caught many places off guard by following a meandering, unpredictable path. The storm's excruciatingly slow movement meant that Isaac practically parked over low-lying towns and threw off great sheets of water for hours.
"I was blindsided. Nobody expected this," said Richard Musatchia, who fled his water- filled home in LaPlace, northwest of New Orleans.
Inside the fortified levees that protected New Orleans, bursts of sunshine streamed through the thick clouds, and life began to return to normal. But beyond the city, people got their first good look at Isaac's damage: Hundreds of homes were underwater. Half the state was without power at one point. Thousands were staying at shelters.
And the damage may not be done. Even more rain was expected in Louisiana before the storm finally drifts into Arkansas and Missouri.
Isaac dumped as much as 16 inches in some areas, and about 500 people had to be rescued by boat or high-water vehicles. At least two deaths were reported.
Five feet of water poured into Musatchia's home before a neighbor passed by with a boat and evacuated him and his 6-year-old boxer, Renny.
He piled two suitcases, a backpack and a few smaller bags onto the boat and said that was all he had left. He abandoned a brand-new Cadillac and a Harley- Davidson. "People have their generators, because they thought the power would go out, but no one expected" so much water, Musatchia said. Other evacuees were picked up by National Guard vehicles, buses and pickup trucks.
Daphine and David Newman fled their newly decorated home with two trash bags of clothing. They have lived in their subdivision since 1992 and never had water in their home from previous storms, not even Hurricane Katrina. The comparison was common since Isaac hit on the seventh anniversary of the devastating 2005 storm, though the differences were stark. Katrina was more powerful, coming ashore as a Category 3 storm. Isaac was a Category 1 at its peak. Katrina barreled into the state and quickly moved through. Isaac crept across the landscape at less than 10 mph and wobbled.
David Newman was frustrated that the government spent billions of dollars reinforcing New Orleans levees after Katrina, only to see the water inundating surrounding regions. "The water's got to go somewhere," he said. The sudden call for evacuations so long after the storm made landfall provoked a debate about whether anyone was to blame.
Jefferson Parish Council President Chris Roberts said forecasters at the National Hurricane Center in Miami needed a new way of measuring the danger that goes beyond wind speed.
"The risk that a public official has is, people say, 'Aw, it's a Category 1 storm, and you guys are out there calling for mandatory evacuations,'" Roberts said. Hundreds of people in lower Jefferson chose to ride out the storm — and many of them had to be rescued, he said.
Along the shores of Lake Ponchartrain near New Orleans, officials sent scores of buses and dozens of high-water vehicles to help evacuate about 3,000 people as floodwaters lapped against houses and stranded cars.
(Cain Burdeau, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Isaac arrived exactly seven years after Hurricane Katrina and passed slightly to the west of New Orleans, where the city's fortified levee system easily handled the assault.
The city's biggest problems seemed to be downed power lines, scattered tree limbs and minor flooding. One person was reported killed, compared with 1,800 deaths from Katrina in Louisiana and Mississippi. And police reported few problems with looting. Mayor Mitch Landrieu ordered a dusk-to-dawn curfew just to be sure.
But in Plaquemines Parish, a sparsely populated area south of the city outside the federal levee system, dozens of people were stranded in flooded coastal areas and had to be rescued. The storm pushed water over an 18-mile levee and put so much pressure on it that authorities planned to intentionally puncture the floodwall to relieve the strain. "I'm getting text messages from all over asking for help," said Joshua Brockhaus, an electrician who was rescuing neighbors in his boat. "I'm going back out there."
By mid-afternoon, Isaac had been downgraded to a tropical storm. The Louisiana National Guard wrapped up rescue operations in Plaquemines Parish, saying they felt confident they had gotten everyone out and there were no serious injuries. And, they would stay in the area over the coming days to help, National Guard spokesman Capt. Lance Cagnolatti said. Isaac's maximum sustained winds had decreased to 60 mph by Wednesday night. Even at its strongest, Isaac was far weaker than Hurricane Katrina, which crippled New Orleans in 2005. Because Isaac's coiled bands of rain and wind were moving at 5 mph — about the pace of a brisk walk — the threat of storm surges and flooding was expected to last into a second night as the immense comma-shaped system crawled across Louisiana. "We didn't think it was going to be like that," Brockhaus said. "The storm stayed over the top of us. For Katrina, we got 8 inches of water. Now, we have 13 feet." In Plaquemines Parish, about two dozen people who defied evacuation orders needed to be rescued. The stranded included two police officers whose car became stuck. The storm knocked out power to as many as 700,000 people, stripped branches off trees and flattened fields of sugar cane so completely they looked as if a tank had driven over them.
Plaquemines Parish ordered a mandatory evacuation for the west bank of the Mississippi below Belle Chasse because of worries about a storm surge. The order affected about 3,000 people, including a nursing home with 112 residents. West of New Orleans in St. John the Baptist Parish, flooding from Isaac forced 1,500 people to evacuate. And Gov. Bobby Jindal's office said thousands in the area needed to evacuate. Rising water closed off all main thoroughfares into the parish, and in many areas, water lapped up against houses and left cars stranded. After wind-driven water spilled over the levee in Plaquemines Parish, state officials said they would cut a hole in it as soon as weather allowed and equipment could be brought to the site.
In coastal Mississippi, wildlife officers used small motorboats Wednesday to rescue at least two dozen people from a neighborhood Isaac flooded in Pearlington. Back in New Orleans, the storm canceled remembrance ceremonies for those killed by Katrina. Since that catastrophe, the city's levee system has been bolstered by $14 billion in federal repairs and improvements. The bigger, stronger levees were tested for the first time by Hurricane Gustav in 2008.
Army Corps of Engineers spokeswoman Rachel Rodi said the flood-control measures were working "as intended" during Isaac.
(Cain Burdeau, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The focus has been on New Orleans as Isaac takes dead aim at the city, but the impact will be felt well beyond the city limits. The storm's winds could be felt more than 200 miles from the storm's center.
The Gulf Coast region has been saturated thanks to a wet summer, and some officials have worried more rain could make it easy for trees and power lines to fall over in the wet ground. Too much water also could flood crops, and wind could topple plants such as corn and cotton.
"A large, slow-moving system is going to pose a lot of problems: winds, flooding, storm surge and even potentially down the road river flooding," said Richard Knabb, director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami. "That could happen for days after the event."
The storm's potential for destruction was not lost on Alabama farmer Bert Driskell, who raises peanuts, cotton, wheat, cattle and sod on several thousand acres near Grand Bay, in Mobile County.
"We don't need a lot of water this close to harvest," Driskell said.
However, Isaac could bring some relief to places farther inland where farmers have struggled with drought. It also may help replenish a Mississippi River that has at times been so low that barge traffic is halted so engineers can scrape the bottom to deepen it.
Forecasters predicted Isaac would intensify into a Category 2 hurricane, with winds of about 100 mph, by early Wednesday around the time it's expected to make landfall. The current forecast track has the storm aimed at New Orleans, but hurricane warnings extended across 280 miles from Morgan City, La., to the Florida-Alabama state line. It could become the first hurricane to hit the Gulf Coast since 2008.
Evacuations were ordered for some low-lying areas, and across the region, people boarded up homes, stocked up on supplies and got ready for the storm. Schools, universities and businesses closed in many places.
Still, all the preparation may not matter if flooding becomes the greatest threat. In Pascagoula, Miss., Nannette Clark was supervising a work crew installing wood coverings over windows of her more than 130-year-old home. But she said all that won't matter if a storm surge reaches her home, as it did after Katrina in 2005.
"The water was up to the first landing of the stairs," she said. "So I get very nervous about it."
Isaac's approach on the eve of the Katrina anniversary invited obvious comparisons, but Isaac is nowhere near as powerful as Katrina was when it struck on Aug. 29, 2005. Katrina at one point reached Category 5 status with winds of over 157 mph.
(Kevin McGill, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The shaking occurred beneath the desert 90 miles east of San Diego, south of the Salton Sea, in the gap between the San Andreas and Imperial faults, the U.S. Geological Survey said.
Such swarms usually do not lead to catastrophic events. There was a swarm of shakers beneath the sea in March 2009 that quickly died out.
However, the USGS says there's a 10 percent probability that a much larger quake could occur by late Tuesday afternoon. And Sunday's event was unusually robust, producing 40 quakes measuring 3.0 to 5.5 between 2:17 a.m. and 5 p.m. on Sunday.
"There's a small chance that something bigger could happen," said Bob Dollar, a seismologist at the USGS.
The swarm began late Saturday night with a series of small quakes on the Brawley Fault Zone, east of San Diego. The region produced a 5.3 quake at 12:31 p.m. Sunday, then a 5.5 shaker at 1:57 p.m. In an apparently unrelated event, there was a 2.0 quake at 2:55 p.m. Sunday in Julian.
