Oceanside Harbor tied the record high for Dec. 26 when the temperature hit 80 degrees in the early afternoon.
San Diego's Lindbergh Field reached 76, or 12 degrees above average.
And the entire coastline was toasty because of Santa Ana winds, which cleared the skies of clouds — and, in one instance, made it easy to see water vapor rising from the spouts of a few whales swimming off Del Mar in the late afternoon.
The winds compress as they squeeze through canyons and valleys, causing them to grow hotter, a phenomenon known as adiabatic warming.
In particular, the Santa Anas have been making the region unusually warm after the sun goes down.
The overnight low for Thursday in Ramona was expected to be 61, a full 10 degrees above the previous "minimum high" for Dec. 26. The previous record was set in 1989.
Winds gusts shot up to 72 mph in the Cuyamaca Mountains, 50 mph in Santa Ysabel and 49 mph in Alpine, raising fire-risk concerns.
Overall, the winds and high temperatures are "elevating the wildfire risk," said Mark Moede, a forecaster at the National Weather Service office in Rancho Bernardo. "We need a break ... but it's not foreseeable for the next 10 days."
Moede said persistent high pressure in the eastern Pacific and over the Great Basin is blocking storms in the Gulf of Alaska from dropping into Southern California.
It's also allowing strong winds to reach the coast, smoothing the faces of waves and flipping back the crest, creating wispy tails of spray that briefly produce rainbows.
Solspot.com said a swell is beginning to roll ashore from the west-northwest, and will produce waves in the 3- to 5-foot range at the favored spots in areas of the South County at least through Saturday. Waves are estimated to be about one foot smaller in North County, according to the website.
(Gary Robbins, U-T)
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The Maine couple spent Christmas Eve at a family member's home without electricity. Christmas morning found them at their own home without power. And to complete their holiday, they traveled to a third darkened home to exchange gifts that afternoon.
"You have to go with the flow and adapt, and do the best you can," Katrina Johnson said Thursday, before their power was finally restored. "You learn how to deal with it. Do you like it? No, but you deal with it."
Utility officials said it could be days longer before power is restored to everyone after a weekend ice storm that turned out the lights from Michigan to Maine and into Canada.
People shivered for a seventh day as a new storm blew through the upper Midwest and Northeast, shutting down part of the Pennsylvania Turnpike after a pileup involving 35 vehicles. Ten people were taken to the hospital with injuries from the crash. Another pileup on Interstate 78 in eastern Pennsylvania involving 25 to 30 vehicles sent 25 people to hospitals.
In Michigan, where about half a million homes and businesses lost power at the storm's peak, utilities reported that 103,000 customers remained without power Thursday evening and said it could be Saturday before all electricity is restored.
In Maine, more snow added to the misery for utility crews working long hours in eastern Maine and parts of the state's interior.
Most utility customers in Maine were expected to have their lights on by week's end, but there were some pockets where damage was so severe it could take until Wednesday.
Maine reported more than 21,000 customers were still in the dark, down from a high of more than 106,000. There were more than 101,000 without power in three Canadian provinces — Quebec, Ontario and New Brunswick — including 54,000 in the city of Toronto. A state ferry was commandeered to transport utility crews to restore power to the 600 or so residents on the island of Islesboro, where actor John Travolta has a home.
In Kennebec County, where the state capital of Augusta is located, glistening trees sagged under the weight of ice. Many tree limbs had snapped, littering yards.
In Gardiner, workers in four bucket trucks from Massachusetts' N-Star utility company worked patiently to get a power line lifted back into place as snow fell.
Authorities blame last weekend's storm for 27 deaths; 17 in the U.S. and 10 in Canada, including five who apparently died from carbon monoxide poisoning.
(David Sharp, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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But not everyone was so lucky, including Ashley Walter, who was forced to spend Christmas at a shelter in a school in Litchfield with her husband, Jacob Walter, and their month-old daughter, Leah.
The family lost power on Saturday, got it back and then lost it again Sunday. Ashley Walter and Leah stay warm at the shelter while Jacob Walter makes frequent trips home to check on their cats and water pipes.
"It's definitely kind of strange, but we're hanging in there," she said Wednesday of the challenge of being forced out of their home at Christmas. "We did our Christmas together last night. I packed little stockings and gave them to my husband, sisters and my daughter."
The frigid temperatures that cloaked a region from the Great Lakes to New England meant that ice remained on power lines and tree limbs. Officials worried that wind gusts of more than 20 mph could bring down more branches and that 2 to 6 inches of snow in places on Thursday would hamper line crews trying to get to remote spots. "We've had two beautiful, sunny days in Maine, and the ice isn't going anyplace," Maine Emergency Management Agency spokeswoman Lynette Miller said. "They're very concerned about more weight coming down on trees that are already compromised by ice."
