Cameron said the flooding is "unprecedented" and vowed to do everything possible to protect people and their property as the damage spread to the major cities York, Leeds and Manchester. He said protective systems and contingency plans will be reviewed because the frequency of such extreme weather events seems to be on the rise. Weeks of persistent rainfall have saturated the ground and swollen the rivers to record levels, leaving entire swathes of northern England, and smaller parts of Wales and Scotland, vulnerable. Several hundred flood warnings remain in effect.
There have been no fatalities or serious injuries reported, but hundreds of people have been evacuated from houses and apartments in York, 200 miles north of London, where 3,500 properties are at risk. Emergency crews worked extra shifts to try to restore power to roughly 7,500 blacked out homes in the greater Manchester and Lancashire areas. Environment Secretary Liz Truss said flood protection systems put in place in recent years were unable to cope with the record-high river levels.
"In Lancashire every single river was at a record-high," she said. "In Yorkshire we have seen some rivers a meter (yard) higher than they have ever been before. Clearly, in the light of that, we will be reviewing our flood defenses."
Several hundred people had been evacuated the day before in the West Yorkshire and Lancashire regions and officials said thousands had lost power. The number of people affected continues to grow as flooding spreads.
A picturesque 200-year-old pub, The Waterside, in the Manchester area, collapsed and part of the structure was swept away by the River Irwell.
The Environment Agency urged residents to remain vigilant because more "severe" flooding was expected overnight and today.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
top
It was the latest of a succession of powerful weather events across the country, from heavy snow in New Mexico, west Texas and the Oklahoma Panhandle to flooding in parts of the Plains and Midwest. Days of tumultuous weather have led to 43 deaths overall — those in Texas, plus five in Illinois, eight in Missouri and 19 in the Southeast.
The full extent of damage from Saturday’s storms along a nearly 40-mile stretch near Dallas came into clearer focus. Local officials estimated as many as 1,450 homes were damaged or destroyed in storms that the National Weather Service said produced nine tornadoes. Vehicles were mangled, power lines fell and trees were toppled.
Heavy rain, wind and falling temperatures hampered cleanup efforts Sunday afternoon.
"This is a huge impact on our community, and we’re all suffering," Garland police Lt. Pedro Barineau said of the suburb about 20 miles northeast of Dallas, where eight people died, 15 were injured and about 600 structures, mostly single-family homes, were damaged.
The National Weather Service said an EF-4 tornado, which is the second-most powerful with winds up to more than 200 mph, hit the community at about 6:45 p.m. Saturday. It was near the intersection of Interstate 30 and George Bush Turnpike, which is a major route in the region. The Garland tornado was only the second recorded EF-4 in Dallas County. A classified EF-4 on May 9, 1927, killed 15 people and injured 40 others.
At least three people who died were found in vehicles, said Barineau, who also noted that some cars appeared to be thrown from the interstate, though it wasn’t known whether that was how the people found in the vehicles died. Natalie Guzman, 33, took photos of her family’s home in a Garland neighborhood. The garage wall had collapsed and the roof fell in. The only part of the house that appeared to be spared was the master bathroom, where her brother-in-law took shelter Saturday night. He was the only one at home and told her he had just enough time to get himself and his dogs into the bathroom.
"It was worse than I thought," Guzman said, comparing the scene to the photos he had sent Saturday.
The destruction in Garland was so overwhelming that Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins declared the city a disaster within mere minutes of seeing the toll firsthand. "I don’t declare local disasters lightly," Jenkins said. "But I looked at the scene for 10 minutes, spoke to the incident commander and then called the lawyers to bring the paperwork." In the nearby town of Rowlett, City Manager Brian Funderburk said Sunday morning that 23 people were injured, but that there were no deaths and no reports of missing people. The weather service said damage indicated it was likely an EF-3 tornado, which has winds up to 165 mph.
Jenkins said in a statement Sunday night that as many as 600 homes were damaged in Rowlett.
Dale Vermurlen lived in a Rowlett neighborhood that sustained heavy damage. His house only had minor damage, but was next to that were flattened.
"I grabbed both dogs by the collars and held on to the toilet. I said, ‘OK, this could be it, boys.’ " Homes in the neighborhood that had been searched by emergency responders were marked with a black "X." In some instances, it looked like homes had been picked up and set back down in a big pile. State troopers blocked off roads, utility crews restored power and people walked around, hushed and dazed.
Three other people died in Collin County, about 45 miles northeast of Dallas, according to sheriff ’s Deputy Chris Havey, although the circumstances were not immediately clear.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott made disaster declarations Sunday for four counties — Dallas, Collin, Rockwall and Ellis — and warned that the number of victims could rise.
On the other side of the state, the Department of Public Safety in Amarillo strongly discouraged travel throughout the entire Texas Panhandle — a 26-county area covering nearly 26,000 square miles — because blowing and drifting snow had made the roads impassable. Interstate 40, the main east-west highway across the Panhandle, was almost completely shut down. DPS said only a small section of the highway in Amarillo remained open.
Meanwhile, Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin declared a state of emergency as there were blizzard conditions and an ice storm warning out west and flood warnings in the east, where one community had received 9 inches of rain.
The state Department of Emergency Management said eight storm-related injuries were reported. About 60,000 homes and businesses were without power.
In neighboring Arkansas, officials said it appeared that a tornado touched down in Bearden, tearing roofs off buildings and uprooting trees. There were no immediate reports of injuries.
Farther north, rain caused dangerous driving conditions and flooding in Missouri, where Gov. Jay Nixon also declared a state of emergency. Six people died overnight when two separate vehicles drove into flooded roadways in south-central Missouri, Pulaski County Sheriff Ronald Long said. Greene County authorities said two fatalities there were associated with the flooding.
In southern Illinois, authorities said three adults and two children drowned Saturday evening when the vehicle they were riding in was swept away and sank in a rain-swollen creek.
The death toll in the Southeast linked to severe weather rose to 19 on Sunday when Alabama authorities found the body of a 22-year-old man whose vehicle was swept away while attempting to cross a bridge; a 5-year-old’s body was recovered from that incident Saturday. Ten people have died in Mississippi, and six died in Tennessee. One person was killed in Arkansas.
Meanwhile, the National Weather Service issued severe weather advisories for large parts of the central United States, including a blizzard warning for parts of New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma and a flash flood watch stretching from Texas to Indiana.
New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez declared a state of emergency for the entire state due to a winter storm that had dumped up to two feet of snow by Sunday night. The New Mexico city of Roswell bested its one-day snowfall record, receiving 12.3 inches by Sunday evening, the National Weather Service said. The bad weather forced the cancellation of nearly 1,500 flights in the nation on Sunday, according to tracking service FlightAware.com. About half of the canceled flights were in Dallas, a major hub.
(David Warren & Reese Dunlin, ASSOCIATED PRESS; REUTERS)
top
The fire that erupted Friday night was caused by downed power lines during high winds. The winds eased Saturday, and the fire stopped growing. Evacuations for about 50 homes in Solimar Beach north of Ventura were rescinded. On Sunday, firefighters were busy dousing hot spots and mopping up remnants of the approximately 1,230-acre blaze. At least one flareup occurred on steep terrain overnight. During a tour of the burned area, Ventura County fire Capt. Mike Lindbery told the Ventura County Star that the flames left barren stretches that could give way if the area gets a heavy winter rain, as expected after the new year.
The wildfire had caused the partial closure of a Highway 101 and Pacific Coast Highway, but both reopened Saturday.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
top
National Weather Service Meteorologist Anthony Bain in Fort Worth said two or possibly three tornadoes touched down in the Dallas area, although the full extent of damage would not be known until daylight today.
WFAA television in Dallas showed video of damage to homes, a church and vehicles stretching from Garland, about 20 miles northeast of Dallas to Glenn Heights, 20 miles south of the city. The emergency manager of Ellis County south of Dallas, Stephanie Parker, posted on twitter: "We have destroyed and damaged homes. Please do not get out on the roads if you do not have to." Four people were confirmed killed in vehicle accidents near the intersection of two major highways in Garland during the storm.
The twisters — accompanied by torrential rain, wind and some hail — were part of a weather system that could produce major flooding from northern Texas through eastern Oklahoma, eastern Kansas, western Arkansas and parts of Missouri.
The severe weather snarled air traffic in the Dallas area. The Dallas Mavericks NBA game was delayed because of the storm.
On the other side of Texas and in much of New Mexico, a snowstorm accompanied by plunging temperatures was expected to leave up to 16 inches of snow through this evening, according to NWS meteorologist Brendon Rubin-Oster in College Park, Md.
Meanwhile, two more deaths linked to weather were reported Saturday in Mississippi, bringing that state’s death toll from severe weather over Christmas to 10. Late Saturday, one death was reported in Alabama.
Flash flooding closed roads across Alabama and trapped motorists in rapidly rising waters.
Mississippi Emergency Management Agency spokesman Greg Flynn said 56 injuries were reported. In a statement, Flynn said preliminary damage estimates show 241 homes were destroyed or severely damaged.
More than 400 homes in total were affected, he said. Severe storms are forecast for tonight through Monday as a strong cold front pushes through. Tornadoes are possible, and residents are asked to remain alert.
The flooding is the result of heavy downpours that have thrashed the southeastern U.S. since Wednesday, bringing record rainfalls in some areas.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
top
In the county of Lancashire, some 220 miles northwest of London, emergency workers backed by the military buttressed defenses with extra sandbags and heavy trucks brought in rescue equipment able to drive through waters too high to safely traverse on foot. Hundreds of people were evacuated from their homes after water breached flood barriers and poured into the streets. Beleaguered residents in some towns were told to abandon their homes for higher ground while others were told to move their valuables and listen to advice from emergency services about possible evacuation.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
top
Ruthie Green went door to door in a coat and a bicycle helmet to check on neighbors after the storm and swept debris from her front porch as more emergency responders arrived in the neighborhood.
"I been listening to the news all day so I was kind of preparing," Green said. When the tornado warning came up on her iPad, Green said she ran to a closet.
"Then I heard the big roaring, it didn’t last more than three minutes," Green said. "I just laid down and just kept praying."
Green said she was unsure of whether any neighbors had been injured or killed down the block where several homes were destroyed.
"We probably won’t know anything until daylight comes," she said. "I’m hoping that everybody got out all right." "Details are still sketchy," said Jason Holmes, a National Weather Service meteorologist.
Weather radar Friday evening showed an intense system along the Interstate 20/59 corridor west of Birmingham, with the storm moving eastward. Flooding was reported in counties throughout the region, as heavy rain continued to fall.
Pastor Melvin Howard of the Mount Olive Full Gospel Church said he came rushing to the area of Jefferson Avenue and 50th Street in Birmingham when he heard the storm hit.
Howard said his church’s building had collapsed but no one was inside at the time.
"We’re just there to salvage what we can salvage," he said.
The Alabama tornado is the latest development in an ongoing series of storms that has hammered the South during Christmas week.
Elsewhere in the region, where the weather had calmed, dozens of people faced Christmas having lost their homes and possessions. But many said they were thankful to see another Christmas.
Unseasonably warm weather on Wednesday helped spawn torrential rain and deadly tornadoes that left at least 14 people [dead] and left dozens of families homeless by Christmas Eve.
Among the dead were seven people from Mississippi, including a 7-year-old boy who perished while riding in a car that was swept up and tossed by storm winds.
Six people were killed in Tennessee, including three who were found in a car submerged in a creek according to the Columbia Police Department. The Tennessee Emergency Management Agency said the victims were a 19-year-old female and two 22-year-old males.
One person died in Arkansas, and dozens of homes were damaged or destroyed.
Peak tornado season in the South is in the spring, but such storms can happen at any time. Exactly a year ago, tornadoes hit Mississippi, killing five people and injuring dozens.
On Friday, parts of Mississippi remained under a flood warning.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS, with additions from al.com)
top
The National Weather Service in Reno says Thursday’s storm was expected to dump as much as 22 inches of snow along highway passes and up to 15 inches in Truckee and the Tahoe Basin.
Forecasts had called for snow to accumulate at elevations as low as 2,000 feet.
The white Christmas Eve was welcomed by Tahoe ski resorts and the visitors already at them. But Caltrans says poor visibility required vehicles to be turned back on Interstate 80 at one point, while a hail storm stopped traffic on U.S. 50.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
top
Tornadoes touched down in Indiana and Mississippi, where three were killed. The springlike storms packing strong winds killed two more in Tennessee. A tree blew over onto a house in Arkansas, killing an 18-year-old woman and trapping a 1-year-old child inside, authorities said. Rescuers pulled the toddler safely from the home.
In Benton County, Miss., where two deaths occurred and at least two people were missing, crews were searching each house and in wooded areas to make sure residents were accounted for. Police there said several homes were blown off their foundations.
A 7-year-old boy died in Holly Springs, Miss., when the storm picked up and tossed the car he was riding in, officials said. Marshall County Coroner James Anderson says the boy’s relatives in the car with him were taken to a nearby hospital for treatment. A tornado damaged or destroyed at least 20 homes in the northwest part of the state. Clarksdale Mayor Bill Luckett said the only confirmed casualty was a dog killed by storm debris. Planes at a small airport overturned and an unknown number of people were injured. "I’m looking at some horrific damage right now," the mayor said. "Sheet metal is wrapped around trees; there are overturned airplanes; a building is just destroyed."
Television images showed the tornado appeared to be on the ground for more than 10 minutes. Interstate 55 was closed in both directions as the tornado approached, the Mississippi Highway Patrol said.
After an EF-1 tornado struck the south Indianapolis suburb of Greenwood, television stations showed pictures of damage including a portion of a roof blown off a veterinary office. The biggest threat for tornadoes was in a region of 3.7 million people in Mississippi, Tennessee and Arkansas and parts of Missouri, Illinois and Kentucky, according to the national Storm Prediction Center in Oklahoma. The center issued a "particularly dangerous situation" alert for the first time since June 2014, when two massive EF4 twisters devastated a rural Nebraska town, killing two people.
About 120 miles east of the tornado, Brandi Holland, a convenience store clerk in Tupelo, Miss., said people were reminded of a tornado that damaged or destroyed more than 2,000 homes and businesses in April 2014. "They’re opening all our tornado shelters because they say there’s an 80 percent chance of a tornado today," Holland said.
Elsewhere, skiers on the slopes out West got a fresh taste of powder and most people in the Northeast enjoyed spring-like temperatures as they finished up last-minute Christmas shopping.
"It’s too warm for me. I don’t like it. I prefer the cold in the winter, in December. Gives you more of that Christmas feel," said Daniel Flores, a concierge from the Bronx, his light jacket zipped open as he shopped in Manhattan with his three children.
Only about half of the nation, mostly in the West, should expect the possibility of a white Christmas.
In parts of Georgia, including Atlanta, a flood watch was posted through Friday evening as more than 4 inches was expected.
The threat of severe weather just before Christmas is unusual, but not unprecedented, said Greg Carbin, a meteorologist at the national Storm Prediction Center.
(Jeff Martin, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
top
The construction dump on the outskirts of Shenzhen was prone to dangerous erosion, an environmental impact report said. The expanding piles of waste presented a "crisis," a Shenzhen newspaper wrote. Even truck drivers who dumped tons of debris and displaced earth there each day recalled a pang of anxiety as they watched the pile swell.
But the alarms got little attention until the accumulation of building waste collapsed here, burying homes and factories, and forcing Chinese officials, investigators, journalists and families waiting for news of the 76 still missing to ask: If so many saw the risks, why was nothing done?
"Everyone seems to have some of the responsibility," said Liang Jianping, a migrant worker in Shenzhen who was hoping for word of his missing cousin, a worker in a factory near where the disaster struck Sunday.
"The officials, the companies, the truck drivers, they were all here, they saw what was happening," Liang said. "But there were no safety assurances. Everyone should share some of the blame."
As of today, authorities confirmed that they had recovered only two bodies from the dense red earth and mud — up to 32 feet deep — that swamped an area equivalent to 70 U.S. football fields.
More bodies are likely to be recovered in the coming days, and officials in Shenzhen appeared prepared to blunt public ire by moving against the company that operated the dumpsite.