The shaking was widely felt, but it didn't appear that either quake caused significant damage in San Diego County. The San Diego Police Department said it had not received reports of significant damage.
"I am from Boston, and this is not cute," said Joey Lozada of San Diego. "But it was fun watching things move in the house without nobody touching them."
Jan Steller of Allied Gardens said the second of the big quakes "was strong enough to cause the chandelier in our two-story foyer to swing and my desk chair to roll. The earlier one this morning did not, although we felt it move the house."
Frances Rogers was on the sixth floor of an office building in downtown San Diego and said, "The one at 2 p.m. felt stronger — worse than the one at 12:30 p.m. In these buildings that are designed to sway, you really feel them. It felt like they last a long time, just watching the blinds and doors moving, and waiting for it to end."
In Brawley, Mike Patel, manager of the Townhouse Inn & Suites, said the shaking knocked over and broke televisions in several of the hotel's rooms and knocked items off shelves. The earthquakes shook a lot of water out of the hotel's pool.
"Every 15 minutes you feel something," he said.
Brawley City Manager Rosanna Moore said the city had no reports of injuries as of 2:40 p.m. when the city was setting up its emergency operations center. A strike team from Riverside County was headed south to help at the center.
Moore said a number of businesses in the city's main street corridor sustained damage to their facades, including broken windows. She said the city's firefighters and police officers are evaluating city buildings and responding to calls as needed.
Pioneers Memorial Hospital in Brawley evacuated patients as a precaution to inspect for damage. The 107-bed hospital requested help from the local Red Cross to provide canopies for the evacuated patients to shield them from the sun in the 103-degree heat.
"We want to keep them as comfortable as possible," said Teri Klemchuk, spokeswoman for the Red Cross of San Diego and Imperial counties.
Brawley Mayor George Nava said there were reports of power outages and roof collapses, but mostly lots of broken glass. About 30 mobile homes were knocked off their foundations, he said. He estimated that businesses in the city of about 25,000 people lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in damaged merchandise.
City officials were still working to determine if the first day of school set for today was going to happen as scheduled. A damage assessment of the schools was set for late Sunday, Nava said.
Pastor Bob Feist of First Christian Church of Brawley said the quakes toppled bookcases, shook items off walls and caused dishes to fall and break.
Feist said he was driving when one of the larger quakes struck and it shook his car as it was moving down the road. He said attendees left Sunday services unusually abruptly.
"Most of our folks stay around and talk for a while, but the church emptied out kind of quickly today," Feist said. "Everybody wanted to see the damage at their homes."
When the second of the two big earthquakes hit, Brawley resident Frederic Din was driving down Main Street, heading home to inspect damage from the first quake.
"The car just shook like crazy," Din said. "I had to stop in the middle of the street and ride it out."
The Imperial Valley Press posted a photo of a collapsed patio structure, and Facebook users posted various photos of items from grocery store shelves and home bookshelves that had crashed to the ground.
Sunday's swarm of small quakes is not unusual, especially along the Brawley Fault Zone, seismologists said. Dollar noted that since 1932, there have been 15 earthquakes there measuring 5.0 to 5.9, and one that measured over 6.0.
The region is close to the southern terminus of the San Andreas Fault, which is the geological dividing line between the Pacific and North Atlantic tectonic plates. USGS and Caltech researchers say that Southern California could suffer the "Big One" if the entire southern San Andreas Fault breaks.
"The Brawley Fault Zone is very active seismically, but it is unusual to have two 5.0-plus quakes occur so close together in time. We'll have to watch to see what happens," said Tom Rockwell, a San Diego State seismologist who studies the San Andreas and Imperial fault systems.
"The big concern is if a moderate earthquake would lead to a larger earthquake on the San Andreas," Rockwell said.
(Gary Robbins, Kristina Davis & Matt Clark, U-T)
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The National Weather Service issued a red flag warning across a wide area of Northern California, with forecasters predicting wind gusts up to 35 miles per hour in some of the fire zones.
The stronger winds come after firefighters were able to improve containment lines during the past few days around the Ponderosa Fire, which is burning about 25 miles southeast of Redding, or about 150 miles north of Sacramento.
"In the past 24 hours the fire has not grown in size, but our main concern today (Sunday) is with winds picking up," said California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection spokesman Daniel Berlant.
"The winds have a lot of potential to spread this fire or to allow it to spot over the perimeter line," Berlant said.
The blaze, sparked by a lightning strike on Aug. 18, was 74 percent contained after about 43 square miles.
The wildfire has destroyed 64 homes and 20 outbuildings, mostly near the tiny community of Manton.
About 300 homes are still considered threatened, but despite the increased winds, officials still expected crews to have the blaze contained today.
Asecondmajor fire in the region, this one burning in the Plumas National Forest since July 29, has expanded to more than 104 square miles.
The nearly 1,400 firefighters on the lines have the blaze 61 percent contained, but officials also expressed concerns about gusting winds.
"We've got a lot of wind on the fire right now," said fire spokesman Larry Helmerick, as he spoke from a tent that he said was being shaken by the wind.
"We're just hoping to hold it today, because we have today, tomorrow and maybe part of Tuesday where we have this wind-driven stuff," he said.
Firefighters also faced challenges from the wind as they battled a fire burning outside the Mendocino County community of Covelo.
One home and five outbuildings have been burned since the blaze stared Aug. 18, and a fire engine was destroyed by the fire Saturday, said fire spokesman Ralph Gonzales.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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As the storm battered the Florida Keys and showed the potential of turning into a Category 2 hurricane, it appeared that the convention city would be spared the brunt of its force. It was expected to make landfall Tuesday or early Wednesday somewhere on the Gulf Coast.
But Isaac was nonetheless wreaking havoc with the convention schedule, having already delayed today's opening by a day, and continuing to upend the travel plans of many of the estimated 50,000 delegates, media members and others planning to attend.
Romney campaign strategist Russ Schriefer told reporters Sunday evening that all of today's headline speakers had been rescheduled for later in the week and that other daytime speakers had been dropped from the program or had their speeches shortened. The program will begin at 7 p.m. Tuesday instead of 8 p.m., but there are no other plans to cancel or shift events, he said.
Among those who canceled or put a hold on their appearances at the convention were the governors of four states likely to be most heavily affected by the storm: Rick Scott of host state Florida, Louisiana's Bobby Jindal, Mississippi's Phil Bryant and Alabama's Robert Bentley.
What did not get interrupted, however, was the campaign combat. Leading Republicans took to the airwaves to give a preview of the message they plan to deliver at the convention.
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who will be officially anointed as the GOP nominee this week, attempted to shore up his support among female voters in an interview on Fox News Sunday. He accused President Barack Obama and the Democrats of exploiting recent controversies, including the one that Rep. Todd Akin, the Republican Senate candidate in Missouri, created with his comments about rape.
"It really is sad, isn't it, with all the issues that America faces, for the Obama campaign to continue to stoop to such a low level," Romney said.
Obama, in an interview with The Associated Press, had accused Romney of taking "extreme positions that are very consistent with positions that a number of House Republicans have taken. And whether he actually believes in those or not, I have no doubt that he would carry forward some of the things that he's talked about."
Indeed, the rough weather itself became a metaphor as the Republicans warmed up for their convention. "You know, tidal waves often follow hurricanes. And in November, a tidal wave is coming," thundered Ted Cruz, a tea party favorite and a U.S. Senate candidate from Texas, at a pre-convention gathering sponsored by the Faith and Freedom Coalition, an organization that seeks to mobilize evangelical voters.
Emergency management officials had plans in place to evacuate Tampa, which is prone to flooding. Heavy rains could bring three to five feet of water.
Democrats, who had planned a counteroffensive, scrapped some of their plans, too, including a Sunday afternoon news conference with the Democratic National Committee chairwoman and local officials. Vice President Joe Biden also postponed plans to campaign in Florida today and Tuesday.
Even with the most severe weather headed elsewhere, convention planners are mindful of the schedule and the specter of holding a big event when another region of the country is dealing with an emergency.
The roll-call vote that would make Romney's nomination official, which was planned for tonight, is now scheduled for Tuesday.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Much of the areas along the Gulf Coast, including New Orleans, which was ravaged seven years ago to the week by Hurricane Katrina, received either tropical storm or hurricane warnings on Sunday and the governors of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama declared states of emergency in anticipation of Isaac.
The Florida Keys, which were the first land mass in the United States to feel Isaac's impact, barely shuddered as the storm sideswiped it with rain and occasional bursts of sharp wind; residents along the chain of islands, long accustomed to storms, were mostly unfazed, while government officials expressed relief.
"It's not what it could have been," said Irene Toner, Monroe County director of Emergency Management. "I consider us pretty lucky so far."
Forecasters said the storm could develop into a Category 1 hurricane — the weakest — by today, once it begins its unimpeded journey up the warm waters of the Gulf.