The ice storm last weekend was one of the worst to hit during a Christmas week, and repair crews were working around the clock to restore service. States that weren't hit were sending crews to help.
Authorities blamed the storm for 17 deaths in the U.S. and 10 in Canada, many attributed to carbon monoxide poisoning from emergency generators powering homes. In Michigan, police said a woman died Christmas Eve when her vehicle ran a stoplight that was out of service because of the ice storm and collided with a pickup truck.
Tens of thousands of homes were still without power on Wednesday in Michigan, down from more than 500,000 at the storm's peak; in Maine, down from more than 100,000; and in Toronto, down from 300,000.
In Litchfield, Trudy Lamoreau was supervising the emergency shelter where about 25 people stayed Tuesday night. Lamoreau, who's also the town manager, said they warmed the shelter with generators until the school got power back late Tuesday night.
"People are doing quite well, considering the circumstances," she said. Volunteers tried to make the shelter homey, including cooking up a ham dinner with potatoes, vegetables, bread and pie for dessert for Christmas.
Ashley Walter said the volunteers had been "amazing," setting up a separate room for her and Leah so they wouldn't disturb others when the infant woke during the night.
"They just try to make everything better for us," she said.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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A red-flag warning will be in place across East County from early today until possibly noon Sunday because of the expected combination of strong Santa Ana winds and relative humidity that will drop below 15 percent, according to the National Weather Service.
Winds could gust 50-60 miles per hour west of the Cuyamaca Mountains, hitting especially hard in places such as Alpine and Descanso.
They will initially arrive from the northeast and then blow from the east, and will create an offshore flow that will be felt at some local beaches, the weather service said. The winds will raise temperatures into the low 70s at the coast — five to seven degrees above normal.
Meanwhile, the humidity level is expected to drop sharply this afternoon and stay low all night, which is unusual for this time of year.
"The rain can reduce wildfire danger if it comes just before the Santa Anas, or if we have a lot of rain over a long period," said Jimmy Taeger, a weather service forecaster. "But it doesn't take long for things to dry out."
The drying process is accelerated by the sort of strong and prolonged winds that whipped through East County last weekend.
(Gary Robbins, U-T)
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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued its report card for the Arctic on Thursday, portraying 2013 as moderate compared with the roasting 2012.
Overall Arctic temperatures didn't soar quite as high, and Greenland ice sheets and summer sea ice didn't melt as much.
"The Arctic caught a break, if you will, in 2013, but one year doesn't change the long-term trend toward a warmer Arctic," said report card editor Martin Jeffries, a University of Alaska geophysicist who is the science adviser to the U.S. Arctic Research Commission.
"The Arctic has shifted to a new normal," Jeffries said at the American Geophysical Union scientific conference in San Francisco, where the 136-page report card was released.
While 2013 looks a tad cool compared with the past six years, it is unusually warm compared with the 20th century, he said.
Central Alaska's summer was one of the warmest on record, coming months after its coldest April since 1924, NOAA said. Fairbanks experienced a record 36 days of more than 80 degrees. And snow cover in May and June was near record low levels in North America and broke a record for the least snow in Eurasia.
But one of the biggest climate change indicators, summer sea ice, wasn't as bad as expected. Sea ice in 2013 reached its sixth-lowest level in the three decades that NOAA has been keeping track. That's up from the lowest ever in 2012.
But the seven lowest levels have all occurred in the past seven years.
The 2013 figure "is simply natural variability," said National Snow and Ice Data Center director Mark Serreze.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The storm forced the cancellation of thousands of flights across the U.S. and slowed traffic on roads, leading to a number of accidents, including a fatal crash on the Pennsylvania Turnpike near Morgantown that led to a series of fender-benders involving 50 cars that stranded some motorists for up to seven hours. More than two dozen vehicles were involved in another series of crashes on nearby Interstate 78. What was forecast in the Philadelphia area to be a tame storm system with about an inch of snow gradually changing over to rain mushroomed into a full-blown snowstorm that snarled mid-afternoon traffic along Interstate 95 in Pennsylvania from the Delaware to New Jersey state lines.
The National Weather Service said the low pressure system from North Carolina north to New England was being fed by disturbances from the southwest and moist air off the Atlantic.
The forecast called for the wintry mix to continue through Sunday, turning to rain early today.
North Texas started to thaw out slightly Sunday after two days of a near standstill with icy roads and low temperatures. About 400 departures from Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport were canceled Sunday. It will likely be a couple of days before the ice that's coated the region melts completely.
(Michael Rubinkam&Dan Gelston, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Businesses small and large are waiting for pickups and consumers across the land are receiving notices that their packages will be delayed because of a massive, icy blast that will eventually hit from coast to coast.