(NYT NEWS SERVICE)
top
Hundreds of emergency workers used bulldozers and earth-movers to search a 94-acre area where some residents had for years worried that the dumping of debris so close to their homes was a crisis waiting to happen. The massive wave of earth buried or toppled 33 buildings, including apartments, worker dormitories and factories. As of late Monday, 81 people were still missing.
"Everyone was yelling, ‘Run, run,’ and I didn’t take anything except my baby," Chen Qing said, as she nursed her 1-year-old son in a shelter for survivors set up in a nearby sports center. "I don’t know who’ll help us now. Everything in our lives has been left in the mud."
The landslide was particularly unsettling, commentators said, because it occurred in Shenzhen, widely viewed as an ambitious, modern city that has hoped to rival its neighbor, Hong Kong.
It occurred about four months after explosions of toxic chemicals decimated a port-side area of Tianjin, another coastal city that has envisioned itself as an engine for China’s economic rejuvenation. The blasts killed 150 people, and injured more than 700.
Chinese news media have suggested that officials have allowed risks to fester, through corruption or laxity. The official response to such accidents, while often impressive in scale and speed, has done little to mute that criticism — in this case by ignoring the danger from a growing pile of construction tailings and debris near factories and homes.
"What is troubling about this accident is that it occurred in a first-tier city, Shenzhen," said a commentary in The Beijing News. "It is at the forefront of Chinese citizens in its level of modernization."
On Monday, residents who had fled the ocher-red mud said the semi-rural area should never have been used to dump dirt and rubble from local construction projects.
"They started piling up the dirt and waste roughly two years ago," Li Xigui, a 52year-old who has lived in the area for 15 years, said in an interview. "I knew something would go wrong in the future."
He said that his home and adjacent workshop were swallowed up by the landslide, and that his mother had fractured a bone in her shoulder when her grandson yanked her out of the encroaching mud.
Dump trucks had piled dirt on the area, an old quarry, creating an unstable pile ripe for problems, he said. "When you put lots of dirt and waste in a place like this," he said, "the pile can easily collapse and it doesn’t necessarily have to be in a rainy day."
China’s rapid construction growth has long created problems with the dumping of building waste and displaced dirt, often resulting in illegal, multistory piles of debris on the outskirts of cities that block waterways and bring dust and flooding.
(NYT NEWS SERVICE)
top
At least 91 people were unaccounted for as of Sunday night, and about 1,500 rescue workers were on the scene looking for people under the rubble, according to a report on the official page of the Guangming New District government on Sina Weibo, China’s Twitter-like social media site.
Images and video on social media showed a flood of dirt engulfing low-rise buildings and upending construction vehicles as if they were toy cars. At least four people had been pulled from the rubble, three of whom had minor injuries, the local government said.
Some of the collapsed buildings were residential, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.
China’s government-controlled media placed great emphasis on the concern felt by senior officials, including President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang. Both men were monitoring the situation and had dispatched a team from the country’s Cabinet to the scene, Xinhua reported. The expressions of concern by China’s top two officials appeared to reflect a new-found sensitivity on the part of the leadership after a series of deadly accidents highlighted the downside of the nation’s breakneck economic growth. What was left largely unsaid in official reports was the potential cause of the landslide. A report from sina.com, an online news portal, said that an illegal, man-made pile of earth, deposited on the side of a hill, had collapsed.
The Weibo page of a local official newspaper, the Shenzhen Tequ Bao, reported that the giant pile of construction debris and earth was illegal and that it had been approved by local officials. Those posts were later deleted. Just a few miles to the south of the accident site, in Hong Kong, steep hillsides in populated areas are reinforced by elaborate networks of retaining walls to prevent landslides, which can be common in a region pounded by heavy monsoon rains. In China, public criticism over lax government regulations and official corruption has grown recently after several disasters.
In August, a chemical storage depot exploded in the northern port city of Tianjin, killing more than 170 people.
In October, a building collapsed in the central province of Henan, killing at least 17 construction workers.
A landslide in May in southwestern China’s Guizhou province caused a nine-story building to collapse, killing 16 people.
The 2008 earthquake in Sichuan province, which left more than 87,000 people dead or missing, including many children crushed in collapsing schools, brought national attention to the shoddy construction standards of many buildings, derisively called "tofu buildings."
(NYT NEWS SERVICE)
top
Walter Palmer, the Minnesota dentist who shot Cecil with a bow and arrow, had pleaded guilty in 2008 to making false statements to the Fish and Wildlife Service about a black bear fatally shot in western Wisconsin outside an authorized hunting zone.
The Fish and Wildlife Service cautioned against linking the order with Cecil’s death, describing the action instead as a redoubling of efforts to ensure that violators of wildlife laws don’t reap future benefits from importing wildlife and wildlife products.
(U-T NEWS SERVICE)
top
The letter was to notify the state Legislature that the administration is shifting another $83 million from the state’s rainy day fund to help pay for the cleanup and that officials anticipate $105 million more will be needed in January. The fire sites in Calaveras, Lake and Butte counties were declared a federal disaster, so state officials expect a large portion of the cleanup costs could be reimbursed by the federal government.
Finance officials estimated in November that cleanup costs would top $100 million. But Cohen said in the letter that the cleanup is unprecedented in its magnitude and complexity. For example, the state’s share of costs for cleanup from a wildfire in the city of Weed in 2014 was $7.4 million, and cleanup from the 2007 Angora Fires near Lake Tahoe cost the state $7.3 million.
Cohen cited three factors for higher-than-expected costs from this fall’s fires: more debris than officials anticipated, lot sizes that are larger than expected, and increasing requests from landowners to help with cleanup. Officials with the California Department of Insurance do not yet have an overall estimate of damages from the two fires.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
top
Vilsack is fuming because Congress set aside $1.6 billion to pay for wildfire suppression in 2016 after the service, which he controls, spent $100 million more than that to fight them this year. Year after year, Congress has underfunded the firefighting effort, forcing the Forest Service to borrow hundreds of millions of dollars from other departments in the agency to pay for equipment and firefighters.
Congress allocated$1 billion for fire suppression in 2015 — a year fast approaching another record for most acres burned in a fire season. As fires burned, Vilsack pleaded for more money to avoid the frantic inter-agency borrowing of fire seasons, such as $999 million in 2002; $695 million in 2003; $200 million in 2006, along with four other years when the budget came up short. In a letter to lawmakers Thursday, Vilsack put his foot down. The 2016 budget “fails to provide a long-term solution to address the critical and growing problem of paying for catastrophic wildfire and instead leaves the Forest Service hobbled by the current untenable budget situation,” he wrote. He issued what amounts to a threat, saying he will no longer rob from other departments to pay for firefighting efforts that Congress doesn’t fund.
“If the amount Congress appropriated in 2016 is not sufficient to cover fire suppression costs, Congress will need to appropriate additional funding on an emergency basis,” Vilsack wrote.
Ironically, money was diverted this year from the department devoted to prevent wildfires by removing debris that helps them burn. The Forest Service pays loggers to remove trees left dead and dying from insect infestation, as well as foliage that grew in previous years but dried and turned to kindling during long periods without snow or rain. The nation’s worst fire season in recorded history was 2006, when 9.87 million acres burned. This year’s season is only a few thousand acres below that mark with nearly two weeks remaining and two large fires still burning in Kentucky. USDA spokesman Matt Herrick said the Forest Service has estimated that the record will be surpassed.
In an era of climate change, fire seasons that once started in May now start in March. They end in December, not October. “The future trend will be hotter, longer, more severe, and ultimately more costly fire seasons,” Vilsack wrote.
(Darryl Fears, WASHINGTON POST)
top
Microbeads are tiny plastic particles used as an abrasive in many personal-care and beauty products, such as facial scrubs, soaps and toothpastes. The federal legislation would prohibit the manufacture of products containing plastic microbeads as of July 1, 2017, and phase out sales of the product over the next two years.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
top
That is more than 20 times the level that is considered safe by the World Health Organization.
Half the city’s cars will be forced off the road on any given day, while barbecue grills and other outdoor smoke sources will be banned and factory production restricted. Schools will close and residents advised to avoid outdoor activities.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
top
The Carlsbad City Council was set to declare a local state of emergency late Tuesday to authorize repairs that would prevent further damage in a low spot along the boulevard near the Encinas Creek bridge south of Palomar Airport Road.
"We just want to protect the roadway before we start losing pieces of it into the ocean," said John Maashoff of the Public Works Department.
About 300 feet of the western southbound lane of Carlsbad Boulevard was closed to traffic Tuesday morning "out of an abundance of caution" to protect drivers and especially the bicyclists, joggers and pedestrians who use the shoulder, Maashoff said. The solution probably will be to build a rock revetment along the highway shoulder prevent further erosion, he said, though a plan is still being developed.
"The goal is to start as early as next week," Maashoff said. "But we do have a lot of high tides next week, so that’s probably going to prohibit us from getting in there and doing a lot of substantial work."
The highest tide of the season, expected to be 7.2 feet above mean sea level, will occur Dec. 24. Public works officials are concerned that if there’s also another storm, there could be additional damage. "In 2010, we had a very similar situation," Maashoff said. "The shoulder was eroded, a sewer main was exposed, and we did some emergency repairs. We put in about 300 feet of riprap revetment to protect the boulevard from wave action."
Sand has eroded all along the Carlsbad coast in recent weeks, he said, though so far the only significant damage has been at Encinas Creek. The unusually high tides, also known as "king tides," have swept away the sand from many North County beaches, leaving only cobblestones.
Carlsbad real estate agent David Dion shot dramatic video Saturday morning of waves crashing against the seawall west of Agua Hedionda Lagoon.
"I run along that beach every Saturday morning," Dion said. "It’s 95 percent gone from the beach that used to be there." He said his video of the crashing surf has had 600,000 views on Facebook, with the number still climbing by 5,000 views an hour. He recently posted it on You-Tube, where by Tuesday morning it had 50,000 viewers.
"It’s crazy," he said. "I’ve never had that happen before."
A little farther north in Carlsbad, the state beach parking lot at Tamarack Avenue was closed Tuesday morning to sweep out the sand that blew in over the weekend. "We started at 6:45 a.m. and hope to open by 1 p.m." said supervising state parks Ranger Lisa Urbach. "We don’t want to have the lots closed like this any longer than possible." A bulldozer was brought in from the Anza-Borrego Desert, and work crews from Orange County helped with the cleanup, Urbach said, and that delayed the work a day. To prevent another such delay, the Parks Department will have heavy equipment staged in the area in preparation for the high tides of Dec. 23-25. Beach erosion and sandy parking lots are not unusual in Southern California winters, but the damage this year could be significant. The National Weather Service has said unusually warm sea temperatures this winter will bring Southern California some of the strongest storms in years, a condition known as El Niño.
"Some people shovel snow in the winter; we shovel sand," said Marcus Robert, a state parks maintenance worker. Earlier this month, the extreme tides ate away part of a sandy bluff supporting Coast Highway 101 in Cardiff, forcing the city of Encinitas to launch emergency repairs there. That work was expected to cost about $60,000.
Estimates of the Carlsbad Boulevard repair costs are pending, Maashoff said. Other agencies involved in the work include the California Coastal Commission, the state Department of Parks and Recreation, the Regional Water Quality Control Board, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
(Phil Diehl, U-T)
top
The snow tapered off Tuesday afternoon as the storm moved northeast, leaving behind drifts up to four feet high. "It’s going to be western Nebraska’s turn next," National Weather Service meteorologist Todd Dankers said. "It’s going to end up eventually in Minnesota."
It was the first big storm of the season for most of Colorado and Utah. Schools closed in some towns in at least four states. Some flights at Denver International Airport were more than four hours late after at least seven inches of snow fell there, airport officials said.
More than 600 miles of Colorado Interstate highways were snow-packed or icy, and gusts as strong as 58 mph left near-whiteout conditions in isolated areas of Colorado’s eastern plains, Dankers said. Few highways were closed, however. A snowplow slipped off a highway in the foothills west of Boulder early Tuesday and landed upside-down in a creek, but the driver wasn’t injured. The accident happened at about 4:30 a.m. in Boulder Canyon, said Amy Ford, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Transportation. Nothing spilled from the truck into the creek, she said. The cause of the accident was under investigation.
The wind piled up drifts three to four feet deep in the small northeastern Colorado town of Merino. Schools and the town offices were closed, but some businesses open as usual. "I think we’re just more used to it," said Jada Gettman, owner of Grandpa’s restaurant in Merino, which was open. "The snowing and blowing doesn’t affect us as much."
About 24 inches of snow fell in the west-central mountains near McClure Pass, the National Weather Service said. The town of Larkspur, in the foothills north of Colorado Springs, reported 17 inches of snow, and cities along the north-south Interstate 25 corridor reported up to a foot. Farther east, the Colorado plains received four to eight inches of snow.
The storm struck Utah before moving into Colorado, leaving about a foot of snow in the Salt Lake City area and more than two feet in other places. The Utah Highway Patrol worked more than 400 accidents over the last two days as people struggled to get to work and school on icy, snow-packed roads. The storm left a foot of snow in parts of Wyoming and Montana, leaving icy highways. School kids in Billings, Mont., the state’s largest city, got their first snow day in more than 25 years. Parts of Interstates 25 and 80 were closed in Wyoming, but travel was a lot more fun in Yellowstone National Park, where recent snow allowed the park to start welcoming snowmobile and tank-like snow-coach traffic.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
top
One of them, however, appeared to be untangling as the European Union softened its insistence that countries’ targets to limit carbon pollution need to be legally binding, something U.S. negotiators reject because of opposition in Congress.
"We need the United States on board and we have to find a solution," EU Climate Commissioner Miguel Arias Canete told reporters.
Many Republicans question whether climate change is happening and oppose emissions limits out of concern that it would hurt U.S. industry and jobs.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
top
During last week’s "orange alert" — the first of the year, and the second-most serious warning on a four-tier system — Beijing education authorities ordered all schools to halt outdoor classes and activities, and allowed schools to "flexibly arrange" their academic schedules. Last Tuesday, at least one school, Beijing No. 2 Experimental Primary School, suspended classes and allowed students to stay home. Yet those moves stopped short of those put in place under this week’s alert, which urges schools throughout the city to close completely; restricts cars, based on even and odd license plate numbers, to driving on alternating days; and temporarily closes many of the city’s factories and construction sites. It even bans fireworks and outdoor barbecues. (Grilled kebabs are a hugely popular street food in the city). In addition, government agencies will have to keep 30 percent of their automobiles off the streets.
The measures have caused confusion among commuters, who fear that the alert will wreak havoc on Beijing’s already-packed buses and subways, and parents, who wonder how they’ll look after their children until schools reopen.
"We were just informed the primary school will be shut for three days," said Li Xia, 35, an employee at an insurance company with an 8year-old daughter. "There isn’t such a thing as a pollution holiday for us. So I don’t know how this will work — what are we going to do with our children while we’re working?"
"The pollution has been so bad these past few years," she continued. "My child will have to stay at home this whole time. When I was a kid, I used to play outdoors with my friends all the time. I feel sorry for my child; this is not the way a kid should live."
By 8 p.m. Monday, the air quality index — a widely used measure of air pollution — for Beijing rested at 250 on a scale of 0 to 500. The World Health Organization classifies readings of over 300 as "hazardous."
At 9:15 p.m., teacher Li Jing was still waiting to hear whether schools in her Beijing district would be in session the next day. "It’s very strange," said Li, who has a 10-year-old son. "All the other districts have issued notices and we are still waiting."
Dong Liansai, a Beijing-based climate and energy campaigner at Greenpeace, said the red alert was released in a timely manner and was consistent with the city’s emergency response plan. "That’s a sign of a different attitude from the Beijing government," he said. "It shows they really want to initiate this alert system and deal with air pollution." He called the current episode "a crisis that’s also a chance to test and improve the emergency response plan." Still, he said, having two nearly back-to-back episodes of intense pollution "means China still needs to do more to realize the urgency of curbing air pollution" and should use the events to add to momentum for policy change and greater enforcement of existing regulations.
Ma Jun, director at the Beijing-based Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs and one of China’s best-known environmental activists, praised the move, saying there had been "a lot of questions" following the intense smog of last week and prior occasions when the criteria for a red alert had been met but authorities had nevertheless only issued an orange warning.