Tampa, where most of the formal events on the first day of the Republican National Convention were canceled today because of uncertainty over the storm, will likely be spared. At the moment, Tampa Bay is expected to feel the sting of Isaac's wind and rain but should escape the storm's most punishing weather, a reprieve to organizers who fretted most of the week over the storm. An estimated 65,000 people are expected here for the convention.
"Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday ought to be fine," Mayor Bob Buckhorn of Tampa said Sunday.
But Isaac's shift north and west — farther away from Florida's south and central coast — has prompted heightened concern elsewhere. Hurricane experts now predict that Isaac could smack right into the northern and western Gulf Coast, perhaps even New Orleans. By then, it could jump to a Category 2 hurricane with 100 mph winds, projections showed. The storm's latest shift, coming three days before the seventh anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, was met with great concern in that region.
Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana said that he would skip his scheduled speech in Tampa on Tuesday but might speak on Wednesday, if the storm cooperates. The Republican governors in several other Gulf Coast states — Florida, Alabama and Mississippi — also announced that the storm had forced them to alter or drop their plans for the convention.
Jindal on Sunday asked for voluntary evacuations in 15 low-lying parishes on or near the Gulf Coast and authorized the National Guard to mobilize 4,000 members, if needed. The community of Grand Isle was placed under a mandatory evacuation order by its mayor.
"We always have to hope for the best even as we prepare for the worst," Jindal said at a news conference in Baton Rouge. "Right now, our absolute top priority has to be the safety of our people."
The mayor of New Orleans, Mitch Landrieu, said on Sunday that if an evacuation were ordered in the city, the Superdome, the convention center and the airport would not be available for emergency shelter. "We've walked through this many, many, many times," he said. "You have to be prepared to evacuate in the event that an evacuation is called."
Shell and BP oil companies curtailed drilling and evacuated oil workers in the Gulf.
Several beach communities between Tampa and Naples, including Fort Myers Beach, were ordered [to] evacuate on Sunday as a precaution. In South Florida, officials had also taken precautions, closing schools and opening shelters. Airports remained open but hundreds of flights were canceled.
Residents fueled up their cars and generators, took stock of batteries, moved potentially airborne objects inside and bought extra water. In the Keys, most businesses put up shutters and closed early on Sunday. But most people in South Florida took Isaac in stride.
As Isaac shuffled toward the Florida Keys, residents, who tend to view a tropical storm as a trifle, greeted it nonchalantly, and, in some quarters, as an excuse to party indoors. They took a few precautions and then met up in bars or with friends. Key West's last brush with a hurricane was Wilma in 2005, which caused widespread flooding.
(Lizette Alvarez, NYT NEWS SERVICE)
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Forecasters said the storm would likely stay below hurricane force until it reached the Gulf of Mexico on Sunday, and they shifted its projected track back eastward and it remained a possible threat to Tampa, Fla., where the Republican National Convention starts Monday.
Communications in Haiti are often spotty and there were no official reports any damage late Friday. Government and international aid groups in Haiti's capital were prepared to evacuate several thousand people from settlement camps that sprang up in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake. But the main threat appeared aimed at Les Cayes, a city of about 45,000 people on the southwestern coast that is prone to flooding during heavy rain.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Fire crews assessing the rural area determined [on] Tuesday [that] 50 buildings had been destroyed, state fire spokesman Daniel Berlant said.
Officials didn't have an accurate count of how many of the structures were homes, but Berlant noted the buildings were spread across a vast rural area of mostly residential homes.
The blaze, sparked by lightning on Saturday has consumed more than 33 square miles and continues to threaten hundreds of homes.
Nearly 1,900 firefighters were battling the fire in rugged, densely forested terrain as it threatened 3,500 homes in the remote towns of Shingletown, Manton and Viola, about 170 miles north of Sacramento.
The fast-moving fire is one of many burning across the West, where dry lightning has sparked up grass, brush and timber, bringing an early start to the fire season.
Gov. Jerry Brown announced Tuesday National Guard troops will be assisting with the firefighting efforts. The news comes a day after the Federal Emergency Management Agency said it is offering federal funds to help fight the blaze.
The fire forced the closure of Highway 44 and other roads, and prompted the declaration of an emergency in Shasta County.
Elsewhere in California, a massive wildfire in Plumas National Forest grew over due to winds. The blaze, about 120 miles north of Sacramento, has consumed 98 square miles since it started at the end of July and threatens about 900 homes.
In Mendocino County, the sheriff’s office issued a mandatory evacuation for residents in Covelo because of a wildfire that has burned more than 15 square miles of thick timber and rugged terrain. One outbuilding has been destroyed and 45 homes were threatened by the blaze, officials said. The fire was sparked by lightning Saturday in a remote area, making it difficult for fire crews to access.
In Washington state, fire crews to the north were hoping to fully contain a week-old wildfire that has destroyed 51 homes and 26 outbuildings, and damaged six others.
(Haven Daley, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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"All we can do is pray," evacuee Jerry Nottingham told reporters.
The fast-moving Ponderosa Fire was one of many burning across the West, where lightning, dry temperatures and gusting winds have brought an early start to fire season.
Nearly 1,900 firefighters were battling the Ponderosa Fire in rugged, densely forested terrain as it threatened 3,500 homes in the towns of Manton, Shingletown and Viola, about 170 miles north of Sacramento. "These are the largest number of homes we’ve had threatened so far this year," state fire spokesman Daniel Berlant said. "The grass, brush and timber up here are so dry, and once the lightning with no rain struck, the flames began to spread quickly."
The fire has destroyed seven homes while blackening more than 25 square miles. It was just 30 percent contained after beginning Saturday.
The fire forced the closure of Highway 44 and other roads, and prompted the declaration of an emergency in Shasta County. The Red Cross set up an evacuation center at a sports complex in Redding, where dozens of people, from the elderly to infants, as well as about a dozen dogs, were given shelter.
One evacuee, Bonnie Maloy, who escaped her home in Shingletown, along with husband Bill, described the scene as they fled the flames.
"Frantic at first, then I said, 'Let's calm down,' and we got everything that's important, things we couldn't replace: animals, kids, photo albums," she said.
Another massive wildfire burning to the south in Plumas National Forest since July 29 grew larger over the weekend as strong winds pushed the flames past fire lines established late last week.
The blaze, about 120 miles north of Sacramento, has consumed more than 79 square miles and was threatening about 900 homes. It was 37 percent contained.
(Haven Daley and Terry Collins, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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(U-T)
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The fire that sparked around 11:30 a.m. Saturday has destroyed four homes and consumed nearly 19 square miles near the towns of Manton, Shingletown and Viola, fire spokesman Daniel Berlant said. About 3,500 homes spread out across a rural area along the border of Tehama and Shasta counties are threatened as the fire continues to grow, he said.
"A good majority are immediately threatened, and a good number are in the path of the fire," Berlant said Sunday. "We will be battling it hard today to protect as many of those homes as possible."
The fire's cause has not been determined, but officials said it started after a series of lightning strikes in the area.
No part of the blaze was contained Sunday afternoon, and fire activity had picked up, Berlant said.
John Cluff, 42, told the Redding Record Searchlight that he was forced to flee his home before the evacuations were issued. He went back for his dog about 3:30 p.m.
"The fire basically chased me out of the property," he said. "All I could see was black smoke and flames."
The Shasta County Sheriff's Department has declared a state of emergency for the county, with evacuations expected to continue through the night. The agency also was closing some local roads.
The Red Cross set up an evacuation center in Redding, about 35 miles to the west of the blaze.
The fire, burning in a rugged area of thick forests about 170 miles north of Sacramento, is one of a handful of new fires in Northern California.
Another wildfire that started Saturday has consumed about 1.5 square miles east of the Mendocino County community of Covelo. That blaze, which was sparked by lightning, was burning in a remote area of thick timber and rugged terrain, making it difficult for fire crews to access. A third new fire has scorched about half a square mile in a remote area of Shasta County.
Meanwhile, a massive wildfire that has been burning in the Plumas National Forest since July 29 grew larger Sunday as strong winds pushed the flames past fire lines on the fire's northeast edge.
"Winds picked up, and it got very dry in the afternoon," fire spokesman Brad Pitassi said. "It made a good push in that area" The blaze, about 120 miles north of Sacramento, has consumed nearly 70 square miles and continued to threaten about 900 homes. The fire is 38 percent contained, with full containment expected Aug. 31.
Also in California, a wildfire in Lassen Volcanic National Park was 51 percent contained after consuming more than 43 square miles. Officials expected firefighters would have the blaze contained by Tuesday.
Elsewhere in the West, fires also continued to rage in Idaho, Utah and Washington.