For people who rely on the shipping industry, the storm comes at the worst time: the height of the holiday mailing season.
"Really with this event, we are looking at it almost like we would a hurricane," said Lucas McDonald, a senior emergency manager for Walmart. Knowing hazardous conditions were coming, the company shipped extra merchandise to stores ahead of the storm.
"As we get to this point, in some cases we have had to take our drivers off the road, and so that's OK because we've already got the merchandise there," said McDonald, a former TV meteorologist.
Carlos Suarez, who usually shops online, received a notice Thursday that a video game he ordered on Amazon couldn't be delivered within two days — contrary to the $80 fee he pays each year to guarantee rapid deliveries. "In this situation it was just a dumb video game," Suarez said. "We sometimes order medicine through the mail and that could have been a little more frustrating."
Memphis, Tenn.-based FedEx, too, notified customers of delays, taking cues from a team of 15 meteorologists to highlight on its website the winter storm that started along the West Coast and reached Ohio and western Pennsylvania on Friday.
"On any given day we have 1,000 contingency plans in place," FedEx spokesman Scott Fiedler said. "What we're doing is pinpointing the forecast down to basically a piece of real estate. It could be a mile or two-mile runway at 3 a.m., what's going to happen to that."
At UPS' Global Operations Centers in Louisville, Ky., five meteorologists monitor global weather around the clock.
At the National Weather Center in Norman, Kevin Kloesel, the associate dean for public service and outreach, said many companies hire their own weathermen to help ensure goods aren't stopped halfway to their destination.
"Over the last decade we've seen an explosion of private weather companies that can satisfy the niche that is required by the retailer, which is a point forecast for either a store or a detailed forecast for a route," he said.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The workers suspended their efforts after dark, but planned to return this morning to try again, said Kim Amendola, spokeswoman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which is taking part in the effort.
Six of the whales were found dead, and four had to be euthanized Wednesday, said Blair Mase, coordinator for NOAA's marine mammal stranding network. At least three could be seen on the beach, out of the water.
The whales are stranded in a remote area near Highland Beach, the western boundary of Everglades National Park and about 20 miles east of where they normally live. It takes more than an hour to reach the spot from the nearest boat ramp and there is no cellphone service, complicating rescue efforts.
"We want to set the expectation low, because the challenges are very, very difficult," Mase said.
Park spokeswoman Linda Friar said rescuers were trying to surround the whales, which were in roughly 3 feet of salt water about 75 feet from shore, and herd them back to sea. "They are not cooperating," Friar said.
Workers also tried to nudge the whales out to sea earlier in the day with no success.
The short-finned pilot whales typically live in very deep water. Even if rescuers were able to begin nudging the 41 remaining whales out to sea, Mase said they would encounter a series of sandbars and patches of shallow water along the way.
This particular whale species is also known for its close-knit social groups, meaning if one whale gets stuck or stays behind, the others are likely to stay behind or also beach themselves. "It would be very difficult for the whales to navigate out on their own," Mase said.
Federal officials were notified about the whales late Tuesday afternoon. Because of the remote location, workers weren't able to access the site before dark. They arrived Wednesday morning and discovered 45 whales alive.
"There were some that were very compromised and in very poor condition," Mase said.
Four were euthanized with sedatives, and more could be put down today if their condition deteriorates, Mase said. She described the remaining whales as swimming and mobile but said scientists don't know how long they have been out of the deep, colder water they are accustomed to and could be impacted by secondary consequences, such as dehydration.
(Suzette Laboy, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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And in Minnesota, the cold has forced Salvation Army bell ringers inside and canceled holiday parties, while dense, cold air sunk into Rocky Mountain valleys and kept some lower elevations freezing in the West.
The dip in the jet stream is allowing Arctic air to plunge deeper into the United States. To add to the cold weather trouble, AccuWeather senior forecaster Paul Walker said a new storm will likely develop in New Mexico and west Texas today and head east, bringing ice and potentially power outages.
Extreme cold is nothing new in the Rockies, with temperatures regularly dropping each winter to minus 20 or minus 25 degrees annually. The difference this year is how long the cold snap is expected to last.
National Weather Service meteorologist Dave Bernhardt said the last extended cold period in Montana he could recall was in the winter of 1996.
Low temperatures in Denver were expected to drop below zero through Friday but remain below 20 through the middle of next week. The storm dumped several inches of snow in Denver.
(Colleen Slevin, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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A weather warning issued by Met Eireann is still in effect.
Around 1,100 are homes are without power in Trim, Co Meath, 300 are without power in Declin, Co Westmeath, 200 are without power in Malahide, Co Dublin, and 1,200 are are without power across the north west of the country.
ESB Network crews are working to restore power to customers as soon as possible and a spokesman said that they hope to have supply restored within a few hours.