"This will prevent the most vulnerable group (children) from further exposure," he said. Still, he said, "we need to realize that pollution is a regional problem and it’s not just about our own city (Beijing) and whatever emergency actions we can take. Whatever we do can only have limited results." "In the future, we need to work out how to coordinate a regional response because emissions from industry and coal burning (in nearby regions) are much more significant than emissions from cars," he said.
Ma noted that Beijing is in the same "airshed" as heavily industrial areas nearby, including Hebei province. "We need to work in coordination," he said. "The coal and industrial pollution is much worse" than from cars. "In many places, the quality of coal is still quite bad." Ma said he believes that the red alert in Beijing will prompt a deeper public discussion about how to clear the skies. "The question is, how can we control pollution based on rule of law, not just in emergency cases like this, taking tough action," he said. "We need to make sure day-to-day enforcement happens."
Chinese cities, especially northern ones, have some of the world’s worst air pollution. Most of it comes from industrial coal burning, and some from motor vehicles. Leaders in Beijing can ensure clearer skies when they want by ordering shutdowns of factories, but they have done so only during international summit meetings here and signature events like the military parade on Sept. 3 for the victory over Japan in World War II. At international climate change talks, including the ones now under way in Paris, Chinese officials have promised to curb coal use in order to address air pollution and carbon dioxide emissions.
"This week in Paris, China is rightfully getting credit for its policies to tackle climate change," said Alex Wang, a law professor at the University of California Los Angeles who studies Chinese environmental policy. "But the extraordinary air pollution in Beijing right now demonstrates just how much remains to be done to make these policies work in practice."
(Julie Makinen and Jonathan Kaiman, California News Group, with NYT News Service)
top
Deputy Prime Minister Demeke Mekonnen estimated that the drought will continue well into 2016 and cited lack of transportation and food supplies as major obstacles.
John Graham, Save the Children’s Country Director in Ethiopia, said in a statement that Ethiopia is experiencing its worst drought in 50 years and $1.4 billion in aid is needed to adequately respond to the emergency.
(U-T News Service)
top
The first cases of this outbreak were noted in early November and traced to a popular camping site in South Kona. It has now grown to rival the last major dengue outbreak, which took place in 2001 and lasted about 10 months with 92 cases on Maui, 26 on Oahu and four on Kauai. The outbreak is taking place at the start of the island’s peak tourism season, which usually begins around mid-December and lasts until March or mid-April. The Hawaii Tourism Authority published an alert last month instructing tourists to take precautions against the illness.
The virus, spread by a bite from infected mosquitoes, is uncommon in Hawaii. County health officials said that it was probably introduced to the island by a person who contracted it in another part of the world, became infectious while in Hawaii and was bitten there by a mosquito, which spread the fever.
(NYT News Service)
top
Authors Fernando Jaramillo and Georgia Destouni of Stockholm University focused their research on the effects of flow regulation and irrigation — essentially, building dams and reservoirs for human use — on the water cycle, and found that previous studies have significantly underestimated their influence. Notably, they found a significant increase in water consumption — thousands of cubic kilometers worth — in the latter half of the 20th century because of water management.
These practices can have an important influence on what scientists call "evapotranspiration," which is water that is lost to the atmosphere by either evaporating from the Earth’s surface or being taken up by plants and later released into the air through their leaves. While most people think about "water consumption" as referring to the amount of water humans drink or use for industry, water that evaporates into the atmosphere is actually a major component too, said Jaramillo. A handy blog from the World Resources Institute helps explain the concept: Essentially, water consumption refers to any water that is withdrawn and not immediately returned to its original source. So when water vaporizes and goes into the atmosphere as a result of human actions, such as irrigation or dam-building, it counts as being consumed by humans — even if it comes back down to the Earth at a later point as rain.
It’s important to think about consumption in this way: Water that goes into the atmosphere in one place doesn’t necessarily comeback down in the same location or in the same amount. And by engaging in practices that cause more water to be lost into the atmosphere than naturally would, humans are interfering with the natural ratio of evapotranspiration to precipitation — in other words, water out versus water in — and that could lead to increases in water shortages down the road.
"A scientific motivation for this study is that we want to understand what is it that drives changes in the freshwater system on land," said Destouni, the senior author and a professor of hydrology and water resources at Stockholm University. And as the research was conducted, she said, "we started to see that the landscape drivers of change including human water management were actually important nearly everywhere." There are a variety of ways that human water management techniques can affect how much water is lost to the atmosphere as water vapor.
Creating reservoirs means there’s a larger surface area of standing water, which can increase evaporation rates. Additionally, irrigation can increase the number of plants in an area, which then draw in more water and release it into the air through their leaves. The authors decided to determine the global impact of flow regulation and irrigation on the water cycle in order to figure out how much water is being consumed, or lost to the atmosphere, just as a result of these practices. They selected 100 large water basins from around the world to use as a sample, choosing basins "that were more representative and had long-term consistent data on climate and water change and long-term data on water use and land use," Jaramillo said.
They then used these data to figure out the ratio of evapotranspiration to precipitation between 1901 and 2008. In the past, studies examining the influence of flow regulation and irrigation on the water footprint have used global - scale models, which the authors argue have underestimated the effects on the water cycle. Their study is the first to take a global look using historical data.
After conducting their analysis, the researchers found that between the period from 1901 to 1954 and the period from 1955 to 2008, there was an increase in the average loss of freshwater to the atmosphere of more than 3,500 cubic kilometers, or about 850 cubic miles, of water. These calculations raise the estimated total human water footprint — that’s all water consumed, freshwater or otherwise — by a whopping 18 percent, bringing it up to about 10,688 cubic kilometers per year.
(Chelsea Harvey, THE WASHINGTON POST)
top
The plan — likely to be controversial — was announced after a Delhi high court issued a directive Thursday ordering the state and national government as well as Delhi’s pollution control committee to devise a concrete plan to address rising air pollution levels by Dec. 21.
"It seems like we are living in a gas chamber," the court said. Delhi’s air — a noxious combination of exhaust, dust, smoke from wood and dung-fired stoves, burning leaves and industrial output — surpassed Beijing’s last year as the dirtiest in the world, according to a study by the World Health Organization.
Friday, its concentration of PM2.5 particulate matter — the small airborne particles that enter people’s lungs and pose a major health threat— was a “hazardous” 652 at one point in the afternoon, compared with an “unhealthy” 180 in Mumbai and Hyderabad, two other major Indian cities. Officials say they hope the measure will reduce pollution levels by 50 percent.
(THE WASHINGTON POST)
top
"I worry about the economic impact for our country," Bush said during a visit to Iowa, the first-in-the-nation caucus state. President Barack Obama is pushing to put a price, such as a tax, on pollution to fight global climate change.
"I worry that - put aside intentions - these proposals could have an impact on the here-and-now on people that are really struggling right now," Bush added. "I’d be uncertain whether I would attend a meeting like that where it seems like the movement is toward policies that would hurt our economy."
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
top
"Climate change is a massive problem," he said. "It’s a generational problem. It’s a problem that by definition is just about the hardest thing for any political system to absorb" because the effects are gradual and diffuse. And yet, he said, "I actually think we’re going to solve this problem." Obama made his remarks hours before Congress reconvened, and the Republican majority in the House sent a signal to negotiators from the nearly 200 nations gathered here that it did not support the president’s climate-change policies.
The House passed two bills blocking Obama’s major initiatives on climate change, a set of Environmental Protection Agency rules to push energy providers away from coal-fired power plants. Earlier in the day, Obama met with the leaders of five island nations including Barbados in the Caribbean Sea and Papua New Guinea in the South Pacific north of Australia. The president, whose first two bilateral meetings in Paris were with the leaders of China and India, said that even small dots on the map deserved to be heard in international climate talks.
(NYT NEWS SERVICES)
top
San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer, mayors of the county’s 17 other cities and county Supervisor Bill Horn sent Brown a joint letter last week urging him to help local agencies do everything possible to prevent loss of life and property this winter.
“The San Diego region is united in its belief that government regulations shouldn’t stand in the way of making common-sense preparations for the heavy rains predicted from the coming El niño,” Faulconer said Tuesday. “For months, staff has been working to navigate the complex, expensive and time-consuming regulations cities are required to comply with before flood channels can be cleared. But by declaring a state of emergency, Governor Brown can remove the bureaucracy."
The letter also requested temporary suspension of some state laws related to water and wildlife, assistance from the state Office of Emergency Services, and that Brown ask the federal government to temporarily suspend laws in the Clean Water Act that affect flood control maintenance and repair.
The state and federal regulations aim to prevent local agencies from ripping out sensitive habitat in the name of flood prevention and damaging water quality by doing reckless work that can accelerate erosion.
But local officials complain they are too cumbersome, especially when the city is facing a threat like El niño.
The cities must complete five detailed technical studies for each channel targeted for cleaning prior to submitting permit applications with up to six agencies. The average cost of mitigation per channel is more than $500,000, according to the city.
The letter to Brown follows the San Diego City Council’s move on Nov. 17 declaring a local state of emergency, a move that was mostly symbolic because the city doesn’t have the power to override state environmental laws.
(David Garrick, San Diego Union Tribune)
top
It took the city five years to obtain state and federal permits needed before work could begin on the 63 channels, some of which are concrete-lined, others of which are earthen. In September, with the permits finally in hand, public work crews started plowing through the sites. By early this week, workers had removed vegetation and trash in 27 of the targeted areas and were pushing ahead on the others, officials said. The sites have been prioritized by the highest to lowest risk of flooding. "Over the last few months, we have been able to make great headway on the channels," said Julie Procopio, assistant director of the city’s Public Works Department. "One by one, we are knocking off the ones we think are the highest priority."
So far, the crews have cleared about 3.5 miles of channels and have removed quite a haul: 1,475 tons of vegetation, 890 tons of silt, and 18 tons of trash. The city hopes to get as many channels cleaned as it can soon, not just to get ahead of the expected storms, but also to remove unwanted vegetation before bird nesting season starts in February. Alicia Appel, the city staffer who headed the work to get the permits, said a biological monitor is on site at most of the locations during the cleaning. Once the channels are cleared, the goal is to keep them that way; the five-year permit allows city crews to revisit the sites. The city’s storm drain system consists of roughly 5,200 curb inlets and outlets, and miles of underground pipes. Those, too, have been inspected and cleaned in anticipation of a wetter-than-average winter, and a powerful El Niño, city officials said.
The prep work extends beyond clearing the waterways. Crews also pruned back drought-weakened trees and placed railings along Lake Wohlford Road for fast response to potential mudslides. Escondido has also stocked up on road signs with messages such as "flooded" and "detour" and "road closed."
"We are aware and we are prepared," Procopio said.
El Niño is the name of the phenomenon that generates widespread warm water in the Pacific Ocean. The conditions often draw the atmospheric jet stream across Southern California, bringing powerful storms. Some scientists have said that this year’s El Niño could be the strongest on record.
Aside from its own prep, Escondido is also asking residents to heed the El Niño warnings. Links to tips on how to prepare for the predicted rains can be found on the homepage of the city’s website. There is also a free winter weather emergency preparedness workshop at the Escondido police and fire headquarters on Dec. 9. The city is also providing empty sandbags — and the sand to fill them— at the Kit Carson Park Amphitheater, 3333 Bear Valley Parkway. The limit is 10 bags per person. People should bring their own shovels and expect to fill the sandbags themselves.
(Teri Figueroa, San Diego Union Tribune)
top
Reuters reported authorities blamed "unfavorable weather" and coal fires lit by the poor for heat in the winter for the oppressive smog. But that’s really only half the story — coal-fired power plants are also in overdrive since last week’s wintry blast.
Temperatures were running as low as 25 degrees below normal for this time of year in northeast China for much of the past week. When the excessive power use for heating combined with stagnant high pressure, Beijing’s air quality took a nose-dive.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
top
Snow made for a messy, slow commute in Minneapolis, while dozens of schools closed for the day because of snow in Iowa, South Dakota and Minnesota. Up to a foot of snow was expected in eastern South Dakota and southwest Minnesota, while smaller amounts were forecast from Nebraska to Wisconsin.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
top
It identified hotspots of endangered cacti across the Americas, from the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul and parts of neighboring Uruguay north to the Mexican states of Queretaro, San Luis Potosi, Oaxaca and Puebla.
Salvador Arias, cactus curator at the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s botanical garden, said a third of the country’s 700 or so native species are at severe risk for survival and called the situation "alarming."
He said the greatest threat comes from destruction of habitat for crops and cattle. Second is illegal collection, often by aficionados who take seeds or plants to sell in European countries.
"These plants belong to the so-called exotic plants, which have ornamental value for people around the world," said Arias, who was involved in putting together the report. "How did (the plants) make it there (Europe)? We can simply say through illegal extraction."
Scientists say cacti are important elements of desert ecosystems as sources of food and water. They’re also a source of nourishment and building materials for local human populations.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
top
Government and business leaders are banking on clean energy technology to fight global warming, kicking off the negotiations by pledging billions of dollars to research and develop a technical fix to the planet’s climate woes.
Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates, President Barack Obama and French President Francois Hollande will launch a joint initiative today after a diplomatic push in recent weeks ahead of the Paris conference.
A key goal is to bring down the cost of cleaner energy. At least 19 governments and 28 leading world investors, including Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, billionaires George Soros and Saudi Prince Alaweed bin Talal, and Jack Ma of China’s Alibaba, have signed on so far.
"It’s quite a big deal,” said Jennifer Morgan, global climate director for the World Resources Institute. “It brings a new kind of burst of energy into the conference right at the beginning on something very important."
Meanwhile, the French government is using the sweeping emergency powers it gained after the Paris terrorist attacks to clamp down on any possible disruption to the conference, limiting demonstrations and placing two dozen environmental activists under house arrest.
The efforts to restrict protests were not entirely successful; 174 people were taken into custody Sunday after demonstrators clashed with the police in the Place de la République.
The negotiations will occur against the backdrop of recent scientific reports that have concluded that the first effects of human-caused climate change have already started to sweep across the Earth, from rising sea levels flooding Miami to savage heat waves in Australia. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration projects that 2015 will be the hottest global year on record, beating the record set in 2014.
Since 1992, U.N. negotiators have held annual summit meetings aimed at drafting a global climate change treaty. They came close to a deal twice.
In 1997, world leaders signed the Kyoto Protocol, which assigned the largest economies legally binding targets for cutting their greenhouse gas emissions. There were two big problems: Kyoto assigned targets to the developed world, but made no requirements of developing economies like India and China, which today are two of the largest greenhouse gas polluters. President Bill Clinton never sent the deal to the Senate for ratification because it would not have passed, thus exempting the world’s largest economy from action.
In 2009 in Copenhagen, Denmark, Obama and other world leaders drafted a new pact to replace the Kyoto deal. It would have committed developing countries like China to action, but failed to achieve the unanimous consent required for legal enforcement, and has served as little more than a voluntary agreement.
Obama pledged that by 2025 the United States would cut emissions up to 28 percent from 2005 levels, largely through aggressive environmental rules on greenhouse gases from power plant smokestacks and vehicle tailpipes. President Xi Jinping announced that by 2017, China would begin a national cap-and-trade system placing limits on industrial emissions and requiring companies to pay for government-issued permits to pollute. Xi also has pledged that China’s emissions will begin to drop no later than 2030.
Since then, more than 170 countries, representing more than 90 percent of global carbon emissions, have put forth proposals to reduce emissions. Those plans, expected to form the core of a new agreement, represent a major change from the usual brinkmanship of climate negotiations. A big sticking point at the climate talks will be money — how much rich countries should invest help poor countries cope with climate change, how much should be invested in renewable energy, and how much traditional oil and gas producers stand to lose if countries agree to forever reduce emissions.
The governments pledge to double their spending on low or no-carbon energy over the next five years, according to Brian Deese, senior adviser to Obama on climate and energy issues. They include leading energy producers and consumers such as the U.S., China, India, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Australia, Canada, France and Norway. They currently invest about $10 billion a year total, about half of which comes from the U.S.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES; with contributions from ASSOCIATED PRESS, NY TIMES, REUTERS)
top
The Oklahoma Department of Transportation said roads in the Panhandle remained slick after the slow-moving storm dropped ice and freezing rain in the region. Utilities in Oklahoma said more than 71,000 homes and business were without power as of Sunday afternoon because of the ice storms. In parts of North Texas and Arkansas, the concern was flooding, with flood watches and warnings in effect through Sunday evening.