(John S. Marshall, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Searing temperatures and drought scorched Eggerling's land in southeast Nebraska, leaving little grass to feed his 100 cattle. Then Congress left for a five-week break without agreeing on aid to help ranchers through one of the worst droughts in the nation’s history.
That means it will be September before Eggerling and other ranchers can even hope for disaster aid legislation that includes cash to buy feed until they would normally send their cattle to feedlots or slaughter in the fall or winter. For some, it's already too late. Out of grass and out of cash, they've sold their animals.
For others, time is rapidly running out as they try to hold on. Their decisions will affect the price and supply of meat for months, perhaps years, to come.
"I'd like to see every one of the senators and congressmen go out into one of these widespread, drought-stricken areas and spend a day," said Eggerling, 44, of Martell, Neb. "Walk around and see the effects of what's going on. Look at the local economies and see what's going to happen to them. Then they can go back to Washington with a real perspective and say, 'Hey; we need to do something.' " Most farmers are having a hard year with drought and unusually high temperatures in the middle of the country burning up everything from corn to cabbage. But ranchers are in a particularly precarious position because most don't have access to federally subsidized insurance programs that cover crops like corn and soybeans.
Private companies won't insure grazing land because it's too hard to predict losses, and ranchers say pilot programs tested by the U.S. Department of Agriculture are too expensive and pay out little when there's a loss, Nebraska Farm Service Agency Director Dan Steinkruger said.
The White House announced last week that the federal government will buy up to $170 million worth of pork and other meat for food assistance programs in an effort to help drought-stricken farmers. The Defense Department also was expected to encourage its vendors to speed up meat purchases in an effort to prop up prices with a glut on the market expected in the next few months.
Feed prices soared amid the drought, and livestock farmers have been selling off animals for months as they run out of money. The meat is expected to hit grocery stores this fall, with prices dropping briefly and then rising early next year. Meanwhile, farmers are getting a fraction of what their animals would normally be worth at sales.
"It's not like we can hold our products — like setting a shirt on a shelf until it sells for the price we set," said Kristen Hassebrook, a spokeswoman for the Nebraska Cattlemen, a trade group. "We can't just tell that steer or heifer to stop eating for a couple of days until the market share goes up. If we can't feed that animal, we have to sell it for whatever the price is that day."
The Obama administration also has offered low-interest emergency loans, opened federal land for grazing and distributed $30 million to get water to livestock. Farmers say they'll take what help they can get, but emergency loans come with a tangle of red tape and aren’t available to everyone. Water is appreciated, but animals need to eat, and even with grazing on some federal land, hay is in short supply.
The House approved $383 million in disaster relief earlier this month, but Congress went home before the Senate acted on the bill. The Senate had previously passed a disaster aid package as part of a five-year farm bill, but GOP leaders in the House refused to bring that to a vote because many Republicans object to the nearly $80 billion included for the food stamp program.
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The Colorado fire, burning in a mountainous area about 15 miles west of Fort Collins, grew to 22 square miles within about a day of being reported and has destroyed or damaged 18 structures.
Strong winds, meanwhile, grounded aircraft fighting a 40-square-mile wildfire near the mountain community of Ruidoso in southern New Mexico. Crews were working to build a fire line around the blaze, which started Friday and has damaged or destroyed 36 structures.
It wasn't immediately clear how many of the structures lost were homes. "We're still trying to take a tally," Kerry Gladden, public information officer for Ruidoso, said late Sunday afternoon.
In Colorado, the fire sent up heavy smoke, obscuring the sun and creating an eerie, orange dusk in the middle of the day. The smell of smoke drifted into the Denver area and smoke spread as far away as central Nebraska, western Kansas and Texas.
The latest New Mexico fire is smaller than the Whitewater-Baldy fire — the largest in the state's history — but it's more concerning to authorities because it started closer to homes, said Dan Ware, a spokesman for the New Mexico State Forestry Division. He said the number of Ruidoso evacuees was in the hundreds, but he didn't have an exact figure.
Elsewhere Sunday, firefighters were battling a wildfire that blackened 6 square miles in Wyoming's Guernsey State Park.
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At least three employees at the factory — two immigrants and an Italian engineer checking the building's stability — were among those killed Tuesday in the second deadly quake in nine days to strike a region of Italy that hadn't considered itself particularly quake-prone.
By late Tuesday, the death toll stood at 16, with one person missing: a worker at the machinery factory in the small town of San Felice Sul Panaro. About 350 people also were injured in the magnitude-5.8 quake north of Bologna in Emilia Romagna, one of Italy’s more productive agricultural and industrial regions.
The injured included a 65-year-old woman who was pulled out by rescuers after lying for 12 hours in the rubble of her apartment's kitchen in Cavezzo, another town hard hit by the quake. Firefighters said a piece of furniture, which had toppled over, saved her from being crushed by the wreckage. She was taken to a hospital for treatment.
The building had been damaged in the first quake, on May 20, and had been vacant since.
The woman had just gone back inside Tuesday morning to retrieve some clothes when the latest temblor knocked down the building, firefighters said.
Factories, barns and churches fell, dealing a second blow to a region where thousands remained homeless from the May 20 temblor, much stronger in intensity, at magnitude 6.0. The two quakes struck one of the most productive regions in Italy at a particularly crucial moment, as the country faces enormous pressure to grow its economy to stave off the continent's debt crisis. Italy's economic growth has been stagnant for at least a decade, and the national economy is forecast to contract by 1.2 percent this year. The area encompassing the cities of Modena, Mantua and Bologna is prized for its super-car production, churning out Ferraris, Maseratis and Lamborghinis; its world-famous Parmesan cheese, and less well-known but critical to the economy — its machinery companies.
Like the May 20 quake, many of the dead in Tuesday's temblor were workers inside huge warehouses, many of them prefabricated, that house factories.
Inspectors have been determining which are safe to re-enter, but economic pressure has sped up renewed production — perhaps prematurely.
Seven people were killed in the May 20 quake.
At a factory close to the epicenter in the city of Medolla, rescue crews searched for three workers who did not turn up at roll call after the quake and were presumed dead.
Premier Mario Monti, tapped to steer the country from financial ruin inNovember, pledged the government would quickly provide help to the area "that is so special, so important and so productive for Italy."
The Coldiretti farm lobby said damage to the agricultural industry, including Parmesan makers whose aging wheels of cheese already suffered in the first quake, had risen to 500 million euros ($626 million) with the second hit. The Modena Chamber of Commerce estimated the first quake had cost businesses 1.5 billion euros, with no fresh estimates available. Ferrari, Maserati and Lamborghini, all centered on Modena, reported no damage, and said workers were evacuated and then allowed to go home to check on their homes and families. Lamborghini planned to keep production halted today.
The quake was felt from Piedmont in northwestern Italy to Venice in the northeast and as far north as Austria. Dozens of aftershocks hit the area, some registering more than magnitude 5.0.
The temblor terrified many of the thousands of people who have been living in tents or cars since the May 20 quake and created a whole new wave of homeless.
Tuesday's quake struck just after 9 a.m. with an epicenter 25 miles northwest of Bologna, according to the U.S. Geological Survey — several miles from where the magnitude-6.0 quake that killed seven people on May 20 was centered.
(Colleen Barry, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The Banner fire, which scorched 5,300 acres, was fully contained as of Tuesday afternoon.
Officials did not provide further details on the type of equipment believed to have caused the fire, citing the ongoing investigation.
The blaze started off Banner Grade on Thursday and burned east, near the community of Shelter Valley and into the desert. No structures were damaged. Four firefighters suffered minor injuries.
Firefighting costs so far are estimated at $4 million, Cal Fire Battalion Chief Nick Schuler said.
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While it left little damage after sweeping ashore with 70 mph winds around midnight Sunday at Jacksonville, Fla., the storm still wrecked much of Connolly's trip. She skipped a graduation ceremony because powerful winds kept her and her daughters from venturing past the beach boardwalk when the storm approached Sunday. She also postponed their drive home Monday as Beryl, downgraded to a tropical depression, continued to dump rain near the Georgia-Florida state line.
"It definitely changed our vacation to unfortunate circumstances that we're not happy with. But you just have to live with it," said Connolly, who at least found the irony of her hometown's name "pretty funny."
Beach trips, backyard barbecues and graveside Memorial Day observances got a good soaking in southeastern Georgia and northern Florida.
Beach lifeguards turned swimmers away from the ocean because of dangerous rip currents from Jacksonville to Tybee Island, Georgia's largest public beach 140 miles to the north. Skip Sasser, who oversees the island's lifeguards as its fire chief, said beach traffic was unusually thin for a holiday. The ocean was declared off-limits to swimmers for a second day in a row.
"It's been raining intermittently, so it's chased a lot of them off," Sasser said. "There was a lot of traffic this morning heading westbound out of Tybee."
Veterans groups, meanwhile, carried out outdoor Memorial Day ceremonies despite the grim forecast.