The areas affected include Moville, Carndonagh, Ballybofey, Newtowncunningham and Rossgeir.
AA Roadwatch has said Grainne's Gap in Co Donegal is blocked by a fallen tree on the Buncrana to Muff road.
High winds have also affected ferry services to offshore Islands.
The regular service to Arranmore Island has not been able to run because of the weather and tides but the situation is being assessed on an on-going basis to see if it is possible to run a ferry in the afternoon.
In Sligo high winds have led to waves crashing onto a number of coastal roads but this has eased at the road at Cartron leading to Rosses Point and it is now clear.
Britain is expected to bear the brunt of stormy conditions that have been forecast for today.
A number of Irish Ferries services have been cancelled due to very strong winds.
There has also been some flooding on the roads overnight.
AA Roadwatch is also advising that care is needed around Co Donegal, in parts of Co Galway, Westmeath, Roscommon, Co Cavan and in Co Wicklow.
About 7,000 homes across Northern Ireland were without power after the storm caused disruption overnight.
Roads were also closed in parts of Co Down after trees came down as gusts of up to 70mph swept in from the Atlantic.
(RTE News Ireland)
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Winds have gusted to 61 miles per hour at Mount Laguna, 55 mph at Volcan Mountain and 51 mph at Harrison Park, according to the National Weather Service.
Forecasters also have reported gusts reaching 41 mph at Borrego Springs, 40 mph in Julian, 29 mph at Mission Trails and 22 mph at Imperial Beach.
Wind gusts could continue to surpass 60 miles per hour today in certain locations, including mountain ridges, deserts and foothills.
The winds are the leading edge of a weather system that will bring the first sustained, widespread cold of the fall season to San Diego County.
By Thursday night, temperatures are expected to drop to the low 40s at and near the coast, the upper 30s to the low 40s in foothills and valleys, and the upper 20s in spots such as Julian.
Daytime highs also will be 10 to 15 degrees below normal. For example, San Diego might not hit 60 degrees Thursday.
There's a little bit of rain with this system; showers briefly moved across San Diego on Tuesday evening. But significant precipitation isn’t expected.
Long-range meteorological projections haven't been able to pin down whether this rainfall year will be dry, wet or average. Last year was a noticeably dry period for the region.
Meanwhile, forecasters said 1 to 3 inches of snow could fall above the 5,000-foot level in the next couple of days, with flurries down to 3,000 feet.
And astronomical high tides could combine with the cold front to create minor tidal overflow and beach flooding.
(Gary Robbins, U-T)
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Scientists said images from NASA spacecraft showed the comet approaching for a slingshot around the sun on Thursday, but just a trail of dust coming out on the other end.
"It does seem like Comet ISON probably hasn't survived this journey," U.S. Navy solar researcher Karl Battams said in a Google+ hangout.
Phil Plait, an astronomer who runs the "Bad Astronomy" blog, agreed, saying "I don't think the comet made it."
Still, he said, it wouldn't be all bad news if the 4.5-billion-year-old space rock broke up into pieces, because astronomers might be able to study them and learn more about comets.
"This is a time capsule looking back at the birth of the solar system," he said.
The comet was two-thirds of a mile wide as it got within 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) of the sun, which in space terms basically means grazing it.
NASA solar physicist Alex Young said it would take a few hours to confirm ISON's demise, but admitted things were not looking good.
He said the comet had been expected to show up in images from the Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft at around noon eastern time (1700 GMT), but almost four hours later there was "no sign of it whatsoever."
"Maybe over the last couple of days it's been breaking up," Young told The Associated Press. "The nucleus could have been gone a day or so ago."
Images from other spacecraft showed a light streak continuing past the sun, but Young said that was most likely a trail of dust continuing in the comet's trajectory.
"The comet itself is definitely gone, but it looks like there is a trail of debris," he said. Comet ISON was first spotted by a Russian telescope in September last year.
Some sky gazers speculated early on that it might become the comet of the century because of its brightness, although expectations dimmed as it got closer to the sun.
Made up of loosely packed ice and dirt, it was essentially a dirty snowball from the Oort cloud, an area of comets and debris on the fringes of the solar system.
Two years ago, a smaller comet, Lovejoy, grazed the sun and survived, but fell apart a couple of days later.
"That's why we expected that maybe this one would make it because it was 10 times the size," Young said.
It may be a while before there's a sun-grazer of the same size, he said.
"They are pretty rare," Young said. "So we might not see one maybe even in our lifetime."
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The characters that soar between Manhattan skyscrapers every year may not lift off Thursday if sustained winds exceed 23 mph and gusts exceed 34 mph, according to city rules enacted after fierce winds in 1997 caused a Cat in the Hat balloon to topple a light pole and seriously injure a spectator.