A 70-year-old woman whose car was swept away in Fort Worth on Friday remained missing Sunday. Authorities had planned to send in divers to search for her, but rushing waters made recovery efforts too dangerous and difficult, Fort Worth Fire Department spokesman Kyle Clay said.
Flooding also resulted in a family having to be rescued from their home in Seagoville, southeast of Dallas. Three people and a dog were rescued from the home. Four other families chose to leave because of rising waters from a nearby creek.
River waters also lapped at the foundations of homes in Horseshoe Bend community in Parker County. Joel Kertok, the emergency management spokesman for the county west of Fort Worth, said the river there crested and had begun to recede Sunday as the rain diminished.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
top
In Johnson County, authorities pulled a body out of a vehicle that was swept away overnight. About 11:40 a.m., authorities said they found another body near Mansfield but didn’t release any other details.
And in Burleson, authorities were still looking for the 70-year-old driver of a submerged vehicle. Around 1 a.m., a Tarrant County sheriff ’s deputy was swept away during a high water rescue in Burleson. Deputy Krystal Salazar stopped to help a motorist who was stuck in about 5 feet of water. Salazar, a bystander trying to help, and the motorist were swept away when the deputy tried to wade over. Salazar was found about two hours later clinging to a tree. She was transported to the hospital as a precaution. The female motorist had not been rescued from her vehicle, which was submerged.
Fort Worth fire officials said that “rescue efforts have moved to a recovery stage.”
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
top
Hurricane Sandra off the west coast of Mexico is the ninth major hurricane this year in the eastern Pacific. Has the region ever had that many major storms in a single season?
A:
This year sets the record for most Category 3 or higher storms in the region, according to the National Hurricane Center. Winnie, a Category 1 hurricane in December 1983, was the latest-occurring hurricane in the basin.
(Robert Krier, S.D. UNION TRIBUNE)
top
The confirmed casualties were a 56-year-old woman and a 69-year-old man.
At least two firefighters were among the 13 people hospitalized by the blaze that had scorched 210,000 acres of farm and woodland and threatened several towns near Adelaide, the state’s capital and largest city, Weatherill said.
Five of those injured were in critical or serious conditions with burns.
"Their condition is being closely monitored, but we do hold grave concerns," Weatherill told reporters.
The blaze remained uncontrolled Wednesday night with more than 300 firefighters at the 25-mile fire front. Reinforcements were on their way, officials said.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
top
Ominous as the scene may look, the mill is part of a conservation strategy to preserve the forest. The forest’s survival, indeed the endurance of forests across the tropics, whether in Brazil, the Congo Basin or Indonesia, offers benefits far beyond national borders. By absorbing carbon dioxide and trapping carbon, forests play a vital role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. On that, there is little disagreement. Yet it has been much harder to reach a consensus over how to fend off the threats encircling them. Cattle ranchers, farmers, illegal loggers and drug traffickers all lay waste to forestland, virtually immune to government efforts to protect it.
The experiment here in the Maya Biosphere Reserve in Guatemala’s northern Petn region suggests one solution: The most effective way to protect forests is to give control of them to the communities who live there. Those who can secure a living from the forest, often by harvesting valuable hardwood trees, have an incentive to protect it, and that can create a far stronger line of defense than what governments can muster.
“Nobody is going to take care of somebody else’s house, somebody else’s garden,” said Marcedonio Cortave, who directs an alliance of the communities working in the reserve. “But they will look after and defend their own livelihood.”
Communities and two local companies manage almost a quarter of the territory across the 5.2 million-acre reserve here, in 11 government concession areas that permit strictly monitored forestry. Some 15 years since the concessions were established, the deforestation rate in the managed areas is close to zero, according to a study led by the Rainforest Alliance.
“If the concessions didn’t exist, the zone would be one big cattle pasture,” said Wilson Martnez, the forest manager for Yaloch, a concession area near the border with Belize. Map in hand, he walked through a patch of jungle that had been harvested last year. Each tree had been plotted to determine which ones to cut and which ones to leave as seed trees.
All that betrayed the logging was the stump of a single mahogany tree, a modest clearing planted with mahogany seedlings, and faint trails. The site will be left to regenerate naturally.
Along with preventing deforestation, the communities have also succeeded in protecting the most threatened tree species in the jungle, native bigleaf mahogany and Spanish cedar, according to a study released this month.
“These practices represent the state of the art for conservation,” said Bryan Finegan, a forest ecologist at Catie, an international research institute in Costa Rica that led the study. “It’s a model for the world.”
Despite long-held doubts that communities are capable of sustaining their forests, international conservation groups have signed on to the strategy. Working with indigenous and community groups, they will press to include forest peoples’ rights in negotiations at the global climate change summit in Paris that begins Monday.
“The foresters and the technocrats say that they can’t manage their forests,” David Kaimowitz, the director of natural resources at the Ford Foundation, said. “But everywhere they have been given an opportunity to do that, that has not been true.”
(Elizabeth Malkin, NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE)
top
The quake, initially reported as a magnitude 7.1, was felt all the way to the south of Peru, close to the Chilean border, according to local media. The quake could also be felt in the capital, Lima, 423 miles away to the east, witnesses said.
The main quake’s epicenter was located 184 miles northwest of the Peruvian city of Puerto Maldonado.
(U-T News Services)
top
(U-T News Services)
top
Temperatures plunged behind a cold front that brought snow across much of the region Friday and Saturday. The National Weather Service forecast 20 degrees or lower across six states from North Dakota to Illinois. The weather service reported temperatures in the single- and low double-digits Sunday in northern Illinois, including Chicago, where residents were digging out of more than 11 inches of snow — the highest November total in 120 years in the city.
More than 130 flights were canceled Sunday into and out of the O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, according to flight-tracking website FlightAware.com.
The first snowfall of the season also brought amounts ranging from a few inches to 20 inches of snow from South Dakota through Michigan earlier in the weekend.
(U-T News Services)
top
The 41-year-old rhino had been under veterinary care for a bacterial infection and age-related health issues. Her condition took a turn for the worse over the weekend, San Diego Zoo Global said in a statement. Early Sunday morning, the Safari Park team “made the difficult decision to euthanize her."
It is a crushing loss for the Safari Park, where Nola had lived since 1989. The gentle 4,000-pound animal was a favorite with the staff because of her sociable personality and love of back scratches. She was also a popular attraction for Safari Park visitors, who could always spot her because of her distinctively curved horn.
Nola’s death is also a blow to the northern white rhino sub-species. After decades of poaching, there are just three northern white rhinos left in the world. All three — a male and two females— live on the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya.
The source of Nola’s lingering infection was recently traced to a large abscess deep in her pelvic region. Veterinarians performed a minor surgical procedure to drain the abscess on Nov. 13, and the majority of the infected material was removed. But her condition began rapidly deteriorating on Saturday, and the decision was made to euthanize her.
“It sounds corny, but with her, every day is a blessing," lead keeper Jane Kennedy said last month, when she and her fellow Safari Park staff members were keeping an eye on Nola’s condition. “I would call her a symbol of our purpose. She truly represents what we are all dedicating our lives to."
Nola had been caught in Sudan when she was approximately 2 years old. She came to the Safari Park in 1989 from the Dvur Kralove Zoo in the Czech Republic as part of a breeding program. But she and her fellow northern whites had already made a big impression on her new hosts.
“I met Nola and her group of rhinos in July of 1986, when I traveled to what was then the Czech Soviet Republic. The Soviet army was there, and so was this group of northern white rhinos,” said Oliver Ryder, director of genetics, Kleberg Chair, San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research. “The last week I was there, a baby rhino was born. It made a big impression on me, because these enormous creatures were so gentle and so cautious and curious with this baby rhino. I was impressed yet again that there is a depth to their lives that we don’t understand.”
The hope was that Nola would mate with Angalifu, the Safari Park’s northern white rhino male. The mating happened, but there was never a pregnancy. At one point, staffers sawed off the horns of Nola and fellow female, Noti, to keep them from fighting Angalifu off. But without herd behavior to spur more frequent mating, there were never any northern white births at the Safari Park.
Two deaths since December
And then, there were fewer northern white rhinos altogether. Noti died in 2007, and Angalifu died last December. And in July, Nabire, a female northern white rhino living in the Dvur Kralove Zoo, died at the age of 32.
So when Nola was put on medical watch this year due to a sinus infection, the whole rhino-watching world began to worry. In May, she began receiving treatment for an abscess on her right hip. The life expectancy of the white rhino species, which includes northern and southern white rhinos, is 40 to 50 years. But when Nola’s abscess and the bacterial infection that it caused came back in September, the Safari Park community was on high alert.
“It’s tough. It’s like having your 90-year-old aunt get sick, and there is nothing you can do except give her basic care and keep her comfortable,” keeper Kennedy said last month, as she watched Nola recline in the shade of her Safari Park enclosure, with her companion southern white rhino, Chuck, nearby. “When her abscess came back the second time, you could tell she didn’t feel good. When her attitude sinks, ours has to jump up because we need to help her.”
For Kennedy and her fellow members of Team Nola, helping the rhino was a priority and a privilege. And the rhino made it easy. Due to an irregularity in her hooves, Nola needed regular nail trimmings. The constant interactions with the keepers made her comfortable with human contact and usually a cinch to work with, despite her massive size.
She did not like being in her boma corral, and she was not at all fond of taking her many antibiotic pills. But she loved her pedicures and her back scratches and hanging out in her 65-acre African Plains habitat with the equally sociable Chuck, who was very eager to track her whereabouts when Nola was getting her abscess drained last week.
“They are like the elderly couple who met late in life and became friends,” Kennedy said of Chuck and Nola. “I’ve known Nola for 26 years, and she is truly, truly one of the sweetest animals I have ever worked with.”
With neither of the Ol Pejeta northern white females able to give birth naturally due to advanced age or reproductive issues, it is up to science to save the sub-species. The San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research’s Frozen Zoo contains viable cell cultures from 12 northern white rhinos. Genetic materials from Nola have been preserved, and the plan was always to collect her ovaries and any viable stem cells upon her death.
With the help of in-vitro fertilization, the hope is to use the recently arrived southern white rhinos living in the Safari Park’s new Rhino Rescue Center as surrogates for a hybrid rhino, which would be created with northern white sperm and southern white eggs. San Diego Zoo Global has one of the world’s most successful rhino breeding programs.
To date, 94 southern white rhinos, 68 greater one-horned rhinos and 14 black rhinos have been born at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park. As the genomic research, technology and procedures become more advanced, the goal would be to create complete northern white rhino embryos, which the southern whites would carry to term.
Nola’s legacy will live on, and not just in the hearts and minds of the people who cared for her. “The white rhinos represent the wild places and prehistoric animals that are still with us,” said Steve Metzler, interim associate curator of mammals, who accompanied the Rhino Rescue Center’s six southern whites on their 22-hour flight from Johannesburg to San Diego. “It is devastating to think that in just a few hundred years, we can wipe that out. That is just wrong, and we need to do something about it.”
(Karla Peterson, U-T News Services)
top
That was the theme of a public discussion hosted this week by UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, with in-house researchers and guest speakers from organizations such as the National Weather Service.
Scientists have warned that one of the most powerful El niño systems in recorded history could pummel Southern California well into the spring.
Years of drought and record- high temperatures in the Pacific Ocean could complicate things further, scientists in this region said.
“It’s been a strange two years, a ver strange two years," said Dan Rudnick an oceanographer at Scripps. “This El niño is happening on top of the strange stuff we’ve had since 2014.”
If El niño conditions pull more winter storms down to Southern California than usual — and that has been the historical pattern during years with a strong El niño — the precipitation will likely move across some of the warmest ocean temperatures on record.
“Those warm waters off the coast can add moisture, can add instability. In other words, give us heavier rainfall rates as they move in,” said Alex Tardy, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Rancho Bernardo. “We’ve already seen that a couple of times this year with the rainfall in early November.
“It’s timing, but there’s the potential for increased [coastal] flooding,” he said. A “double whammy,” he added, would occur if flooding from inland watersheds creates flooding, mudslides or other property damage.
In many places, drought conditions may have reduced vegetation and destabilized soils— making mudslides more likely. Scientists caution that repeated storms could swell rivers and small streams to areas that haven’t seen such conditions in decades.
Adding to concerns, warmer weather in the past year has contributed to recent tides well above predicted levels. “What you see is a tendency for the observed tide to stand above the predicted tide by 8 inches or so,” said Dan Cayan, a climate researcher at Scripps. “That’s not been the case over the last couple of days, but once the atmosphere changes, we’re anticipating with that warmer water that we’ll probably pick up to anomalously higher sea levels.”
If a low-pressure system to move toward the region during the next few days, coastal areas could get hit hard by waves over Thanksgiving weekend, Cayan said. “The largest tides this winter are the ones approaching us in the next week, so that’s an important period for us,” he said. “It turns out there’s a signature of a storm on the horizon.”
With roughly a century of data and just a handful of El niño events on record, scientists were cautious not to talk in terms of guarantees. Only about half of such weather events have delivered strong precipitation to Southern California. The most powerful El niño on record came during the winter of 1982-83. However, given the convergence of unusual conditions this year, everyone in attendance at the Scripps forum Thursday expressed a strong curiosity for what the winter will bring. “We don’t know what will happen next because it’s been such a strange couple of years, and we’ll see how this one evolves in comparison to past El niños,” Rudnick said.
(Joshua Emerson Smith, U-T)
top
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
top
The fire, in the south of Western Australia, began last weekend after lightning struck about 12 miles north of the township of Esperance. It was flaring six days later after burning through 580 square miles of farmland, fanned by temperatures above 100 degrees and bursts of wind gusting at more than 50 mph. The combination of record heat and very dry conditions — October was the hottest month in Australia ever after its third-driest September — is prompting some officials to predict an especially intense fire season, which started early this year. "It is going to be a horror summer," said Trevor Tasker, a firefighter and regional emergency services inspector from Western Australia.
"I've never seen conditions like this." The immediate cause of the record-breaking warmth is a strong El Niño weather pattern. A prolonged fire season could strain the largely volunteer firefighting forces in Australia and destroy crops, livestock and farms, many of which have suffered through decades of drought. In early November, the Bushfire and Natural Hazards research center warned that large tracts of the country, from Rockhampton in Queensland’s north, down through New South Wales and along the south coast, to Adelaide in South Australia, would suffer higher-than-normal risk of fire through summer, which lasts from December through February.
(NYT NEWS SERVICE)
top
Yemen typically gets around 4 inches of rain per year. Chapala is forecast to unleash two to three times that amount in the space of just one day. The deluge is likely to cause massive debris flows and flash flooding.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
top
It might seem like a slam dunk that the threat of El Niño would make cities and the county eligible for emergency permits, which allow crews to immediately clear brush, debris and other objects clogging drainage channels without the typical environmental hurdles and red tape.
But officials say the criteria for such permits are so stringent that they’re rarely an option before a storm, and are possible in the middle of a storm only when a new threat to property or life has emerged and a long list of additional conditions are met.
“It’s not a simple process, and there are many rules to follow,” said Drew Kleis, deputy director of San Diego’s Stormwater Division. “Something unexpected has to occur that changed the conditions and basically got out ahead of the regular channel maintenance permitting process we are required to go through.”
That permitting process, which is governed by the Army Corps of Engineers and the state Regional Water Quality Control Board, aims to prevent local agencies from ripping out sensitive habitat in the name of flood prevention and damaging water quality by doing reckless work that can accelerate erosion.
Exemptions are allowed for emergencies, but officials say consensus among forecasters that San Diego County is at high risk for an extremely rainy winter doesn’t qualify.
Cities can’t apply for a blanket exemption based on something like a predicted El Niño winter, said Eric Becker, a senior engineer for the water quality control board’s Wetland and Riparian Protection Unit.
They must specify a particular imminent storm, a specific drainage channel and the life or property that would be at risk, he said. In addition, storms dump different amounts of rainfall on different parts of the county, adding another layer of uncertainty.
“It’s on a case-by-case basis, and they have to convince the Army Corps of Engineers that it is truly an emergency,” Becker said.
Kleis, who focuses on making sure the city of San Diego’s 84 miles of drainage channels are ready to absorb heavy rain, agreed that emergency exemptions apply to a narrow set of situations.