At Savannah's historic Bonaventure Cemetery — made famous by the book "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" — American Legion members worked through a downpour to make sure its plot for veterans had a small American flag planted by each headstone.
"When we were setting up, I had a different shirt on and I got soaked to the skin. My socks and my underwear probably are, too," said Jim Grismer, commander of American Legion Post 135 in Savannah. "I had so many people trying to talk me into moving it inside. But I said then you can't have the live firing salute and the flag raising."
Aside from ruining holiday plans, the rain was welcome on the Georgia coast for bringing some relief from persistent drought. According to the state climatologist's office, as of May 1, rainfall in Savannah was 15 inches below normal for the past 12 months.
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The Banner Fire is 95 percent contained, up from 90 percent Monday morning, Cal Fire Capt. Nick Shuler said. The fire’s spread has stopped at 5,331 acres.
Cal Fire had expected to declare the Banner Fire fully contained Monday evening, but fire crews were still trying to gain the upper hand on a section of the fire burning in extremely steep terrain, Shuler said.
More than 900 firefighters from several state and local agencies have battled the blaze.
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The Whitewater-Baldy Complex fire continued to grow, burning more than 191 square miles by midday Sunday and was about two miles away from the privately owned ghost town of Mogollon in southwestern New Mexico.
The town was evacuated Saturday due to extreme winds, but no homes there have been destroyed.
Denise Ottaviano, a spokeswoman for the crew fighting the blaze, said the fire remains active near Mogollon, but the blaze hasn't made a significant push toward the town. Crews were working to build a protection line between Mogollon and the fire's western edge. The blaze, however, destroyed a dozen homes and several outbuildings on Wednesday in the community of Willow Creek, which remains under evacuation.
On Sunday, New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez authorized the deployment of 15 National Guard soldiers to help secure areas around the fire.
Meanwhile, crews were building protection lines on the fire's western and northern edges and making preparations to send five helicopters into the air.
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Fire officials in New Mexico said Saturday the Whitewater-Baldy Complex fire has shrunk slightly to 82,000 acres but is zero percent contained because of weather conditions.
The evacuation of Mogollon was ordered because of the extreme wind blowing around the southwestern New Mexico fire. Four helicopters and more than 500 firefighters from around the state were on hand to fight the blaze but still had to contend with "extreme conditions."
Cities as far away as Albuquerque remained under a health alert until this afternoon due to smoke from the fire, which has spread across the state. State officials were warning residents during the Memorial Day weekend to limit outdoor activities, especially if smoke was visible.
Meanwhile on Saturday, crews in Colorado battled a wildfire that has scorched more than 3,000 acres of rugged canyon land near the Colorado-Utah border.
U.S. Forest Service spokesman Steve Segin said the fire started Friday afternoon and is burning in a remote area near Paradox. It's not threatening structures, and no injuries have been reported.
And in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, a wildfire grew by 17 percent to more than 21,000 acres Saturday as officials warned of windy conditions, and welcomed help from water-dumping aircraft from the Michigan National Guard.
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The blaze was 65 percent contained.
Five helicopters were being used to shuttle firefighters to the front lines of the fire, which was burning in steep and inaccessible terrain about 30 miles east of Julian, near Banner Grade and south of state Route 78, Cal Fire spokesman Tom Piranio said.
Winds were estimated at 10 to 15 mph with gusts up to 60 mph, Piranio said.
Six air tankers are also unable to fly due to the weather conditions, the spokesman said.
There were no road closures or evacuations in effect, no injuries reported and no structures damaged, Piranio said.
The fire is expected to burn throughout the weekend, and full containment is not expected until Wednesday, officials said. Its cause is under investigation.
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The new evacuations, at Stagecoach Trails RV Resort, were ordered about 1 p.m. Three sheriff's deputies helped 50 occupants and two horses get out of the park quickly.
County Road S2 was closed between mile marker 27 and Great Sandy Trail Road as winds gusting to 30 mph pushed flames to the south very close to the resort, Cal Fire spokesman Tom Piranio said. He said the trailer park is 40 miles north of the Agua Caliente hot springs resort, which was not in danger.
The fire is expected to continue burning through most of the Memorial Day weekend. About 500 firefighters are battling the blaze.
The cause of the fire, the county's largest this year, remains under investigation. Low clouds and fog at Ramona Airport and in Hemet prevented Cal Fire aircraft from taking off Friday until about 1 p.m., when conditions improved.
A Red Cross spokeswoman said volunteers set up a temporary evacuation center at Borrego Springs High School for the RV resort evacuees, as they did for 14 Shelter Valley residents on Thursday.
The fire broke out about 2:15 p.m. Thursday on private land near the base of the Banner Grade, which connects the mountains east of Julian to the desert floor, Cal Fire Capt. Daryll Piña said.
Gusty breezes drove the flames east, away from a house on the property south of state Route 78 and county Road S2, Piña said.
The blaze then headed toward the Shelter Valley desert community, where deputies helped 100 residents evacuate for several hours on Thursday.
A few went to the evacuation center, and all were allowed to return home by 9:30 p.m.
Thursday night's weather conditions "definitely helped us," Cal Fire spokesman Thomas Shoots said from a fire camp base near Warner Springs on Friday. "The winds picked up, but it stayed moist. Flames were coming toward Shelter Valley, but we were able to stop it at the edge of the community."
Flames shifted south Friday morning, to Granite Mountain, over ground that had burned the day before, and across rugged desert terrain.
"That's what the Great fire burned last year, so it's starting to burn into that old scar," Piña said.
The Great fire scorched more than 2,000 acres near Shelter Valley in October.
The weather Friday helped and hindered firefighting efforts.
The day started out cool and partly cloudy, with temperatures up to 65 degrees, but winds increased in the late afternoon and evening. Gusts up to 50 mph were possible overnight, the National Weather Service said.
Winds will diminish slightly today but will remain strong in the desert area, the weather service said.
Barring a wind shift that would change the direction of the fire today, the blaze is expected to continue a southerly path in an area of largely desolate desert terrain, Piranio said.
Winds also were gusty when a small fire broke out shortly before 5 p.m. Friday near Dulzura south of state Route 94 and Sycamore Canyon Road, but a Cal Fire air attack brought it quickly under control, Piranio said.
Staff writer Susan Shroder contributed to this report.
NB: The winds referred to in this article are NOT Santa Ana winds. In fact, San Diego's weather is cooler than normal. The winds are a result of a cold front pushing down (the jet stream above blows along the SW-NE trending cold front) that brings rain to the north (northern Cali, Oregon, Nevada, Idaho, Montana) and winds to the south.
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Crews have been unable to attack the flames directly because of fierce winds and erratic fire behavior, said fire information officer Iris Estes.
The wind-whipped fire burned through the Willow Creek subdivision on Wednesday afternoon. Officials confirmed 12 homes along with seven small outbuildings were destroyed, and the damage assessment continued Thursday.
No containment was reported.
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Crews have been unable to attack the flames directly because of fierce winds and erratic fire behavior, said fire information officer Iris Estes.
The wind-whipped fire burned through the Willow Creek subdivision on Wednesday afternoon. Officials confirmed 12 homes along with seven small outbuildings were destroyed, and the damage assessment continued Thursday.
No containment was reported.
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The quake struck at 4:04 a.m. Sunday, with its epicenter about 22 miles north of Bologna at a relatively shallow depth of 3.2 miles, the U.S. Geological Survey said. Civil protection agency official Adriano Gumina described it as the worst quake to hit the region since the 1300s.
The four people killed were factory workers on the overnight shift when their buildings, in three separate locations, collapsed, agency chief Franco Gabrielli said, In addition, he said, two women died — apparently of heart attacks that may have been sparked by fear. Sky TG24 TV reported one of them was about 100 years old. Gabrielli said dozens of people were injured.
Premier Mario Monti, in Chicago for the NATO summit, told reporters he was returning to Italy before the meeting ends because of the quake.
The quake struck in the farm region known for production of Parmigiano and Grana cheeses. Italy's farm lobby Coldiretti said some 200,000 huge, round cheeses were damaged, causing a loss to producers of (euro) 50 million ($65 million).
It also said in a statement at least three barn roofs collapsed, trapping an unspecified number of pigs and milk cows inside.
Emilio Bianco, receptionist at Modena's Canalgrande hotel — housed in an ornate 18th-century palazzo — said the quake "was a strong one, and it lasted quite a long time." The hotel suffered no damage and the Modena province itself was spared, but guests spilled into the streets as soon as the quake hit, he said.
Giovanni Gregori, an earthquake expert with Italy's national research council, said the last quake of this magnitude in the area was in the 14th century. "For man, seven centuries are a lot, for nature it is nothing," he said.
The epicenter was between the towns of Finale Emilia, San Felice sul Panaro and Sermide, but the quake was felt as far away as Tuscany and northern Alto Adige.