Current forecasts call for sustained winds of 20 mph and gusts of 36 mph.
Balloons have been grounded only once in the parade's 87-year history, when bad weather kept them from flying in 1971.
Meanwhile, meteorologists warned that the storm, which has moved across the country, would almost certainly upset holiday travel plans today for those hoping to visit loved ones in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast. Many travelers were moving to earlier flights, taking advantage of airlines' policies to waive their normal change fees. The good news is that the storm is supposed to pass through the Northeast before Thanksgiving Day, with the weather mostly clearing up by this evening.
Most airlines are hoping the storms won't be too severe, allowing them to continue operating a nearly full schedule with few cancellations, but likely a lot of delays, said Daniel Baker, CEO of FlightAware, a global flight tracking service.
"Cancellations are used as a good, preventative measure to avoid cascading delays that can negatively impact travelers thousands of miles away," Baker said.
Heavy rain and high winds would affect travel by air and road in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic and could have a ripple effect on airports with departing and originating flights elsewhere.
Heavy rain and breezy conditions were in the forecast today from the Carolinas to the Northeast, with ice and snow a possibility in the Appalachians, western Pennsylvania and western New York.
The storm system, already blamed for at least 11 deaths, could also spawn isolated tornadoes in the Florida Panhandle. The Southeast is set to suffer soaking rain in the coming days, primarily in Alabama, Tennessee and Kentucky.
This holiday will likely see the most air travelers since 2007, according to Airlines for America, the industry's trade and lobbying group, with the busiest day being Sunday, carrying an estimated 2.56 million passengers. Today is expected to be the second-busiest, with 2.42 million passengers.
(Meghan Barr, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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After the storm plows through the Southwest, meteorologists expect the Arctic mass to head south and east, threatening plans for Tuesday and Wednesday as people hit the roads and airports for some of the busiest travel days of the year.
More than 300 flights were canceled at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, representing about one-third of the scheduled departures, and a spokeswoman said de-icing equipment had been prepared as officials planned for the worst in a flurry of conference calls and meetings.
"It's certainly going to be a travel impact as we see the first few people making their way for Thanksgiving," National Weather Service meteorologist Tom Bradshaw said.
The National Weather Service issued a winter storm warning for chunks of North Texas from noon Sunday until midday today. Parts of Oklahoma are also under a winter storm warning, while an advisory was issued for other parts of the state. A mix of rain and sleet began falling north of Dallas on Interstate 35 by midday Sunday, and areas of southwestern Oklahoma woke up to several inches of snow.
Some elevated overpasses had icy surfaces, but Bradshaw said the worst weather could be expected between 3 a.m. and 9 a.m., possibly snarling morning rush hour.
Several inches of snow fell overnight in Altus in far southwestern Oklahoma, said Damaris Machabo, a receptionist at a Holiday Inn motel.
"It looks great. I love the snow," Machabo said. The snow and freezing temperatures made driving in the area treacherous, but Machabo said she had no problems getting to work early Sunday. Forecasts called for more snow in the area later in the day.
Portions of New Mexico - especially in some of the higher elevations - also had several inches of snow, and near white out conditions were reported along stretches of Interstate 40 west of Albuquerque.
Then along the New Mexico - Texas border, into the El Paso area, a mix of snow, sleet and ice forced some road closures and created messy driving conditions.
Flagstaff in Arizona had 11 inches of snow by early Sunday, and was expected to get another inch by the end of the day before the storm petered out. Metro Phoenix and other parts of central Arizona received between 1.5 to 2.5 inches of rain over the course of the storm.
(Ramid Plushnick-Masti, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Chris Bessenecker has done it for two decades as a humanitarian and disaster-relief expert. He has offered aid after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, a tsunami, earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanoes — and Typhoon Haiyan, which pummeled the Philippines early this month. The cyclone has killed an estimated 5,200 people and left more than 4 million displaced in that country.
In fact, Bessenecker dreamed of pursuing this type of career since he was in junior high school.
"You see the violence and devastation, but what's more significant is that you also see people coming back. They have a lasting will to improve life for themselves and their communities," he said. "I've always loved wanting to forge connections with people across the globe. It's a core value, a mission."
Bessenecker, 48, is currently vice president of strategic initiatives for the San Diego-based nonprofit group PCI (Project Concern International).
He helps coordinate charitable activities in 16 countries, from nutrition programs for children in Africa to economicdevelopmentprojects forwomen in India. He also travels to natural- disaster sites, where PCI specializes in offering longterm rebuilding assistance. The job often takes him away from his family in Kensington — wife, Dana, and their two young children.