“It’s really just a tool in the toolbox when we’ve got an imminent threat to life and property and when something bad is going to happen if we don’t act,” he said. While emergency permits figure to be elusive this winter season, Becker and Kleis said they’re optimistic about flood prevention because the El Niño threat has prompted government agencies to work together in an unprecedented fashion.
They plan to accelerate channel maintenance approvals under the normal permitting process for agencies that seek such help, Becker said, noting that San Diego and Escondido have been proactive this fall in starting work on such approvals.
“If they don’t or can’t go the emergency route, we would still try to expedite things,” Becker said. Such approvals still take time. But Becker said his agency, which governs water quality for San Diego County and parts of Riverside and Orange counties, would postpone permit work on other projects, such as housing developments, to focus on drainage channel applications.
“It would be a prioritization exercise,” he said. “But we only have a certain number of staff, and they can only work on a certain number of things.” An example of such accelerated approvals is Alvarado Canyon, where city officials removed hundreds of tons of debris this fall despite the channel not being on their maintenance schedule for this fiscal year.
Kleis said city workers are vigilantly monitoring all of their channels in case new problems arise, with the threat of El Niño making that work more important than ever. “We have crews that are constantly out inspecting and driving along these channels to check conditions,” he said. When new problems haven’t arisen, however, drainage channels must remain on their current schedules for maintenance, which are based on how recently they were last cleared and other risk factors. The city plans to clear eight channels in the fiscal year that begins next summer if state and federal permits can be obtained.
Those channels, which have the highest flood risk scores in the city system, are Engineer Road in Kearny Mesa, Via De La Bandola in San Ysidro, Rancho Bernardo, Chollas Creek in southeastern San Diego, Auburn Creek in City Heights, Washington Channel in Mission Hills, Cottonwood Channel just north of National City, and Parkside Channel just north of Bonita. Despite the risk, the city probably couldn’t obtain emergency exemptions to clear these channels unless a new development, such as a fallen tree or broken pipe, made things worse. “If they’ve been planning to do work for three years and they waited until now, I think they’d have a harder case getting it declared an emergency,” Becker said.
The type of channel can also make a difference, with cement flood-control channels having different mitigation standards than manmade earthen channels and natural earthen channels.
While it’s sometimes easier to get permits for maintenance work in cement channels, Becker said there are no guarantees because many factors get considered in the approval process. Vegetation in a channel may been seen as a flood risk factor by some, but Becker stressed that plants and shrubs help filter pollution out of water and keep downstream bodies of water cleaner. City crews cleared a record seven clogged drainage channels this year: Alvarado Canyon, Sorrento Creek, Murphy Canyon Creek, Mission Bay High School, San Carlos Creek, Smythe Channel in San Ysidro and Reservoir Drive near San Diego State. A local agency could move forward with channel work without an emergency permit or a normal permit, but Kleis said such moves would risk hefty fines and extreme mitigation measures afterward. “The regulatory agencies have enforcement tools in their toolbox that are extensive,” he said.
The city’s hotline to report blocked drainage channels is (619) 235-1000. To report floods, the number is (619) 527-7500.
(David Garrick, U-T)
top
Lifeguards were called about 6 p.m. to an area below Point Loma Nazarene University, said Lee Swanson, a spokesman for the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department.
A group of five people had been near a tidepool area when the tide came in, Swanson said. Two of them were able to walk up the beach and get out on their own.
Lifeguards had to rescue two women and a man. They were put on rescue boards, pulled onto a surf boat and taken to lifeguard headquarters in Mission Bay. No one was injured, Swanson said.
(Susan Shroder, U-T)
top
Recent severe El niño storms in California caused economic losses of $2.04 billion in 1982-83 and $804 million in 1997-98, the institute report concluded after a review of various studies.
Problems in San Diego ranged from destroyed homes and buildings to shoreline erosion and road damage. “A 1998 report from the California Coastal Commission identified 23 El niño-related emergency permits issued in San Diego County in the 1997-98 winter, including $700,000 in storm related damage to the Oceanside Harbor, and $1.6 million in damages in DelMar," noted the National University report, which was written by senior analyst Vince Vasquez.
Tourism and agriculture are particularly vulnerable. Visitors might shun the region, and heavy storms with high winds tend to damage fruit crops and destroy greenhouses. However, El niño can deliver positive economic effects elsewhere because winters tend to be warmer, previous studies have found. “As a result, people can go shop, they aren’t confined to their homes," Vasquez said. "And they are spending significantly less money on heating bills."
San Diego companies and residents might also save money on water bills if rainfall is well above normal. For farmers, benefits would depend on how storms are spaced. “If we have something like four or five weeks of straight rain without any break in between, we’re looking at root rot and crop damage,” Vasquez said.
(Dan McSwain, U-T)
top
To address some of those concerns, Tote Maritime Puerto Rico, El Faro’s owner, said in a statement that it would hire an independent maritime company to conduct a safety assessment of the ship and its protocols. The assessment will be released to the public.
The National Transportation Safety Board arrived on Tuesday to begin its own investigation, and Tote Maritime said it would fully cooperate.
None of the 33 people on board has been found, despite days of searching by the U.S. Coast Guard.
Safety questions about the ship have arisen based on its age, the route it took and reports from sailors familiar with the ship.
Two seamen who recently served on El Faro said the ship experienced safety problems while they worked onboard, ranging from faulty devices used to lower the lifeboats to rooms that filled easily with water when it rained. The 790-foot El Faro lost communication with the Coast Guard on Thursday morning after reporting that it had taken on water and lost engine power.
Kurt Bruer, a quartermaster who worked this year on El Faro, said he remembered drills that dragged on as workers tried to fix davits used to lower lifeboats.
“I felt unsafe,” Bruer said. “I saw firsthand, the davits don’t work properly. It would take 30 minutes to complete a drill. Half the time we had trouble raising and lowering the lifeboats. It shouldn’t take more than five minutes.”
Bruer also recalled that the ship’s 46 protective suits, called Gumby suits because of their head-to-toe rubbery appearance, were kept in one room. Typically mariners have their individual survival suits in their own rooms. Bruer said he was terminated from El Faro after getting into an argument with an officer, and he now works aboard another vessel.
Officials for Tote Inc. defended El Faro’s seaworthiness late Monday, saying it had passed all annual inspections by the Coast Guard and the American Bureau of Shipping, was well-maintained and did not have a history of engine failure.
(NYT NEWS SERVICES)
top
Tuesday was the first completely dry day in Columbia since Sept. 24, but officials warned that new evacuations could be ordered as the huge mass of water flows toward the sea, threatening dams and displacing residents along the way.
"God smiled on South Carolina because the sun is out. That is a good sign, but ... we still have to be cautious," Gov. Nikki Haley said Tuesday after taking an aerial tour. "What I saw was disturbing."
"We are going to be extremely careful. We are watching this minute by minute," she said.
At least 14 weather-related deaths in South Carolina and two in North Carolina were blamed on the vast rainstorm. Six people drowned in their cars in Columbia alone, and several died after driving around safety barriers onto flooded roads.
Flooding is a concern wherever concrete covers soil that would otherwise act as a sponge in heavy rain. But the multitude of waterways in the Midlands area — where the Broad and Saluda rivers come together to form the Congaree — made the state capital a prime target.
Now officials are looking with concern to the Low country, where several other rivers make their way to the sea, including the Santee and Edisto. Haley warned evacuations may be needed in several counties toward the coast, and noted that several rivers rising downstream of Columbia worried officials.
"We are seeing some stage of flooding with all of them,” she said, adding that none have crested.
Haley said it was too soon to put a price tag on the damage, and it could be “any amount of dollars.” The Republican governor asked for and received a federal disaster declaration from President Barack Obama, freeing up money and resources for the state.
South Carolina’s congressional delegation is vowing to make sure the state gets federal help.
But less than three years ago, the Republican-dominated, conservative delegation opposed a $51 billion relief bill to help mid-Atlantic states like New York and New Jersey rebuild in the wake of Superstorm Sandy, which dealt that region a devastating blow.
In January 2013, five Republicans in the House delegation voted against Sandy aid after the superstorm. So did Republican Sens. Tim Scott and Lindsey Graham in a vote later that month.
In fact, just 49 of 232 House Republicans voted to provide the Sandy storm aid. Rep. Mick Mulvaney, R-S.C., offered an amendment to require that $17 billion worth of the package be offset by cuts elsewhere in the budget.
Rep. Jim Clyburn, a member of the House Democratic leadership team, supported the aid package.
In the wake of the South Carolina flooding, Republicans who opposed Sandy funding seem to be having a change of heart.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
top
On Monday, four days after the ship vanished, the Coast Guard concluded it sank near the Bahamas in about 15,000 feet of water. One unidentified body in a survival suit was recovered, and the search went on for any trace of the other crew members.
Survival suits help mariners float and stay warm. But even with the water temperature at 85 degrees, hypothermia can set in quickly, Coast Guard Capt. Mark Fedor said. He noted that the hurricane had winds of about 140 mph and waves topping 50 feet.
"These are trained mariners. They know how to abandon ship," Fedor said. But "those are challenging conditions to survive."
The ship, carrying cars and other products, had 28 crew members from the U.S. and five from Poland.
Coast Guard and Navy planes, helicopters, cutters and tugboats searched across a 300-square-mile expanse of Atlantic Ocean near Crooked Island in the Bahamas, where the ship was last heard from while on its way from Jacksonville to Puerto Rico.
A heavily damaged lifeboat from the El Faro was discovered, no one aboard, Fedor said. The ship had two lifeboats capable of holding 43 people each.
Also spotted were an oil sheen, cargo containers, a partly submerged life raft — the ship carried five rafts, each capable of holding 17 people— life jackets and life rings, authorities said.
Phil Greene, president and CEO of ship owner Tote Services Inc., said the captain had a plan to sail ahead of the hurricane with room to spare.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
top
Authorities struggled to get water to communities swamped by it, and with waterlogged dams overflowing, bridges collapsing, hundreds of roads inundated and floodwaters rolling down to the coast, the state was anything but done with this disaster.
"This is a Hugo-level event," said Maj. Gen. Robert Livingston, head of the South Carolina National Guard, referring to the September 1989 hurricane that devastated Charleston. "We didn’t see this level of erosion in Hugo. ... This water doesn’t fool around."
Much-feared Hurricane Joaquin missed the East Coast but fueled what experts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration called a “fire hose” of tropical moisture that aimed directly at the state. A solid week of rainfall has killed at least 10 people in South Carolina and two in North Carolina, and sent about 1,000 to shelters. About 40,000 have been left without drinkable water.
One of the latest to die was McArthur Woods, 56, who drove around a barricade and drowned Sunday night. His passenger managed to climb on top of the sedan, which stalled in the rushing water. A firefighter rescued her after someone heard her screams.
"She came out the window. How she got on top of the car and stayed there like she did with that water — there’s a good Lord," Kershaw County Coroner David West said.
By Monday, the heaviest rains had moved into the mid-Atlantic states. Along the Jersey Shore, some beaches devastated by Superstorm Sandy three years ago lost most of their sand to the wind, rain and high surf.
South Carolina authorities mostly switched Monday from search and rescue into “assessment and recovery mode,” but Gov. Nikki Haley warned citizens to remain careful as a “wave” of water swelled downstream and dams had to be opened to prevent catastrophic failures above low-lying neighborhoods near the capital.
"South Carolina has gone through a storm of historic proportions," Haley said. "Just because the rain stops, does not mean that we are out of the woods."
Indeed, shortly after the governor’s news conference, two dams in two separate towns east of downtown Columbia burst on Monday afternoon, forcing the evacuation of some neighborhoods.
James Shirer, who lives in the area, saw one of the dams, in the town of Forest Acres, fail and a 22-acre lake drain in 10 to 15 minutes.
"It just poured out," Shirer said.
The 16.6 inches of rain that fell at Gills Creek near downtown Columbia on Sunday made for one of the rainiest days recorded at a U.S. weather station in more than 16 years.
An Associated Press reporter surveying the scene by helicopter saw the entire eastern side of the capital city awash in floodwater.
Some 550 roads and bridges remained closed Monday, including nearly 75 miles of Interstate 95. The governor said they will need close inspection to ensure they’re safe.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
top
Torrential rains hammered a stretch of the Alpes-Maritimes between the cities of Cannes and Nice on Saturday night, causing rivers and streams to overflow and unleashing waves of water and mud that overturned cars, devastated campsites and rushed into homes and businesses.
While heavy rain had been expected, prompting warnings from the national weather forecaster, the speed and violence of the downpour were not. The Interior Ministry said that 7 inches of rain had fallen in just three hours in Cannes, a city better known for its sun, palm trees and glamorous film festival.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
top
The powerful rainstorm dumped more than a foot of rain overnight on Columbia, swamping hundreds of businesses and homes. Emergency workers waded into waist-deep water to help people trapped in cars, dozens of boats fanned out to rescue people in flooded neighborhoods and some were plucked from rooftops by helicopters.
Officials said it could take weeks or even months to assess every road and bridge that’s been closed around the state.
“This is different from a hurricane because it is water, it is slow moving and it is sitting. We can’t just move the water out,” Gov. Nikki Haley said.
One death was reported in the area on Sunday, bringing weather-related deaths to seven since the storm began days earlier.
People were told to stay off roads and remain indoors until floodwaters recede, and a curfew was issued for Columbia and across two surrounding counties. The capital city told all 375,000 of its water customers to boil water before drinking. Nearly 30,000 customers were without power at one point.
State forecasters said another 2-6 inches could fall around the state, and it could be Tuesday before skies are sunny. The rainstorm around the Southeast has drawn tropical moisture from offshore that’s linked up with an area of low pressure and a slow-moving front.
One of the hardest hit areas in Columbia was near Gills Creek, where a weather station recorded more than 18 inches of rain — or more than a third of the city’s average yearly rainfall — nearly all of it in 24 hours. The creek was 10 feet above flood stage, spilling floodwaters that almost reached the stoplights at a four-lane intersection.
President Barack Obama declared a state of emergency in South Carolina.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
top
Questions about the water supply started after Flint broke away from Detroit’s water system and started temporarily tapping the Flint River. The decision, estimated to save about $4 million annually, was made last year while a state emergency manager was shepherding Flint through a financial crisis.
But residents soon began complaining about the water’s smell and taste, and some reported rashes, hair loss and other health concerns. A General Motors plant stopped using the water because it was causing excessive rust. And local schools have urged students to avoid fountains.
The city’s water is treated and the state says it meets federal safety guidelines, but tests have found that the water is too corrosive and releasing lead from old plumbing in and near thousands of homes. Doctors last week reported high levels of lead in local children’s blood samples, also blaming water pipes. “It appears from the data that there are some serious issues and concerns with what happens when that water reaches the home,” Gov. Rick Snyder said during a conference call Friday.
Snyder also announced expanded health exposure testing, continued free water testing in homes, and quicker steps to ensure that water from the Flint River is effectively treated.
The governor didn’t rule out possibly reconnecting the city to Detroit’s water system, saying it is an “active topic.” The city planned to use the river pending the completion of a new regional pipeline in 2016.
(David Eggert & Mike Householder, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
top
Loosened by heavy rains, tons of dirt and trees tumbled onto Santa Catarina Pinula in a valley on the southeastern flank of the capital late on Thursday, flattening dozens of homes.
Scores of rescue workers labored through dusk to recover bodies from the tangle of mangled walls, beds and furniture churned up in the landslide.
Alejandro Maldonado, head of Guatemalan disaster agency CONRED, said Friday that as many as 600 could be missing after the disaster.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
top
The Coast Guard said the 735-foot ship named El Faro had taken on water and was listing at 15 degrees near Crooked Island, one of the islands most battered by the hurricane. Officials said the crew includes 31 U.S. citizens and two from Poland.
"This vessel is disabled basically right near the eye of Hurricane Joaquin," said Capt. Mark Fedor.
Officials said they hadn’t been able to re-establish communication with the vessel, which was traveling from Jacksonville, Fla., to San Juan, Puerto Rico. The Coast Guard said the crew earlier reported it had been able to contain the flooding.
As the search continued, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said Joaquin’s threat to the U.S. East Coast was fading as new forecasts showed it likely to curve out into the Atlantic while moving north and weakening in coming days.