Nearly 12 hours after the quake, a sharp, 5.1-magnitude aftershock alarmed the residents of Sant'Agostino di Ferrara and knocked off part of a wall of city hall. The building had been pummeled by the pre-dawn quake, which left a gaping hole on one side of it.
The same aftershock knocked down most of the clock tower in the town of Finale Emilia, injuring a firefighter and leaving only half the clock affixed.
Officials said makeshift camps, able to house many hundreds, would be set up in various towns for those in need of shelter.
In 2009, a temblor killed more than 300 people in the central city of L'Aquila, where the historic center is still largely uninhabited and in ruins.
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Winds also ripped through the country music mecca of Branson, Mo., damaging some of the city's famous theaters days before the start of the busy tourist season.
The tornado that blasted Harrisburg in southern Illinois, killing six, was an EF4, the second-highest rating given to twisters based on damage. Scientists said it was 200 yards wide with winds up to 170 mph.
By midday, townspeople in the community of 9,000 were sorting through piles of debris and remembering their dead while the winds still howled around them.
Not long after the storm, Darrell Osman raced to his mother's home, arriving just in time to speak to her before she was taken to a hospital with a head injury, a severe cut to her neck and a broken arm and leg. "She was conscious. I wouldn't say she was coherent. There were more mumbles than anything," he said. "She knew we were there."
Mary Osman died a short time later.
The twister that raked Branson seemed to hopscotch up the city's main roadway, moving from side to side. As sirens blared, Derrick Washington stepped out of his motel room just long enough to see a greenish-purple sky. Then he heard the twister roar.
"Every time the tornado hit a building, you could see it exploding," he said.
At least 37 people were reported hurt, but most suffered cuts and bruises. After the start of Branson's peak season in mid-March, up to 60,000 visitors would have been in hotels on any given day.
At the 530-room downtown Hilton, intense winds sucked furniture away. Hotel workers were able to get all guests to safety.
Looking at the city's main strip, it was difficult to believe there weren't more serious injuries. A small mall was nearly demolished. The Legends Theater, the Andy Williams Moon River Theater and the Branson Variety Theater sustained significant damage.
The Veterans Memorial Museum was in shambles, and a small military jet that sat in front of the museum was blown apart.
In Harrisburg, the winds were strong enough to blow the walls off some rooms at the hospital. The staff had enough warning to move the most endangered patients.
In Missouri, one person was killed in a trailer park in the town of Buffalo, about 35 miles north of Springfield. Two more fatalities were reported in the Cassville and Puxico areas.
Three people were reported killed in eastern Tennessee — two in Cumberland County and another in DeKalb County as storms collapsed homes and downed power lines there. Authorities were sending teams to investigate today to determine if tornadoes were involved in Tennessee.
The twisters were spawned by a powerful storm system that blew down from the Rockies on Tuesday and was headed toward the East Coast.
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The latest assessment, released Wednesday by the U.S. Geological Survey, found traces of radiation in about 20 percent of 167 sites sampled nationwide, including in Southern California and the Rocky Mountain states.
Measured amounts were similar to what the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency detected shortly after the meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi facility and determined to be well below levels of concern for danger to people.
USGS scientists collected precipitation samples to detect Iodine-131, Cesium-134 and Cesium-137, the primary radioactive products released during accidents like the one at Fukushima.
Gases and small particles in liquid or solid form can be transported thousands of miles in the atmosphere. Radioactive fallout in areas far from the source of the release can be detected and quantified by analyzing environmental samples, including rain, sleet and snow.
Also on Wednesday, nuclear radiation health experts from Oregon State University said that radioactivity on debris scattered in the ocean will have dissipated, decayed or been washed away well before the floating items reach the West Coast in coming months.
"The tsunami impacted several industrial areas and no doubt swept out to sea many things like bottled chemicals or other compounds that could be toxic," said Kathryn Higley, a professor at Oregon State.
"If you see something on the beach that looks like it may have come from this accident, you shouldn't assume that it's safe," Higley said. "People should treat these debris with common sense; there could be some things mixed in there that are dangerous. But it will have nothing to do with radioactive contamination."
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The four were among three groups of skiers - about a dozen people in all - making their way through a foot and a half of fresh snow on the back side of Stevens Pass when the avalanche hit. Stevens Pass is in the Cascade Mountains, about 80 miles northeast of Seattle.
All were buried to some extent, but the men who died were swept approximately 1,500 feet down a chute in the Tunnel Creek Canyon area, King County Sheriff's Sgt. Katie Larson said.
Most of the other skiers, all well-equipped, were able to free themselves and rushed to dig out the victims. They performed CPR on the three men to no avail, Larson said.
The fourth skier who was swept down the mountain, a woman, appeared to avoid a similar fate because of the avalanche safety device she was wearing, Larson said.
Such devices include wearable air bags that can be deployed to help a person float atop an avalanche rather than being buried underneath it, or inflatable bags that create space between a person's mouth and the snow. It wasn't immediately known which kind the woman had, said Deputy Chris Bedker of the sheriff's search-and-rescue unit.
The men who died were believed to be in their 30s and 40s.
"Most of the people involved in this were well known to the ski community up here, especially to the ski patrol," Bedker said. "It was their friends who[m] they recovered."
Initial reports of the avalanche reached the sheriff's office just after noon, and for some time it wasn't clear whether the other skiers had also been swept up in the slide.
The Northwest Weather and Avalanche Center on Sunday issued a warning for high avalanche danger for areas above 5,000 feet, saying warmer weather could loosen surface snow and trigger a slide on steeper slopes. The elevation of the avalanche wasn't immediately clear. Across the West, there had been 13 avalanche deaths this season as of Thursday, according to the Colorado Avalanche Information Center, which tracks avalanche deaths in the U.S.
Experts have said the risk of additional slides in the region could remain high all season. They attribute the dangers in part to a weak base layer of snow caused by a dry winter.
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The storm brought wet snow to parts of Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia. In northern Tennessee, about 20 vehicles were involved in crashes along a three-mile stretch of Interstate 75 near the Kentucky border on Sunday afternoon.
Tennessee Highway Patrol Sgt. Stacy Heatherly said the crashes were reported shortly before 2 p.m. Sunday in near "white-out" conditions caused by heavy snowfall and fog. Police said a juvenile was seriously injured. All lanes of Interstate 75 had reopened by early evening.
Dozens of wrecks were also reported in North Carolina as snow, sleet and rain fell with little accumulation, according to The Winston-Salem Journal.
In Virginia, the northbound lanes of Interstate 95 were shut down following a two-vehicle crash that critically injured one man, The Richmond Times-Dispatch reported. The accident was reported at about 6:20 p.m. on I-95 near the interchange with Interstate 295 in Prince George County. The male driver of one vehicle suffered life-threatening injuries, and an adult male passenger in his vehicle was hospitalized.
Snow began sticking in the Richmond area after dark, and Virginia State Police had responded to about 350 crashes by early evening.
Appalachian Power was reporting that 52,000 customers were without power Sunday night in central and southern Virginia, as well as West Virginia. Light snow was also falling on some parts of the Washington, D.C., area.
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Bulgaria's civil defense agency warned that two other, bigger dams were also on the brink of spilling over and residents were urged to prepare for an evacuation. Authorities have started a controlled release of water from the dams to prevent overflow.
Europeans across the continent have been battling more than a week of extreme weather, with thousands still trapped by snow in remote, mountain villages in the Balkans; hundreds — most of them homeless — dead after temperatures hit as low as minus 33 [degree] Fahrenheit; and authorities now facing the prospect of flooding caused by melting snow.
A day after the dam burst, the Bulgarian government declared a day of mourning, and streets in the village of Bisser were covered with sticky mud as people returned to their waterlogged homes.
At least a dozen houses had collapsed, uprooted trees blocked roads and smashed cars sat abandoned along deserted streets. Veterinary officials were collecting the bodies of dead animals from streets still covered in snow.
Bisser Mayor Zlatka Valkova said she received a phone call about the dam and tried to get out of her office in time to alert people of the eight-foot-high torrent. "I rushed out on the street, but then I saw the wave," she said. "It was terrible, it came with such speed that I couldn't do anything."
The village's 800 residents have been provided with food, water and medicine while the recovery operations continue. District Governor Irena Uzunova said eight people have been confirmed dead, and the whereabouts of an elderly couple remain unknown.
Bulgarian President Rosen Plevneliev and the EU commissioner for humanitarian aid, Kristalina Georgieva, arrived Tuesday to assess the extent of the damage.
"The next two weeks will be very difficult and the melting snow could make the situation very complex," Georgieva told reporters in Bisser.
Georgieva voiced sympathy over the loss of lives and of property of people "who had not been wealthy even before the disaster."