Bessenecker recently spoke with U-T San Diego by satellite phone from Hernani, one of the first townsto be hit by Typhoon Haiyan. He and two PCI colleagues joined UT journalists Kristina Le and Nelvin Cepeda in surveying the damage there last week. His team plans to stay in Hernani for another week, continuing its first-stage relief work and mapping the blueprint for successive stages of assistance.
Here is an edited version of the interview with Bessenecker:
Q: What was your first impression of post-typhoon Hernani?
A: When we got out of our vehicle and surveyed the extent of the damage, my impression was, "This is reminiscent of the (2004) tsunami in Indonesia," where I was on the ground doing relief as well. This community has been destroyed by a tidal surge as high as the tops of the palm trees. Imagine building your homes in Coronado or Mission Bay with poles and sticks, and then massive waves come in and sweep away everything. There are about 1,900 homes across 13 neighborhoods in Hernani. Of them, 1,600 are now uninhabitable.
The town had 300 fishing boats, and almost all of them are gone. Rice paddies have been saturated with saltwater. And the rainy season has begun, so with a lack of toilets and clean running water, there's real concern about transmission of diseases and just basic sanitation issues.
You feel tremendous pain for these people. I see kids in the street taking showers whenever it rains, because there's no water supply at their temporary shelters. I think of my own children.
Q: Does PCI have enough resources to restore the town?
A: The magnitude of destruction here will take more than one person, one organization to achieve reconstruction. It will take collaboration among several groups, and commitment to investing in months and years of assistance.
Q: What are the immediate needs in Hernani, and I imagine in many other areas struck by the typhoon?
A: The No. 1 thing people need is shelter, some kind of temporary roof over their heads. You're already seeing people pulling nails, tarps, wood to build roofs. The other crucial thing is to restore their livelihoods as soon as possible.
Q: What are the longer-term priorities in Hernani?
A: Long-term recovery is a process of two, three or four years. From the PCI perspective, it means really engaging individuals, leaders and communities in replanning their neighborhoods. We look at higher-risk areas and team with residents to balance safety with economic and educational needs. How do we place schools in safer locations but still make them nearby enough for kids to walk to them each morning? How do we locate homes close enough to fishing boats, but perhaps on higher land?
Q: What is the best aspect of your job?
A: Hands-down, it's the people you meet in these communities. Despite what people might think, they aren’t really victims. They want to help themselves improve but just lack certain tools and resources. Every place I go, the people are energetic, hardworking, positive, eager. They’re also incredibly kind, hospitable, generous, even though they have limited material means.
Q: What’s the worst part, and how do you cope with it?
A: It's hard to see death, pain and destruction on any scale. Yesterday, I saw a woman surrounded by the ruins of a cathedral. She was kneeling and crying her heart out. In terms of coping, it's being unafraid to share my feelings with my loved ones and colleagues.
Q: Is there something that San Diegans can learn from your profession?
A: My overall message is this: Get involved. There are lots of ways to do that. Donate your time, your money, through PCI or other worthy organizations. Just don't stand on the sidelines.
(Hieu Tran Phan, U-T)
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Interior Secretary Mar Roxas said 4,919 people were killed on Leyte, Samar and nearby islands in the Eastern Visayas region. Civil defense chief Eduardo del Rosario said 290 others died in other parts of the central and southern Philippines.
The regions were battered two weeks ago by fierce winds and tsunami-like storm surges from Typhoon Haiyan, locally called Yolanda. Del Rosario said 1,611 people remain missing. "That is the sad record of Yolanda's passage through
our country," Roxas said. But he added, "The worst is over."
He likened the region to a patient that has been moved out of the emergency room into an intensive care unit.
"We have overcome the most difficult part," he said. "In the first week we can say we were in the emergency room … this second week we are now in the ICU, still critical but stabilized."
He said the hard-hit Leyte provincial capital of Tacloban reported 1,725 dead. "I believe this number in Tacloban city is not yet final," he said.
Most of the bodies have been buried in mass graves, many of them unidentified, he said. "It is possible some of the missing are among the unidentified," he said.
Journalists in Tacloban say the stench of death from piles of debris, upturned vehicles and remnants of what once were homes indicates bodies remain trapped underneath.
Roxas said the situation was stabilizing, with major roads on Samar and Leyte cleared of debris and some banks, grocery stores and gas stations open. More troops and police have been brought to the region from other parts of the country to beef up law enforcement.
The airport in Tacloban, the regional hub, and its seaport are operating. "There is no more looting," he said. "We are now heading to recovery and reconstruction."
Haiyan hit the eastern seaboard of the Philippines on Nov. 8 and quickly barreled across its central islands, packing winds of 147 mph and gusts of up to 170 mph, with a storm surge of 20 feet.