But the slow-moving storm continued to batter parts of the Bahamas, cutting communication to several islands, most of them lightly populated. There had been no reports of fatalities or injuries, said Capt. Stephen Russell, the director of the Bahamas National Emergency Management Agency.
Residents reached by relatives said they were "trapped in their homes, and reported feeling as if their structures were caving in," Russell said. “It’s too dangerous to go outside because the floodwaters are so high, so we ask that persons stay inside and try to go into the most secure place of their home.”
Power also was knocked out to several islands, and Leslie Miller, executive chairman of the Bahamas Electricity Corporation, said the company “is in no position to do much” to restore electricity. "All the airports are flooded," he said.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
top
Gov. Jerry Brown requested a presidential disaster declaration on Monday, noting that more than 1,000 homes had been confirmed destroyed, with the number likely to go higher as assessment continues in Lake County, 90 miles north of San Francisco. Many others are damaged or don’t have power, leaving thousands in need of shelter.
“The biggest challenge is there aren’t enough hotel rooms in Lake County,” county Supervisor Jim Comstock said Monday. He lost most of his 1,700-acre ranch to fire but kept his house.
Comstock said options for housing are limited in the rural county of small towns linked by winding roads. The Twin Pine Casino and Hotel in Middletown set up beds in its event center, but hotel rooms are reserved for displaced tribal members and employees. An evacuation center at the nearby Napa County Fairgrounds is housing about 500 people in tents and campers, he said.
In a letter to President Barack Obama, Brown noted the fire that started Sept. 12 has burned more than 117 square miles and killed three people. At its peak, more than 19,000 people were ordered to evacuate. A "major disaster" declaration releases federal money for recovery efforts.
In the same letter, Brown also sought a declaration for another fire in Calaveras and Amador counties that started Sept. 9. That fire destroyed more than 500 homes and killed two people.
Firefighters have made significant progress and many evacuations have been lifted in the Lake County fire. But schools in the Middletown Unified School District are closed for a second week and one in the community of Cobb won’t reopen for months due to fire damage.
Downtown Middletown was spared, however. A bank, auto repair shop and massage business were open for business Monday. Firefighters helped homeowners sift through debris for rings and other valuables. One woman was able to salvage some of her collectible Elvis plates.
Rob Brown, another Lake County supervisor, said they are trying to match homeless residents with semi-permanent housing, either through empty vacation homes or rooms at the long-shuttered Konocti Harbor Resort & Spa in Kelseyville.
"That’s just some of the patchwork of solutions we’re looking for," he said. "We’re trying to keep people as close to their original community as possible."
People who have lost their homes or whose homes were too damaged to occupy continued to find their own makeshift solutions.
Annette Lee, a 43-year-old executive dean of Yuba College in Lake County’s Clearlake, said she is staying at her late grandfather’s vacant home in Nice, on the northern edge of the county.
Her home in a neighborhood of 5-acre lots called Hidden Valley Ranchos was scarred, but OK. Her husband, Shane Lee, spent the day cleaning the refrigerator and meeting with insurance adjusters while she returned to work.
(U-T News Service)
top
The tally brought the total number of homes destroyed in two wildfires burning in Northern California the past two weeks to nearly 1,600, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection said. Those fires killed five people, and on Sunday authorities announced that a body was found near the source of a new wildfire in Monterey County that destroyed or damaged 10 homes.
Firefighters found the man’s body inside a charred vehicle after the fire began Saturday near the community of Jamesburg. Investigators were investigating his death as a possible suicide, Monterey County Sheriff’s spokesman John Thornburg said.
Farther north, two massive wildfires continue to threaten thousands more homes.
Damage-assessment teams have counted 1,050 homes burned in Lake County, many of them in the town of Middletown, CalFire spokesman Daniel Berlant said.
Teams have completed about 80 percent of damage assessment, focusing largely on homes, Berlant said. They have not determined how many additional structures, such as sheds, barns and other outbuildings, were destroyed.
“Our damage assessment team continues to go in and count home by home, structure by structure. But they still have aways to go before they are finished,” Berlant said.
The fire, which killed at least three people and charred 118 square miles was 69 percent contained. About 6,500 homes remained threatened by the fire, which ranks as the third worst fire in California history based on total structures burned. A 1991 fire in the Oakland Hills ranks as California’s deadliest fire and its worst in the number of homes destroyed.
Meanwhile, another 545 homes were destroyed by a separate blaze that killed at least two people and that has burned 110 square miles in the Sierra Nevada foothills. That blaze was 72 percent contained Sunday. Even though it continued to threaten thousands of structures, all evacuation orders were lifted.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
top
Some survivors say they never even received notice of the most destructive California wildfires in recent memory, raising questions about whether more could have been done to notify residents.
Authorities defended their warnings and rescue attempts, saying they did all they could to reach people in the remote area of homes, many prized for their privacy.
"You may get that notice, or you may not, depending on how fast that fire is moving. If you can see the fire, you need to be going," said Lynnette Round, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, known as Cal Fire.
In Calaveras County, Round said 66-year-old Mark McCloud and 82-year-old Owen Goldsmith died after rejecting evacuation orders to leave their Calaveras County homes.
In nearby Lake County, however, evacuation orders were less clear.
The body of 72-year-old Barbara McWilliams, who used a walker, was found in her home in Anderson Springs. Her caregiver, Jennifer Hittson, said there were no evacuation orders when she left McWilliams’ home around 3 p.m. last Saturday and no indication the fire was that serious.
She asked McWilliams if she wanted to leave, but the retired teacher declined, saying the fire didn’t seem bad.
The body of former newspaper reporter Leonard Neft, 69, was found near his burnt car after what may have been an attempt to escape, his daughter Joselyn Neft said Friday. His wife had asked him to leave earlier Saturday, but he said the fire looked far away.
The body of Bruce Beven Burns, 65, was found in a building on the Lake County grounds of his brother’s recycling business, where Burns also lived. It’s unknown why he stayed.
In all, five people died, three of them in Lake County.
High school math teacher Bill Davis, who lives near McWilliams, said he watched the smoke rise, but it wasn’t until the electricity failed that he called Cal Fire and waited on hold for an hour.
“When I finally got through ... they said my street was not on an evacuation order, but you might want to leave. I was never told, ‘Get the hell out of there, there’s a huge fire coming at you,’” he said.
By 5:30 p.m., with the smoke thicker and helicopters grounded, he knew he should go. "That’s when I started rounding up my cats and leaving," he said.
From a previous fire in late July, he knew to expect a recording on his cellphone or look for someone coming through the neighborhood with a bullhorn yelling for people to evacuate.
"None of that happened," he said. His house burned.
The Lake County sheriff’s office has declined to respond to repeated phone calls and emails seeking comment on how and when residents were notified. In a statement issued earlier this week, sheriff’s Lt. Steve Brooks said Cal Fire requested evacuation assistance at 1:50 p.m. Saturday, but it remains unclear which communities were notified and how.
The Lake County fire tore through 62 square miles in 12 hours, burning nearly 600 homes and causing thousands of residents to flee. Lucas Spelman, fire captain for Cal Fire, said 15,400 people were under evacuation.
County Supervisor Jim Comstock, 65, who lives in Middletown, said he didn’t receive an evacuation order and he believes authorities didn’t have time to issue orders in person, given the fire’s speed.
(Janie Har, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
top
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Thursday that August, this past summer and the first eight months of 2015 all smashed global records for heat.
That’s the fifth straight record hot season and the fourth consecutive record hot month. Meteorologists say 2015 is a near certainty to eclipse 2014 as the hottest year on record.
This year, six of the eight months have been record breaking, with only April and January failing to set new records.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
top
The body was found a few miles from the sandstone gorge where the group of California and Nevada residents got trapped during a violent rainstorm, in an area that had been unreachable previously amid fears of more flooding, park spokesman David Eaker said. The rest of the victims, all in their 40s and 50s, were found earlier this week.
Some in the group were new to rappelling and swimming through narrow canyons, in a sport called canyoneering, but park policy prevents rangers from assessing their skill level or stopping them from going, even after repeated warnings of the flood risk Monday.
The park is investigating what led to the deaths and reviewing its policies, but the process for canyon entry permits is decided at the national level and any changes would likely need to come from the top down, Eaker said.
Flash flooding Monday also killed at least 12 other people, including nine children, in a nearby polygamous town on the Utah-Arizona border. Raging waters swept two cars downstream, leaving a 6-year-old boy still missing.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
top
Both fires continued burning Thursday, but cooler weather and rain helped firefighters gain ground on the blazes that have destroyed more than 800 homes.
Official identifications have not yet been made, but the sheriff’s office said the two bodies found in Lake County were presumed to be those of Bruce Beven Burns and former San Jose Mercury News police reporter Leonard Neft.
A woman was found dead Sunday in the blaze burning about 100 miles north of San Francisco.
Shirley Burns said her 65-year-old brother-in-law might have been sleeping in his trailer and didn’t realize the fire was speeding toward him on Saturday.
Neft’s house was in the same area where Barbara McWilliams, 72, was found dead. She told her caretaker she didn’t want to leave her home near Middletown and would be fine.
Cadaver dogs found the latest bodies on Wednesday in the Hidden Valley and Anderson Springs areas.
Two other bodies were found inside homes destroyed in a separate wildfire about 170 miles away in the Sierra Nevada foothills, Calaveras County coroner Kevin Raggio said.
The fire in Lake County had charred 115 square miles and was 35 percent contained. An estimated 585 homes and hundreds of other structures have burned.
The fire in Amador and Calaveras counties has burned 110 square miles. It was 49 percent contained after destroying 252 homes.
California Attorney General Kamala Harris warned of reports of price-gouging by hotels in wildfire areas, saying her office is prepared to investigate anyone looking to wrongly profit from the destruction.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
top
The most stunning thing about Wednesday night’s earthquake, however, may be the relatively low amount of havoc caused by such a powerful shake.
While the quake led more than 1 million to evacuate coastal areas and no doubt caused much anxiety, seismologists said Chile’s heavy investment in structural reinforcement of buildings and constant refinement of its tsunami alert system helped prevent what would have been a catastrophe in less-prepared nations.
"Chile has good codes and good compliance, which together have reduced the vulnerabilities of their building stock over the decades," said Richard Olson, director of Florida International University’s Extreme Events Institute. "I would rather be there in one of their cities than in many other countries in an earthquake."
Living in one of the world’s most seismically active places, the Andean nation’s 17 million people have little choice but become experts in earthquakes. The strongest earthquake ever recorded happened in Chile: a magnitude-9.5 tremor in 1960 that killed more than 5,000 people.
After another major earthquake in 1985, authorities began implementing strict construction codes similar to those used for highly seismic regions in the United States such as California, said Kishor Jaiswal, a civil engineer with the U.S. Geological Survey.
Most buildings in urban areas of Chile are designed to withstand both the vertical forces of gravity and the horizontal jolts that an earthquake inflicts. Building methods in many other developing countries can withstand gravity and wind but have limited resistance against very strong earthquakes.
Wednesday’s quake struck just offshore in the Pacific at 7:54 p.m. and was centered about 141 miles north-northwest of Santiago.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
top
About 170 miles southeast, in the Sierra Nevada foothills, two bodies were found inside burned-out homes Tuesday, Calaveras County coroner Kevin Raggio said.
One of the victims was identified as Mark McCloud, 65, who was found inside his residence in the Mountain Ranch area. Raggio wouldn’t release the name of the second victim, also found in Mountain Ranch, because the family has not been notified.
He said both were found in an area where mandatory evacuations were ordered after the fire burning 60 miles southeast of Sacramento exploded in size over the weekend.
Fire investigators are looking into whether that blaze was sparked after a live tree came in contact with Pacific Gas and Electric Co. power lines, California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection spokesman Daniel Berlant said.
Barry Anderson, PG&E vice president of emergency preparedness and operations, said the utility is cooperating fully with the Cal Fire investigation and is reviewing the inspection and patrol data for 2014 and 2015 for the area near this fire.
The deaths came in addition to an elderly, disabled woman whose body was found Sunday in the ruins of her Lake County home about 100 miles north of San Francisco.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
top
That decision proved deadly for one group of hikers who got trapped by floodwaters in a popular “slot” canyon as narrow as a window in some spots and several hundred feet deep.
Six have turned up dead. One is still missing.
A sudden deluge of rain fueled the flood Monday evening, which "went from a trickle to a wall" of water, park ranger Therese Picard said. Zion officials said the group got a permit to hike Keyhole Canyon early that morning - hours before a flash flood warning prompted park officials to close the canyons. By that time, park officials say there was no way to reach them in time to alert them to the violent floodwaters coming their way.
"Ninety percent of Zion is wilderness," Picard said. "It is not possible to contact everyone."
Six of the hikers were from California and one from Nevada. All were in their 40s and 50s.
Rangers who were also dealing with small landslides and other effects of the storm found the group’s cars, but did not see any sign of them. With darkness falling and the canyon already filling with floodwaters, they decided it wasn’t safe to send in rescue crews.
The search resumed the next morning. Though the canyon was still inaccessible, teams started following its course and started calling down to the missing hikers with no answer. The first body was found near the mouth of the canyon Tuesday afternoon, and a private canyoneering group came across the second an hour later.
The deadly events at Zion happened at the same time flash floods tore through a small community on the Utah-Arizona border just south of the park, leaving at least 12 people dead who were in two cars who were swept up Monday by swift water, mud and debris in a canyon.
Crews including the Utah national guard, a federal task force and local officials are searching a seven-mile length of Short Creek to try and find a boy who turned 6 last month. The last body recovered was found 6 miles from where the two cars, a van and an SUV carrying 16 people, were swept away.
Three children survived, including a boy who told Utah Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox that he escaped by cutting through an air bag, climbing out a window and jumping off the roof of the vehicle. Cox told The Associated Press that the boy was about 9 or 10 years old and lost his mother and several siblings, who were also in the cars.
Bodies recovered Tuesday were found as far as several miles away in the sister towns of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz. — the home base of Warren Jeffs’ polygamous sect.
Hildale Mayor Philip Barlow said the three women who died were sisters: Josephine Jessop, Naomi Jessop and Della Black.
(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
top
Authorities worked into the early hours today assessing damage in several coastal towns that saw flooding from small tsunami waves set off by the quake.
A tsunami advisory was issued for a 300-mile stretch of the California coast.
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center issued the advisory Wednesday night for an area stretching from the southern end of Orange County to Ragged Point about 50 miles northwest of San Luis Obispo.
A tsunami advisory falls short of a tsunami warning, and waves inundating the land are not expected.
The magnitude-8.3 quake hit off northern Chile on Wednesday night, causing buildings to sway in the capital of Santiago and prompting authorities to issue a tsunami warning for the Andean nation’s entire Pacific coast. People sought safety in the streets of inland cities, while others along the shore took to their cars to get to higher ground.
Authorities said early today that five people had been killed and one person was listed as missing.
Officials urged people who evacuated from coastal areas to stay on high ground until authorities could fully evaluate the situation.
Numerous aftershocks, including one at magnitude-7 and four above 6, shook the region after the initial quake.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
top
The van and SUV were filled with three women and 13 children when a wall of brown water overtook them Monday evening, carrying the vehicles several hundred yards downstream and sending them plunging down a flooded-out embankment with terrifying force. The SUV was smashed beyond recognition. Three people survived, all of them children, in the secluded community that is the home base of Warren Jeffs’ polygamous sect.
A witness described rushing to where the vehicles came to a stop and seeing a gruesome scene of body parts, twisted metal and a young boy who survived the flood.
"The little boy was standing there," Yvonne Holm said. “He said, ‘Are you guys going to help me?’ ” Only one person was still missing Tuesday in the border town, and authorities had not identified the dead. The children in the vehicles ranged from 4 years old to teenagers.
At nearby Zion National Park, authorities found four bodies and searched for three missing hikers who set out Monday to rappel down a narrow slot canyon. They left before park officials closed the canyons that evening because of flood warnings, park spokeswoman Holly Baker said. The hikers, from California and Nevada, were all in their 40s and 50s, Baker said. She had no details on their identities.
In Hildale, the streets were caked in red mud, and earth movers cleared the roads and piled up mounds of dirt. As a helicopter buzzed overhead, crowds of boys in jeans and girls and women wearing deepcolored prairie dresses watched the rescue effort.