Further south, the heavy rain caused the Maritsa River to overflow its banks, leaving dozens of homes under water in the city of Svilengrad near the Greek border. Rescue crews helped transport nearly 100 residents to temporary shelters.
In Greece, rescuers had to help five elderly people escape from their flooded homes after the river Evros burst its banks near the country’s northeastern border with Bulgaria. Several elderly residents were also evacuated overnight from three other villages in the area.
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"The snow is beautiful, but let's hope spring comes soon," the pope told the pilgrims, looking out over remnants of Rome's biggest snowstorm since 1986.
Across Eastern Europe, thousands of people continued to dig out from heavy snow that has fallen during a cold snap that struck more than a week ago and has killed hundreds of people.
In Ukraine, the hardest hit area, temperatures have fallen as low as minus 33 [degrees] Fahrenheit. The government said Sunday the country's death toll now stands at 131, including many homeless people. About 2,300 other Ukrainians have sought treatment for frostbite or hypothermia.
At the other end of Europe, Britain had its first snowfall of the winter on Saturday - up to 6.3 inches - forcing London's Heathrow Airport - Europe's busiest - to cancel flights and stranding many drivers overnight on highways. Stansted, Birmingham and Luton airports suspended operations overnight as snow piled up on runways, but resumed operations Sunday.
Still, Queen Elizabeth II and her husband Prince Philip managed to brave the cold and snow to attend a service at West Newton church on her Sandringham Estate in eastern England on Sunday.
The 85-year-old monarch marks 60 years on the throne today, and her Diamond Jubilee anniversary will be marked by a series of regional, national and international events throughout 2012.
In Bosnia, more than 100 remote villages have been cut off by 6.5 feet of snow in the mountains. More than three feet fell in Sarajevo, the capital, where a state of emergency has been declared.
Three helicopters cruised over eastern Bosnia Sunday, delivering food and picking up people who needed evacuation.
Rescuers on the ground managed to get through to dozens of people who remained trapped in their cars on roads cut off by avalanches in eastern Bosnia. Near Kalinovik, they found several scared and freezing people in their cars.
"There were 15, 20 cars trapped in snow for 20 hours. We barely managed to pull the people out and we are now flying them home with helicopters. It was hell," said rescue worker Darko Rojic.
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Snow piled up to 6 feet on some Rocky Mountain foothills - and it was a welcome boost to several ski resorts that have suffered below-average snowfall this season. But while Echo Mountain and other resorts close to Denver celebrated up to 40 inches of powder, the storm only dusted larger resorts, like Vail, with a few inches in central Colorado's Rockies.
"It's been fantastic," said Scott Gales, a spokesman for Echo Mountain, about 25 miles west of Denver. "We're over 40 inches and it's still snowing at the rate of an inch or two an hour."
The Colorado Avalanche Information Center issued warnings for slopes east of the Continental Divide, saying 2 feet or more of new snow could easily overrun the weak, existing snow pack.
Severe weather struck parts of southeast Wyoming, western Kansas and Nebraska, where a band of heavy snow stalled, dumping nearly 13 inches in some spots. Icy snow made driving difficult as far south as New Mexico. Near-zero visibility forced officials to close all 160 miles of westbound Interstate 70 between the Kansas state line and Denver. Major state highways stretching eastward from Denver, Colorado Springs and other front range cities also were closed because of blizzard conditions, with the closures expected to remain until today.
About 600 flights were canceled at Denver International Airport, which averages 1,700 flights daily. Southwest Airlines, a key carrier at the airport, canceled all of its flights for most of the day but resumed them late Friday.
Harsh weather also raked Europe, Russia and Ukraine, with officials taking extra precautions on Friday to protect homeless people, ordering new facilities and medical care after scores of people have frozen to death during the brutal cold snap. The death toll in the past week rose to at least 175 on Friday, with 101 of those deaths reported in Ukraine, the hardest-hit country. Officials there have set up nearly 3,000 heating and food shelters.
It was so cold in Ukraine that about 1,500 swans, sea gulls and ducks froze to the ice in a small harbor near the Black Sea port of Odessa, forcing emergency workers to use ships to break up the surface and free the birds, officials said.
And Rome - where Italians are usually spared cold winter weather - experienced a rare snowfall on Friday, prompting officials to close the Colosseum, the Roman Forum and Palatine Hill, the former home of Rome's ancient emperors, to prevent tourists from slipping and falling.
(Steven K. Paulson, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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If a major earthquake struck India's seismically vulnerable capital, these neighborhoods - India's most crowded — would collapse in an apocalyptic nightmare. Waters from the nearby Yamuna River would turn the water-soaked subsoil to jelly, which would intensify the shaking.
The Indian government knows this and has done almost nothing about it.
An Associated Press examination of government documents spanning five decades reveals a pattern of warnings and recommendations that have been widely disregarded. Successive governments made plans and promises to prepare for a major earthquake in the city of 16.7 million, only to abandon them each time.
The Delhi government's own estimates say nine out of every 10 buildings in the city are at risk of moderate or significant quake damage, yet the basic disaster response plan it had promised to complete nearly three years ago remains unfinished, there are nearly no earthquake awareness drills in schools and offices, and tens of thousands of housing units are built every year without any earthquake safety checks.
Fearing many buildings could lie in ruins after a quake, the Delhi government began work in 2005 with U.S. government assistance to reinforce just five buildings — including a school and a hospital — it would need to begin a rudimentary relief operation to deal with the dead, injured and homeless. Six years later, only one of those buildings is earthquake-ready.
"At the end of the day, people at the helm of affairs are not doing anything," said Anup Karanth, an earthquake engineering expert.
In its attitudes to disaster preparedness, India is like many other poor nations — aware of the danger but bogged down by both sheer inertia and more immediate demands on its resources.
But Delhi faces immense earthquake risks. Last September, two minor jolts sent thousands of scared residents into the streets, and experts say a big one looms on the horizon.
As far back as 1960, after a moderate quake cut power and plunged Delhi — then a city of 2.7 million — into darkness, the Geological Survey of India advised that all large buildings in the capital needed to have a plan for earthquake safety. A series of reports by other agencies have expanded on that conclusion in recent years, but both the city and national governments have ignored almost all of the recommendations.
Some reports were ignored because of sheer apathy, others because of shifting priorities. In a city and country growing at lightning speed with huge problems of poverty and hunger that need more immediate solutions, earthquake preparedness has simply never been at the top of the list. Some plans begun with good intentions simply fell by the wayside. That's what happened to the 2005 plan to prepare five designated buildings in the capital for an earthquake.
Government engineers were sent to California to train. But the following year — with only the school made earthquake ready — all the engineers were taken off the project. They were reassigned to build stadiums for the 2010 Commonwealth Games, an athletic competition held in Delhi, said M. Shashidhar Reddy, the vice chairman of India's National Disaster Management Agency.
The scale of the problem "really hasn't sunk into the minds of the people," Reddy said.
(Muneeza Naqvi, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The fire, which was 65 percent contained Friday night, had burned nearly 3,200 acres.
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"Our simulations show potential to pack a good punch to Earth's nearspace environment," said Antti Pulkkinen of the Space Weather Laboratory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in suburban Greenbelt, Md. But "we're not looking at an extreme event here."
The front edge of the burst was shot out Thursday and should arrive Sunday morning, said Joseph Kunches, a spokesman for the Space Weather Prediction Center, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colo.
"At first glance, it was, 'Oh my God, it's at the center of the (sun's) disk, it ought to go right to the Earth,'" Kunches said. But upon further review and "headscratching," NOAA's space weather team calculated most of the plasma blob should pass harmlessly over the top of our planet.
"It's more of a glancing blow," Pulkkinen said.
At their most intense, solar discharges, known as "coronal mass ejections," can disrupt satellites, radio communications and the power grid, and force airlines to reroute transcontinental flights that pass near the North Pole. Solar activity can also generate dancing auroras, the northern and southern lights.
The huge blob of charged gas spotted by NASA satellites is speeding toward Earth at more than 2 million mph. The most damaging solar discharges, which are rare, can zoom at speeds more than twice that fast.
The ejection appears to be the most threatening since the sun spit out three large blobs in quick succession last August.
(Brian Vastag, WASHINGTON POST)
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Firefighters were able to stop the fire's progress Thursday, but not before wind gusts of up to 82 mph sent it rushing through a valley south of Reno.
Flames could be seen from the downtown casino district about 10 miles away.
Hernandez said more than 230 firefighters were battling the blaze, which had grown to nearly 5 square miles within hours. The fire broke out about 12:45 p.m. along U.S. Highway 395.
Washoe County officials declared a state of emergency a few hours later, and Gov. Brian Sandoval followed with a statewide declaration.
A five-mile stretch of U.S. 395 was closed as the strong winds pushed the flames north toward Reno along the base of the hillsides, Washoe County sheriff’s Deputy Armando Avina said. Heavy smoke reduced visibility to zero.