Even though authorities evacuated about 800,000 people ahead of the typhoon, the death toll was high because many evacuation centers — schools, churches and government buildings — could not withstand the winds and water. Officials said people who sought shelter in the buildings drowned or were swept away. The United States and about two dozen other governments quickly sent aid.
(Oliver Teves, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Many families in the county, home to one of the nation's biggest Filipino communities, are holding benefit concerts and collecting essential supplies for their hard-hit relatives.
Locally based sailors and Marines, including those originally hailing from the Philippines, are providing security, distributing aid and offering medical care in ravaged towns.
Companies, colleges and elementary classes are raising funds and awareness through special events, from silent auctions to campus assemblies to car washes.
And nonprofit groups here are coordinating relief efforts with partner organizations in the disaster zone. They include PCI (Project Concern International) in Clairemont, which sent a team to work in two areas walloped by the typhoon. U-T San Diego journalists Kristina Le and Nelvin Cepeda have been traveling with them.
"People are coming in and want to help," said Joel Delossantos, a deacon at the First Baptist Church of Spring Valley, a largely Filipino congregation that just finished a clothing drive netting about 30 suitcase-sized boxes. "It's touched us because it's so unlike anything we've seen in a long time."
For the following sampling of local residents, there was no question about taking action to assist loved ones, friends, fellow human beings.
Joel Delossantos, 53, Chula Vista
"I'm Filipino, and I see those people on TV, grieving for their loved ones who have died and they have no way to bury them," said Delossantos at the Baptist church in Spring Valley. "We can't stop calamity, but we can do something to help survivors."
On Wednesday night, the congregation gathered to fill boxes with clothing and other donated items for typhoon victims.
Delossantos said one member will head to the Philippines to personally deliver these contributions to the New Life Baptist Church in Tacloban city, which suffered widespread devastation.
Daughlet Ordinario, 64, Escondido
"I came from Pandan, one of the towns on Panay island that was hit by the recent typhoon. I visit the place every year," Ordinario said.
A San Diego County resident since 1972, she founded the Pandan Bay Foundation to promote music education and after-school programs in her hometown, where 28 families were displaced by the cyclone. She also works with groups that perform medical missions and promote conservation on the island.
Ordinario's family members are safe, but her brother's house was damaged and he lost his noodle-making business. In her last conversation with him before the typhoon hit, he said he had been ordered to evacuate the area.
"It took us like four days after to hear," she said. "I was really anxious, not knowing what was going on there."
Ordinario is scheduled to fly to the Philippines on Dec. 13 but hopes to book an earlier flight. Until then, she is raising money for relief operations through the National Asian American Coalition.
Peter Varberg, 22, Point Loma
Although not Filipino by nationality, Varberg spent much of his life in the Philippines, where his parents still live as missionaries.
"Growing up, typhoons were like going to an amusement park," he said about growing up in Tacloban. "When the typhoons come, you go outside and play."
He knew this storm would be different when his father emailed him about concerns that it might damage buildings at Bethel International School, which the elder Varberg founded.
"We have this enormous school building there that for the past couple of years, my dad has been raising funds to build," said Varberg, in reference to an athletic facility on the campus. "It was essentially crumpled. You can't even tell what it is if you look at the (post-typhoon) photos."
The toll extended to human life as well. In one case, the cyclone killed 10 people in an 11-member family that attended his father's church.
Varberg has been assisting with external communications for his father's school in recent days, and has helped secure emergency funding from Kids International Ministries. Having studied filmmaking at Point Loma Nazarene University, he also is raising money to shoot a documentary in the Philippines next month.
JoAnn Fields, 42, Chula Vista
"The immediate need is water, food and shelter," Fields said. "But my concern is the long haul."
Fields was born in the United States, but both her parents are from Asingan, a municipality in the northern Philippines, where she still has cousins.
She works with the nonprofit organization Gawad Kalinga ("give care"), which has provided 20,000 food packets to more than a dozen sites in the Philippines following Typhoon Haiyan. The group also builds permanent houses for people who otherwise might be living under bridges or in cardboard shacks.
"But the homes we're building aren't huge," Fields said. "They're maybe 10 by 16 (feet). While the structure is made of blocks and concrete, they still have to withstand the typhoons."
She's anxious about the state of those homes in future storms. She also knows that it will take years, perhaps even decades, for many villages, towns and cities to have modern infrastructure in this developing country.
While Fields doesn't have immediate plans to visit the Philippines, she helped organize a fundraising concert this week at Bell Middle School, which has a Gawad Kalinga student chapter.
Gawad Kalinga also has helped put together a benefit concert scheduled for 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday at Pepper Park, 3299 Tidelands Ave. in National City.
Irene Suing, 32, Encinitas
"They heard that it was going to be strong, but they didn't expect this," Suing said about a conversation she had with her mother shortly before Typhoon Haiyan struck.