Residents called it the worst flood in memory for the sister towns of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz., located about 315 miles south of Salt Lake City at the foot of picturesque red rock cliffs. It was in this area at Maxwell Canyon where heavy rains sent water down Short Creek and barreling through the towns.
The torrent was so fast, “it was taking concrete pillars and just throwing them down, just moving them like plastic,” said Lorin Holm, who called the storm the heaviest in the 58 years he’s lived in the community.
The women and children were in the SUV and van on a gravel road north of the towns. They were returning from a park when they stopped at a flooded crossing and got out to watch the raging waters, Hildale Mayor Philip Barlow said.
What they apparently did not know was that a flash flood was brewing in the canyon above, he said. It came rushing down and engulfed their vehicles.
"We’re greatly humbled by this, but we realize that this is an act of God, and this is something we can’t control," said Barlow, a Jeffs follower.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
top
Gary Herrin sobbed as he walked through what had been his childhood home in Middletown.
"Yep, grew up here, was able to walk to school from here. Many friends lived close by," Herrin recalled, looking around. "There’s a lot of good people here, but it’s a ghost town now. It’s really eerie."
A number of people saw the devastation for the first time since the massive flames sped Saturday through rural Lake County, less than 100 miles north of San Francisco.
Aided by drought, it had consumed more than 104 square miles and was 15 percent contained.
Authorities say 585 homes were known to be destroyed, and the number was expected to increase. An additional 9,000 structures remained threatened.
The Lake County fire and another blaze about 120 miles to the southeast have displaced 23,000 people and were the worst of a dozen wildfires burning in the state. The Lake County fire spread into northern Napa County, but the region’s famous wine valley was not threatened.
One person has been confirmed dead, and others were unaccounted for, but authorities said they could be staying with relatives, on vacation or elsewhere and not impacted by the fire.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
top
Lindbergh Field, the official weather station for San Diego, recorded 1.15 inches of rain as of 6 p.m. That figure easily broke the city’s previous record of precipitation for Sept. 15 - a mere 0.12 of an inch, set back in 1906.
It also made Tuesday the second- wettest September day in the record books.
The monsoonal storm’s intensity varied by time and place, coming as a downpour at times and as a wispy curtain of moisture at others.
Motorists were forced to slow down or stop in places such as Oceanside and Fallbrook, which both recorded more than 1.3 inches of rain by Tuesday evening, and near San Diego’s Fashion Valley mall, where 1.27 inches fell within the same period.
Other areas that topped an inch of rain Tuesday included Carlsbad, Encinitas, Kearny Mesa, Linda Vista, Point Loma, Ramona and University Heights, according to the National Weather Service.
Birch Hill on Palomar Mountain was the wettest spot in the county by Tuesday evening, with just under 2 inches of rainfall.
Six vehicles, including a big rig and a KUSI-TV vehicle, were involved in a crash in Mission Valley that left northbound I-15 closed for nearly three hours, the California Highway Patrol said. The accident, which occurred where the freeway meets Interstate 8, was reported at 10:33 a.m.
CHP Officer Tony Contreras said the collision occurred while it was raining.
Accidents aside, the rainfall was welcomed amid the state’s drought, which is deep into its fourth consecutive year. Many areas of San Diego County have received normal or slightly above normal precipitation during the past year, after falling short in the past three years. Tuesday’s rainfall could be a sign of things to come this winter if a strong El Niño system indeed materializes and provides ample rainfall for California.
Scientists said the periodic phenomenon has been developing in the equatorial Pacific, contributing to the unusually warm waters off Baja California and Southern California.
Such warmth can allow hurricanes like Linda to track unusually far north, affecting Southern California’s precipitation levels and sometimes even the weather in the state’s northern half.
"The warm water in the eastern tropical Pacific has fueled a busy hurricane season," said William Patzert, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. "So, yes, there is an El Niño connection. That’s how I see it."
Strong El Niños typically bring more moisture, but it’s not a guarantee.
This year, because of El Niño’s influence, the Climate Prediction Center in Maryland lists the odds of a wetter- than-normal winter in much of Southern California at 60 percent — versus 33.3 percent for a normal year.
Beyond discussions of atypical weather patterns so far this year and the chances for heightened wetness in coming months, the San Diego region has experienced another anomaly: an unusually hot summer. For example, the average temperature in San Diego this month is running almost seven degrees above normal.
The rain this week “will give us a reprieve from the wildfire threat, but it won’t last long,” said Brett Albright, a forecaster for the National Weather Service. “Inland temperatures will get back into the 90s by the weekend.”
(Gary Robbins, with staff writers Karen Kucher and Robert Krier, U-T)
top
Now researchers say this year’s record-low snowpack may be far more historic— and ominous— than previously realized. Ina paper published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, scientists estimate that the amount of snow in the Sierra Nevada was the lowest it had been in more than 500 years.
"We were expecting that 2015 would be extreme, but not like this," said seniñor study author Valerie Trouet, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Arizona.
The report is the latest in a series of studies that have sought to characterize the depth of California’s fouryear drought and place it in a broader historic context. It joins a growing body of research warning that global warming will reduce the amount of snow blanketing California mountains - a development that will reduce the state’s available water, even as its population continues to grow.
"This is probably the biggest water supply concern our state is facing," said Mark Gold, associate vice chancellor for environment and sustainability at UCLA who was not involved in the new study. “On a scale of one to 10, it’s 11."
The issue, according to UC Davis hydrology expert Helen Dahlke, is that with climate change, there will be much less snow and more rain.
"That water will just be going into the ocean unless we can figure out a way to capture some of that water quickly," said Dahlke.
Snowpack is a key factor in California’s water supply: In a normal year, melting Sierra Nevada snow provides the state with one-third of its water. Another third is pumped from underground aquifers, and the rest comes from rivers and reservoirs.
(LOS ANGELES TIMES)
top
Anglers are catching enough yellowfin tuna, dorado and yellowtail to bring total counts up to levels not seen since albacore was abundant in this region during the early 2000s.
However, the departure of albacore starting in the mid-2000s, combined with the decline of bottom-dwellers such as barred sand bass, has kept the overall catch numbers from matching the annual figures seen at the turn of the century.
Those are findings from a customized data analysis by sportfishingreport.com, which tracks activity throughout the industry. The company compiled the assessment for The San Diego Uniñon-Tribune.
Today, public interest in sportfishing is intense because so many people are able to share news online - think Facebook, Twitter and chat rooms - about their significant catches aboard boats stationed from Point Loma to Dana Point to Long Beach, said Chad Woods, owner of sportfishingreport. com.
"Back in 2000, when I first turned(the website) on, there was one person there - and it was me. Nowadays, we’re doing 1 million page views in a month,” Woods said.
The overall trend from his new report roughly tracks with data reported to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, although the agency’s counts are not as up-to-date.
The sportfishing numbers from 2001 through Sunday reflect how ocean fishing works, said Michelle Horeczko, a seniñor environmental scientist with the department’s coastal pelagic and highly migratory species project.
“When you’re talking about highly migratory species, their presence is very much tied to many different factors, including temperatures and availability of food,” Horeczko said.
For more than two years running, climatologists and biologists have pegged the presence of large schools of tuna and the catching of species like marlin far north of their normal range to an unprecedented series of weather patterns that have, together, resulted in water that is significantly warmer than normal.
There is some speculation that this pattern of warmth could change with the arrival of heavy winter storms typically associated with a strong El Niño weather pattern. Such a system is surging north from the equatorial Pacific.
But the latest sportfishing forecasts call for bountiful catches to continue into the fall.
And what about those albacore, which were being caught by the hundreds of thousands each at the turn of the new millennium? Well, that’s an open question.
Commercial fleets can still find albacore far offshore, but the species’ migratory patterns generally have changed.
Brice Semmens, a researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla who specializes in estimates of fish stocks, said there is no clear-cut answer to the albacore mystery.
Having looked at longterm changes in ocean temperatures and other environmental factors, he said there does not appear to be a proven trigger.
“I don’t think anybody really knows. As far as I’m concerned, it’s not really clear why albacore had this boom-and-bust cycle,” Semmens said. It is easier, he said, to understand what’s going on with species such as barred sand bass, which tend to move only dozens of miles rather than the hundreds or even thousands of miles that tuna, marlin and other schools of pelagic fish cover during their annual migrations.
There are definitely fewer sand bass coming home in fish coolers these days, and that has a lot to do with a change in fishing regulations that took effect in 2013. That was when California increased the minimum size threshold from 12 to 14 inches for this species, after studies found that fishing was depleting spawning stock available to reproduce.
Size limits also apply to kelp and spotted bass. And the total number of bass that can be kept in one day of fishing, often called the bag limit, was reduced from 10 to five.
Those restrictions show up clearly in recent years’ fish counts. The number of sand bass catches registered with sportfishingreport. com for San Diego, Orange and Los Angeles counties dropped from 96,147 in 2012 to 20,922 for Jan. 1 through Sunday of this year.
Semmens said there is good reason to hope that the size and number restrictions for various types of sea bass, combined with creation of marine sanctuaries along the three-county region will help restore their imperiled populations. Similar approaches for other decimated species such as cow cod, halibut and lingcod have had positive results, he said.
(Paul Sisson, U-T)
top
In hilly and rural Lake County, a short drive north of the state’s storied wine country, the ferocity and breakaway speed of the Valley fire stunned veteran firefighters, hampered strategic planning and gave rise to worries that it could be a harbinger of an extended, and unpredictable, fire season in the months ahead.
By Monday night, the still-raging fire had grown to 62,000 acres, destroyed hundreds of homes and was just 10 percent contained. Smoke had thinned just enough during the day to provide a clearer assessment of the scope of the devastation. The picture was a tragic one.
The death of a woman was confirmed Monday; sheriff’s deputies had found her remains in a charred residence on Cobb Mountain the night before. Officials said there were other individuals unaccounted for.
A seven-mile stretch of Highway 175 connecting Cobb, where the fire originated, to the devastated town of Middletown was a corridor of destruction: blackened abandoned cars, denuded pine groves, dead animals, gutted houses.
"An extraordinarily hostile fire" said veteran firefighter Kevin Rosado, who was working near the highway Monday.
Two hundred miles to the east, in Sierra foothill Gold Country, the Butte fire had destroyed 135 homes in Amador and Calaveras counties by midday Monday. Crews had managed to carve out containment lines around a third of the fire, which has placed thousands of residences in peril.
To the south, the Rough fire burning in the Sequoia National Forest was reported to be 40 percent contained, but it already has devoured 211 square miles and filled the San Joaquin Valley with stifling smoke.
"These are serious fires," Brown said Monday at the State Office of Emergency Services. "People have been killed. Hundreds of structures have been destroyed. There is more to come."
Ken Pimlott, director of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, who joined Brown at a news conference, said the state already has experienced 6,000 fires this year — 1,500 more than last year. And, he added, “we don’t see an end to fire season for months to come."
As he has previously done this fire season, Brown anecdotally drew a link between the volatility and frequency of recent wildfires and climate change. “The fires are acting more aggressively, more unpredictably,” he said. “It’s scary stuff.... We are really in a battle with Mother Nature, and nature is more powerful than we are."
Though researchers generally applaud the governor’s efforts to raise public awareness about climate change, not all are convinced the hard evidence is in yet to scientifically link a summer of intense wildfires with global warming.
"It’s great that he’s using fire to raise that awareness," said Max Moritz, codirector of the University of California Center for Fire Research and Outreach, "but there are still open questions over how much you can make those links. It’s a tightrope."
Later in the day, the governor authorized $12.4 million in additional spending to help fight the Lake County and Gold Country fires - and the additional blazes he said were sure to come.
Part of the money will pay and equip 100 to 150 more firefighters through December. The bulk of it will provide additional helicopters and new buckets for scooping out water for aerial assaults.
By Monday, a light rain began to fall in the mountains where the Rough fire burned and across the San Joaquin Valley, raising hopes that the precipitation might help knock down the smoke and slow the fire.
In Lake County, it was the blaze’s rapid eruption that caught firefighters offguard. Within three hours Saturday it grew from a small fire of unknown origin burning near an outbuilding to a wall of flame that by Sunday evening had plowed through a number of small communities including Middletown, a 19th century stagecoach stop midway between Clear Lake and Calistoga.
Responding crews were forced to turn their focus from fighting a windblown inferno that was spitting spot fires out ahead of itself to helping residents frantically evacuate from homes clustered on rural roads or scattered through the flaming brush and conifers.
Scott Stephens, a professor of fire sciences at UC Berkeley, said the Valley fire’s rapid spread was caused by its ability to throw off embers and kindle fallen timber, leaves and other vegetation dried by drought, creating additional spot fires in its path. This, he said, “allows it to keep jumping and jumping at rates that are just horrendous. It’s doing that giant hopscotch, and the drought has — no doubt — had to enhance that ability.”
Throughout Sunday and into Monday, smoke and heavy turbulence prevented any aerial attacks— or even surveillance — adding to the difficulty of formulating a consistent plan of attack.
(Lee Romney, Paige St. John, Louis Sahagun & Peter H. King, California News Group)
top
Cal Fire noted an unconfirmed report of one fatality in the Valley fire north of San Francisco that ignited Saturday, raced through dry brush and exploded in size within hours on Sunday.
Officials counted 400 homes, two apartment complexes and 10 businesses destroyed by the flames that have consumed 50,000 acres, department spokeswoman Lynn Valentine said Sunday.
The devastation comes after the Butte fire to the southeast destroyed at least 81 homes. The four-day-old blaze has charred more than 65,000 acres.
Residents fled Middletown, dodging smoldering telephone poles, downed power lines and fallen trees as they drove through billowing smoke from the Valley fire.
Whole blocks of houses were burned in parts of the town of more than 1,000 residents that lies about 20 miles north of Napa Valley. On the west side of town, house after house was burned to their foundations, with only charred appliances and twisted metal garage doors still recognizable.
Firefighters on Sunday could be seen driving around flaming utility poles to put out spot fires. Homeowner and firefighter Justin Galvin stood alone at his house, poking its shin-high, smoking ruins with a piece of scrap metal.
"This is my home. Or it was," said Galvin, who spent all night fighting another massive fire in the Sierra Nevada foothills.
Valentine said most of the destruction occurred in Middletown and Hidden Valley Lake, as well as numerous homes along a shuttered state highway.
Wind gusts that reached up to 30 mph sent embers raining down on homes and made it hard for firefighters to stop the Lake County blaze from advancing, California Department of Forest Protection spokesman Daniel Berlant said.
Four firefighters who are members of a helicopter crew suffered second-degree burns during the initial attack on the fire Saturday afternoon. They remained hospitalized in stable condition Sunday, Berlant said.
There’s no official tally of the destruction yet because firefighters are focused on new evacuation orders and on residents’ safety, he said.
People were ordered Sunday to evacuate a stretch along Highway 281, including Clear Lake Riviera, a town with about 3,000 residents, Cal Fire said.
George Escalona told The Associated Press that in some areas of town “there is nothing but burned houses, burned cars,” adding that all he had left were the clothes he was wearing.
The Valley fire erupted Saturday afternoon and rapidly chewed through brush and trees parched from several years of drought. Entire towns as well as residents along a 35-mile stretch of State Route 29 were evacuated.
The fire moved fast, faster than even veteran firefighters had seen. As it ripped down a hill toward Middletown, two hours north of San Francisco, some residents hardly had time to dress before they fled.
“We were surrounded by fire,” said Maddie Ross, 25, a student at Santa Rosa Juniñor College who fled with her grandparents on Saturday from their home in nearby Hidden Valley Lake.
They did not even have time to put their shoes on. “It looked like hell everywhere,” Ross said. “It was terrifying, truly terrifying. I’ve never been in a situation like that. We all felt like the world was coming to an end.”
Gov. Jerry Brown on Sunday declared a state of emergency Sunday to free up resources for Lake and Napa counties.
Brown had already declared a state of emergency for the Butte fire about 70 miles southeast of Sacramento that has destroyed at least 81 homes and turned the grassy, tree-studded Sierra Nevada foothills an eerie white.
Fire officials had earlier counted 86 homes destroyed but issued the new figure Sunday morning. Crews increased containment on that blaze to 25 percent.
The fire, which broke out on Wednesday, was threatening about 6,400 more buildings.