By nightfall, the fire had burned to the city's southern outskirts.
Deputies went door to door asking people to leave their homes in Pleasant Valley, Old Washoe Valley and Saint James Village. The winds died down after nightfall and it rained, much to the delight of fire crews.
(Scott Sonner, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The average global temperature was 57.9 degrees Fahrenheit, making 2011 the 11th hottest on record, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said. That is 0.9 degrees warmer than the 20th-century average, officials said. In fact, it was hotter than every year last century except 1998.
One reason 2011 was milder than recent years was the La Niña cooling of the central Pacific Ocean. La Niñas occur every few years and generally cause global temperatures to drop, but this was the warmest La Niña year on record.
2011 also was the warmest year on record for Spain and Norway, and the second warmest for the United Kingdom. In the United States, the average temperature of 53.8 was 1 degree above normal, making last year the 23rd warmest on record. But 17 cities - including Houston, Miami, Trenton and Austin - had their warmest years.
This marks the 35th straight year that global temperatures were warmer than normal. NOAA's records for world average temperatures date back to 1880. "It would be premature to make any conclusion we would see any hiatus of the longer-term warming trend," said Tom Karl, director of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center. "Global temperatures are continuing to increase."
NASA, which calculates global temperatures in a slightly different way, announced essentially the same temperature for the year. But NASA's record keeping calls it the ninth warmest ever.
NASA climate scientist James Hansen and University of Victoria's Andrew Weaver said they expect in the next few years the world will set a record high temperature. 2010 tied for the hottest on record.
(Seth Borenstein, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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His move didn't kill the project but could delay a tough choice for him until after the November election.
Right away, the implications rippled across the political spectrum, stirred up the presidential campaign and even hardened feelings with Canada, a trusted U.S. ally and neighbor. For a U.S. electorate eager for work, the pipeline has become the very symbol of job creation for Republicans, but Obama says the environment and public safety must be weighed, too.
The plan by Calgary-based TransCanada Corp. would carry tar sands oil from western Canada across a 1,700-mile pipeline across six U.S. states to Texas refineries.
Obama was already on record as saying no, for now, until his government could review an alternative route that avoided environmentally sensitive areas of Nebraska - a route that still has not been proposed, as the White House emphasizes. But Obama had to take a stand again by Feb. 21 at the latest as part of an unrelated tax deal he cut with Republicans.
This time, the project would go forward unless Obama himself declared it was not in the national interest. The president did just that, reviving intense reaction.
"This announcement is not a judgment on the merits of the pipeline, but the arbitrary nature of a deadline that prevented the State Department from gathering the information necessary to approve the project and protect the American people," Obama said in a written statement. "I'm disappointed that Republicans in Congress forced this decision."
"President Obama is destroying tens of thousands of American jobs and shipping American energy security to the Chinese. There's really just no other way to put it. The president is selling out American jobs for politics," said House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio. Insisting that the pipeline would help the economy, he declared: "This is not the end of the fight," signaling that Republicans might try again to force a decision.
The State Department said the decision was made "without prejudice," meaning TransCanada can submit a new application once a new route is established. Russ Girling, TransCanada's president and chief executive officer, said the company plans to do exactly that. If approved, the pipeline could begin operation as soon as 2014, Girling said.
It did not take long for the Republicans seeking Obama's job to slam him.
Newt Gingrich, campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination in South Carolina, called Obama's decision "stunningly stupid," adding: "What Obama has done is kill jobs, weaken American security and drive Canada into the arms of China out of just sheer stupidity."
Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney said the decision was "as shocking as it is revealing. It shows a president who once again has put politics ahead of sound policy."
Project supporters say U.S. rejection of the pipeline would not stop it from being built. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said Canada is serious about building a pipeline to its West Coast, where oil could be shipped to China and other Asian markets.
Republicans responded unsparingly.
Harper on Wednesday told Obama he was profoundly disappointed that Obama turned down the pipeline, Harper's office said.
The proposed $7 billion pipeline would run through Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma en route to Texas.
The pipeline is a dicey proposition for Obama, who enjoyed strong support from both organized labor and environmentalists in his winning 2008 campaign for the White House.
Environmental advocates have made it clear that approval of the pipeline would dampen their enthusiasm for Obama in the upcoming November election. Some liberal donors even threatened to cut off funds to Obama's re-election campaign to protest the project, which opponents say would transport "dirty oil" that requires huge amounts of energy to extract.
But by rejecting the pipeline, Obama risks losing support from organized labor, a key part of the Democratic base, for thwarting thousands of jobs. "The score is Job-Killers, two; American workers, zero," said Terry O'Sullivan, general president of the Laborers' International Union of North America.
O'Sullivan called the decision "politics at its worst" and said, "blue-collar construction workers across the U.S. will not forget this."
Yet some unions that back Obama oppose the pipeline, included United Auto Workers, Service Employees International Union and Communications Workers of America.
TransCanada says the pipeline could create as many as 20,000 jobs, a figure opponents say is inflated. A State Department report last summer said the pipeline would create up to 6,000 jobs during construction.
(Matthew Daly, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The revised rules set schedules for regular inspections of power lines in high-fire-threat areas and give utilities the authority to turn off power to customers who refuse access to trim trees and clear vegetation.
Laura Cyphert, who rebuilt her home outside Lakeside in the El Monte Valley after it burned down in a 2003 wildfire, applauded the new provisions but still does not feel safe.
"How they go about their responsibilities can have a big impact on whether it's successful or not," said Cyphert, a 44-year-old accountant who also watched the 2007 fires burn within three miles of her home. Arcing power lines, buffeted by Santa Ana winds, were blamed by investigators for the Oct. 21, 2007, Witch Creek fire. Ignited near Santa Ysabel, that fire merged with the Guejito fire, which started early Oct. 22 in the San Pasqual Valley and quickly burned into Rancho Bernardo.
Power lines also were blamed for the Rice Canyon fire that burned hundreds of homes in Fallbrook later that week and, farther from San Diego, the Malibu Canyon fire.
Two state investigations concluded that SDG&E equipment, and to a lesser degree Cox Communications, caused the Witch Creek/Guejito fire and the Rice Canyon fire.
SDG&E has never admitted liability, but has paid out more than $1.1 billion to claimants. A settlement with Cox provided SDG&E with $444 million to be used for wildfire-related expenses.
Under the rules approved by the California Public Utilities Commission, companies, including San Diego Gas & Electric, must increase brush clearance around electrical conductors and recalculate weight loads on power poles when new equipment is added. Regular inspections are now required of companies that operate cellphone towers and other aerial communication facilities near power lines.
"The rules apply not just to the utilities that own the poles but also to the entities like communication companies and cable companies that use the poles," said SDG&E spokeswoman Stephanie Donovan. Communications companies also must attach markers to their equipment on joint-use poles identifying the owner and providing contact information.
(Morgan Lee, U-T)
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The climate change debate has centered on carbon dioxide, a gas that wafts in the atmosphere for decades, trapping heat. But in recent years, scientists have pointed to two other, shorter-term pollutants - methane and soot, also known as black carbon - that also drive climate change.
Slashing emissions of these twin threats would be a "win-win-win" for climate, human health and agriculture, said NASA climate scientist Drew Shindell, who led the study appearing in the journal Science. "Even if you don't believe climate change is a problem, these things are worth doing."
Reducing methane and soot would slow global warming dramatically - by almost a degree Fahrenheit - by the middle of the century, according to computer simulations run by the 24-member international team. At the same time, the simulations show that such actions would save 700,000 to 4.7 million lives annually, as better air quality would prevent lung and cardiovascular diseases.
Global crop yields would also rise, by 30 to 135 metric tons annually, as rice, corn, wheat and soybean plants would have an easier time absorbing the nutrients they need from the air, according to the report.
"In the absence of a global carbon dioxide agreement, it makes sense to move ahead on global efforts to reduce these other gases," said Joyce Penner of the University of Michigan, who has studied the climate impacts of soot, but wasn't involved in the research.
Previous studies have noted the benefits of reducing methane and soot. But the new study looked at the specific impact of about 400 measures policymakers could take. Of those, 14 interventions — such as eliminating wood- burning stoves, dampening emissions from diesel vehicles and capturing methane released from coal mines — would offer big benefits.
"They're all things we know how to do, and have done; we just haven't done them worldwide," said Shindell, who works at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.
About 3 billion people in the developing world rely on stoves that burn wood, dung and other fuels that throw off soot. Switching to cleaner-burning stoves would help reduce short-term global warming while quickly improving local air quality. Soot particles fall out of the air in less than a week.
But getting people to switch to cleaner-burning stoves is "easier said than done," said Elizabeth Ransom, a spokeswoman for University Research Co.
(Brian Vastab, WASHINGTON POST)
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