Mark Ghilarducci, director of the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, said this summer’s fires are the most volatile he has seen in 30 years of emergency response work. The main cause behind the fastspreading fires is dry conditions from the four-year drought, he said.
“The bushes, the trees have absolutely no moisture in them, and the humidities are so low that we are seeing these ‘fire starts’ just erupt into conflagrations,” Ghilarducci said, according to the Sacramento Bee.
Even in the midst of a fire season that threatens to be the longest and most destructive the American West has endured, the Valley fire stood out for just how fast it devoured the communities in Lake County.
Half of Middletown was in ashes, said Scott McLean, a battalion chief for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, known as Cal Fire.
“I’m standing in the middle of a bombed-out town,” McLean said. “I’m on a block of burned-down structures. There’s the frame of a mobile home — that’s all that’s left. The cars are burned-out hulks. The trees look like skeletons. There’s a porch swing, a bathtub. I’m seeing the remnants of somebody’s life.” He added: “This year is different. The fires don’t need that wind, but unfortunately this fire had that wind component, and it was extremely dynamic.”
Lake County saw devastation in just the last two months. In late July, a wildfire east of Clear Lake destroyed 43 homes. As firefighters drew close to surrounding that blaze, another fire erupted several miles from the community of Lower Lake on Aug. 9 and more than doubled in size overnight.
Residents in the area had to evacuate from their homes two times in as many weeks.
East of Fresno, the largest wildfire in the state continued to march westward and away from the Giant Sequoia trees, fire spokesman Dave Schmitt said. The fire, which was sparked by lightning on July 31, has charred 203 square miles and was 31 percent contained Sunday, the U.S. Forest Service said.
Firefighters have maintained a precautionary line around Grant Grove, an ancient grove of Giant Sequoia trees, and set prescribed burns to keep the flames from overrunning it.
Some fire came through the area but it hasn’t done much harm, fire spokesman Frank Mosbacher told the Fresno Bee.
The grove is named for the towering General Grant tree that stands 268 feet tall. There are dozens of Sequoia groves in the Sierra Nevada, and some trees are 3,000 years old.
Since January, firefighters in California have responded to nearly 6,800 wildfires burning 545,000 acres, said Cal Fire spokesman Daniel Berlant. Cal Fire handled 5,000 of the wildfires, over 1,500 more than average, he said. The fires handled by Cal Fire this year have burned more than 150,000 acres, compared with 80,000 per year on average.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS & NYT NEWS SERVICES)
top
A large portion of our state is a Mediterranean-type climate, situated in a region close to the sea with hot, dry summers, recurring winds and mountainous terrain. All of these create favorable conditions for fire. In drought conditions, the risk of fire is even greater.
If not stopped quickly, wildfires can ferociously destroy everything in their paths. It has been shown time and again that the proper selection of landscape plants and good maintenance will go a long way toward reducing fire danger. Second only to roof type, the plants surrounding a house have an enormous influence in determining a home’s survival during a wildfire.
"Vegetation will either lead a fire to a structure or stop it,” says firescaping expert and author Douglas Kent.
One of the greatest impacts a homeowner can have on protecting property and personal safety is to create and maintain a fire-resistant landscape. Planning ahead and consistent maintenance can help stop devastating property loss and even loss of life. With careful planning, a home garden or landscape can be both fire-resistant and water-wise.
As you make plant choices for fire-prone areas, it’s important to remember that there is no such thing as a fireproof plant—only fire resistant ones. Just about any plant will burn if temperatures get hot enough. Also keep in mind that it takes about a year for plants (water-wise, fire-resistant, or not) to become established. Only when well-established are plants truly water-wise.
Prevention steps
No one was injured.
A section of a 50-foot-high cliff collapsed about 1:30 p.m. behind a house on Sea Ridge Drive at the south end of Calumet Avenue in the Bird Rock neighborhood.
The collapse was just a few feet past the edge of the backyard swimming pool, San Diego Fire-Rescue Department Capt. Joe Amador said.
Officials estimated that about two tons of dirt and rock gave way and fell onto the beach, Amador said. He said lifeguards taped off the pile to keep people away.
“We don’t think there’s any imminent threat” to adjacent cliff areas, Amador said.
The beach was not closed.
A geologist has been called in to assess the danger and make recommendations about evacuations from homes at the top of the cliff.
(Pauline Repard, U-T)
top
Many corals are just recovering from last year’s bleaching, which occurs when warm waters prompt coral to expel the algae they rely on for food, said Ruth Gates, the director of the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology. The phenomenon is called bleaching because coral lose their color when they push out algae.
The island chain experienced a mass bleaching event in 1996, and another one last year. This year, ocean temperatures around Hawaii are about 3 to 6 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal, said Chris Brenchley, meteorologist for the National Weather Service.
Bleaching makes coral more susceptible to disease and increases the risk they will die. This is troubling for fish and other species that spawn and live in coral reefs. It’s also a concern for Hawaii’s tourism-dependent economy because many travelers come to the islands to enjoy marine life.
Gates compared dead coral reef to a city laid to rubble.
“You go from a vibrant, three-dimensional structure teeming with life, teeming with color, to a flat pavement that’s covered with brown or green algae,” said Gates. “That is a really doom-andgloom outcome but that is the reality that we face with extremely severe bleaching events.”
Gates said 30 to 40 percent of the world’s reefs have died from bleaching events over the years. Hawaii’s reefs generally have been spared such large scale die-offs until now. Most corals bleached last year bounced back, for example. But Gates said it will be harder for these corals to tolerate the warmer temperatures two years in a row.
“You can’t stress an individual, an organism, once and then hit it again very, very quickly and hope they will recover as quickly,” she said.
Scientists have reports of bleaching in Kaneohe Bay and Waimanalo on Oahu and Olowalu on Maui. For the Big Island, reports of bleaching have come in from Kawaihae to South Kona on the leeward side and Kapoho in the southeast.
Scientists on an expedition to the remote, mostly uninhabited islands in the far northeastern end of the island chain reported some coral died after last year’s bleaching event. Courtney Couch, a researcher at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, said a mile and a half of reef on the eastern side of Lisianski Island was essentially dead. Coral further out from the atoll handled the warm temperatures better, she said.
Brian Neilson, an aquatic biologist with the state Department of Land and Natural Resources, said people could help by not adding to the coral’s problems.
That means avoiding fertilizing lawns and washing cars with soap so contaminants don’t flow into the ocean.
(Audrey McAvoy, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
top
The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration proposed six violations from inspections begun in 2013 — some 20 months before the May pipeline rupture near Santa Barbara.
Among the findings, the agency said Texas-based Plains All American Pipeline failed to properly document pressure tests on tanks and failed to keep adequate records on how it would prevent spills in sensitive environmental areas, or respond if one did occur.
The agency did not propose a fine.
Robert Bea, a civil engineering professor at University of California Berkeley, said the latest action by regulators speaks to the company’s weak culture of safety and inadequate efforts to assess risk and prevent spills.
“In all the documentation I have reviewed concerning the pipeline, I have never seen evidence of any advanced risk assessment and management processes being used by Plains,” said Bea, a former oil executive who has studied spills.
One of two lines in the 2013 inspections ruptured May 19 along a corroded section of pipe, releasing at least 101,000 gallons of crude on the coast. The mess forced a popular state park to shut down for two months, goo from the spill washed up on beaches 100 miles away and hundreds of dead birds and sea lions were found.
The agency says it could not connect the inspection findings from that time with the May 19 pipeline break.
However, the proposed order said the company didn’t adequately document its emergency training and didn’t have paperwork to demonstrate that supervisors knew about emergency response procedures.
The company has been criticized for taking about 90 minutes to alert federal responders after confirming the spill, even though federal regulations require the company to notify the National Response Center, a clearinghouse for reports of hazardous-material releases, “at the earliest practicable moment.”
State law requires immediate notification of a release or a threatened release.
The cause of the break is under investigation. Prosecutors are considering possible charges.
(Brian Melley & Michael R. Blood, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
top
Lightning strikes on July 31 sparked the wildfire. It has charred 172 square miles, growing by nearly 40 square miles in the past week.
In a fight to save the trees, firefighters have been clearing lines with bulldozers around the Grant Grove and putting up sprinklers, said Andy Isolano, a spokesman for the Clovis Fire Department.
The grove is named for the towering General Grant tree that stands 268 feet tall. There are dozens of Sequoia groves in the Sierra Nevada, and some trees are 3,000 years old.
Although Isolano said the trees can endure fire, some are stressed by the four-year drought. The flames are also just a few miles from the grove.
Fresno County Sheriff’s deputies were going door to door Friday distributing mandatory evacuation notices to residents in the tiny community of Dunlap, east of Fresno.
At one point, the blaze was bearing down on San Andreas, but it changed direction, and the evacuation order was called off a short time later, state fire spokesman Daniel Berlant said.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
top
Tropical Storm Etau, which came ashore Wednesday, brought with it heavy rainfall to central Honshu. Ibaraki Prefecture, north of Tokyo, was particularly hard hit after embankments broke along the Kinu River.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. said rainwater containing radioactive material flowed into the ocean from the disabled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant Friday, when floodwaters overwhelmed drainage pumps. The amount of the overflow and radioactive material was not known, the company said.
(NYT NEWS SERVICE)
top
There is now a 95 percent chance that El Niño conditions will continue through the end of this year — up from 85 percent in June and 50 percent six months ago.
“Things are continuing to evolve. We are one month closer to the point where we should see impacts this winter. Obviously our confidence is increasing,” said Mike Halpert, deputy director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center in College Park, Md.
Water temperatures in the Pacific Ocean this week along the equator are 3.78 degrees Fahrenheit above the historic average, federal scientists announced in their monthly El Niño update. That’s the warmest temperatures during the first week of any September since 1997, a year that saw drenching winter storms in the San Francisco Bay Area and elsewhere in California.
El Niño is a disruption in the weather patterns over the Pacific Ocean, when the ocean’s surface warms more than normal. Those warm waters release heat, changing wind directions and the jet stream.
Strong El Niños, which occur when the Pacific Ocean is the warmest, have historically been linked to wet weather in California and South America, and droughts in Australia and Asia. Last month, NOAA, the parent agency of the National Weather Service, reported that water temperatures, wind conditions and other factors showed El Niño conditions that were “significant and strengthening.” This month, they were upgraded to “strong.”
Since 1951, there have been five winters with strong El Niño conditions, meaning ocean water at the equator that is at least 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal. In four of those winters — 1957-58, 1972-73, 1982-83 and 1997-98 — rainfall in the Bay Area and Los Angeles was at least 140 percent of the historic average, according to studies by Jan Null, a former National Weather Service forecaster who owns Golden Gate Weather Services in Saratoga.
But there is no ironclad guarantee. In 1965-66, a strong El Niño didn’t deliver above-average rain. It simplyfizzled out.
Residents stranded in heavily flooded Ishige district in Joso City were airlifted by military helicopters and arrived at an athletic field in the city, carrying a few items of clothing and some food in shopping bags. Some of them were shoeless.
There were no immediate reports of casualties, but rescue officials said they were overwhelmed by pleas for help. More than 30,000 were ordered to flee their homes, and hundreds more were stranded by the water. As of late Thursday, more than 3,500 people were staying in evacuation centers.
City officials said 22 people lost contact after requesting rescue and were believed missing. Three others were injured, one seriously.
The flooding came after two days of heavy rain, with the Kinugawa River breaking through a flood berm, sending water gushing into the eastern half of Joso, a city of 60,000 people about 30 miles northeast of Tokyo.
Aerial videos showed a wide swath of the city underwater, more than one story deep in some places. The rains came on the heels of Tropical Storm Etau, which caused flooding and landslides elsewhere Wednesday as it crossed central Japan.
The water had somewhat subsided as the sun came out today, but the city was still largely flooded and it was not immediately known when the evacuees will be able to return home.
Hisako Sekimoto, 62, who was airlifted by a Self Defense Force helicopter early Friday, said she spent the sleepless night on the second floor of her flooded house with her husband and three cats. Minutes after the floodwater gushed into the house Thursday afternoon, all of their furniture was floating and the water was up to her neck.
“There was no time to escape— all we could do was go upstairs. It was horrifying,” she said. “I kept praying the water wouldn’t come upstairs.”
Live video on Japanese broadcasters showed rescuers being lowered from helicopters and clambering onto second-floor balconies to reach stranded residents.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
top
Even after the storm, forecasters warned of exceptionally cold air, perhaps the coldest in years. Strong winds that were expected to continue into today reduced visibility, created drifts and complicated an ongoing cleanup effort.
“It’s historic. It’s biblical,” attorney Frank Libby said he walked down a deserted street in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood. “I think we’re in uncharted territory. People just don’t know how to deal with the logistics of it.”
He had one message for Mother Nature: “Give us a break.”
Meanwhile, forecasters were talking about another storm on the horizon for midweek.
“The big story is subzero air temperatures with wind chills as low as 20 to 40 below zero,” Matthew Belk of the National Weather Service said, adding that exposed skin could start to develop frostbite in “a matter of minutes.”
“The big thing is to dress in layers and don’t go outside if you don’t have to.”
The Arctic cold front already had frozen the upper Midwest, with temperatures in Michigan plunging to minus-27 in the Upper Peninsula.
Allan Tufankjian of Scituate, Mass., said it’s discouraging every time he looks at the forecast.
“If I saw one day that was above freezing, I’d be very happy,” he said. “I looked seven days ahead and every single day, the highest temperature I could see is 26 degrees.”
Some areas of New England reported nearly 2 feet of snow from the storm including Acushnet, Mass., with 22 inches, and Salisbury with 20.5 inches. Boston recorded 13 inches of new snow. At the easternmost tip of Maine, Lubechad had 2 feet.
With many intersections already clogged by soaring snow banks, forces mobilized before the storm to remove piles of snow. Massachusetts called up the National Guard to help and Hanscom Air Force base outside Boston became a staging area for heavy equipment pouring in from eight other Northeast states.
Although the storm did not bring the eye-popping snow totals of others this season, it made its presence felt with lightning strikes and strong winds that left visibility close to zero for stretches along the coast.
“Oh my goodness, it’s a whiteout!” said Sue Baker of Lubec, Maine, observing the wind blowing outside her bed and breakfast, the Peacock House.
The Coast Guard said it rescued an Australian father- son sailing team whose boat lost power and had its sails torn in 60 mph winds about 140 miles southeast of Nantucket.
In Vermont, the wind was enough to force shutdown of the Lake Champlain ferry cross between Charlotte and Essex, N.Y.
On Cape Ann north of Boston, Patrick McGehee said he was awed by lightning strikes early Sunday morning when he took out his dog.
“I wasn’t sure what was going on, if it was some kind of spiritual event or what,” said McGehee, the owner of the Mary’s by the Sea summer rental business in Rockport. “The whole sky lit up like somebody lit up a light bulb.”
New Englanders won’t be the only ones with the winter blues, forecasters say. A snowstorm could bring 6 to 9 inches to parts of Arkansas, Missouri and Tennessee. Freezing rain was forecast for northern Mississippi and 2 to 4 inches of snow and sleet will be possible in north Georgia.
The storm also threatened Atlanta, where just over a year ago an ice storm trapped commuters for hours on the region’s freeways.
(Alanna Durkin & Michael Melia, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
top
A major emergency was declared as South Australia Premier Jay Weatherill on Friday urged residents to leave areas threatened by fires burning out of control for a second day. Blazes have also broken out in neighboring Victoria state.
"It could be a catastrophic decision to leave late," Weatherill said in a news conference broadcast on Sky TV. "We're dealing with an incredibly dangerous fire" in and around the southern Mount Lofty Ranges, he said.
Conditions in the area are the worst since 1983, when 75 people in the two states died in what became known as the Ash Wednesday fires, South Australia Police Commissioner Gary Burns said at the news conference.
Temperatures rose over central Australia in the past week and winds are pushing that hot air south, the Bureau of Meteorology said in a statement Thursday. It forecast temperatures of more than 104 degrees Fahrenheit across the southern part of the country.
The nation's hot, dry climate makes wildfires a major risk in the Southern Hemisphere's summer. In February 2009, bushfires across Victoria killed 173 people and destroyed 150 homes in the worst blazes in Australian history.
(James Paton, BLOOMBERG)
top