Her mother and brothers live in Ormoc City, which is in the central Philippines. They took shelter in a nearby school as the storm approached.
Suing told her mother to turn off her phone so as to conserve its battery power. Then she had to wait four days before learning that despite considerable damage in the city, all of her family members were fine.
"Four days is very long to not know what's going on," Suing said. "It's nerve-racking and really depressing, and you have those emotions. You just want to fly there, but you know it's impractical and will create more problems."
Suing is attending a seminar at Landmark Education and said she was able to raise about $700 from people there. Her brothers plan to use that money to buy food for Ormoc residents in need, she said.
Paulette Khoury, 29, Carlsbad
"It's pretty much the epitome of island living," Khoury said about her hometown of Tacloban. "It's small enough so you know everybody. It was just starting to get progressive. We just got a McDonalds and a mall last year."
Now she fears all the progress may be set back for a long time.
"Nobody anticipated it being so bad," she said. Her brother, his wife and their three children survived the typhoon, but their house was damaged and they have fled to Manila for the time being.
After Khoury's uncle told her the Tacloban hospital where he works was running low on medicine, Khoury and her sister raised $2,500 in donations through an email and Facebook campaign. Part of the money paid for four boxes of medicine that her parents took with them on a flight to the Philippines on Sunday.
In addition, Khoury's aunt is starting an adopt-a-family program for Tacloban residents needing post-typhoon assistance.
(Gary Warth, U-T)
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Solar-heated steam would help spin turbines at an existing natural-gas power plant in Northern California under a plan from the customer-owned Sacramento Municipal Utility District. The U.S. Department of Energy said this month that it would invest $10 million in the project — about onefifth of its estimated cost.
As an add-on to power plants, concentrating solar technology could someday provide an additional 11 to 21 gigawatts of clean energy to the U.S. grid, by the Energy Department's estimation. A traditional 2-gigawatt plant can power about 1.4 million homes.
Concentrating solar technology uses the heat of sunlight to produce steam and spin a turbine to produce electricity. Attaching concentrating solar to an existing power plant eliminates the need for new turbines, transmission lines and other pricey infrastructure.
At the Cosumnes Power Plant outside Sacramento, solar would provide an additional 10 megawatts of generation capacity when it is needed most, said Elaine Sison-Lebrilla, who oversees renewable energy research and development at the Sacramento Municipal Utility District. During summer months, higher ambient temperatures reduce the effectiveness of traditional thermal power plants.
"We think that it's going to improve the plant's capacity and the plant's efficiency," she said. "We are going to have thermal storage that will allow us to ride into the evening hours when typical solar (photovoltaic) cuts out."
The Sacramento Municipal Utility District, owned by its 600,000 customers in and around the state capital, believes its bidding process will likely attract two competing solar configurations. One uses an array of mirrors to cast the sun's rays on a central tower. Another uses a reflective parabolic trough to heat a fluid.
Sison-Lebrilla said proposals must be feasible and economical to the project to move forward.
A handful of U.S. power plants have adopted hybrid solar technology.
Florida Power & Light introduced a combined concentrating solar and combined- cycle natural gas plant in 2011 in Martin County, Fla. Tucson Electric Power and AREVA Solar, of Mountain View, announced a solar booster project last year that would increase capacity at an Arizona coal plant.
(Morgan Lee, U-T)
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"As of today, our Marines have flownnumerous missions in support of relief operations and transported hundreds of Philippine Marines and civilian evacuees within the disaster area," Maj. Casey Shea, operations officer for the "Raiders," said in a statement.
After Super Typhoon Haiyan struck Nov. 8 with hurricane-strength winds and a tsunami-like wave that killed thousands and displaced millions, the Okinawa-based 3rd Marine Expeditionary Brigade was among the first to respond.
"What better way to assure our friends and allies in the Pacific that we will do whatever it takes to provide comfort in the wake of disasters or provide security and stability in times of crisis," said Lt. Gen. John Toolan, commanding general of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force headquartered at Camp Pendleton.
Toolan spoke Thursday to the San Diego Military Advisory Council on behalf of Lt. Gen. Terry Robling, commanding general of Marine Corps Forces, Pacific, who was waylaid for Philippine relief operations.
"The United States is an Asia Pacific nation and our presence has underpinned peace and security in the region for centuries," Toolan said.
Now as wartime commitments in the Middle East wane, President Barack Obama has directed the military to pivot resources toward the Asia-Pacific.
Current plans for the military rebalance include Marine air ground task forces more widely dispersed throughout the Pacific, in California, Hawaii, Guam, Japan and Australia.
"Even before Typhoon Haiyan hit land, Marines and sailors on Okinawa and in mainland Japan were on their way," Toolan noted. "We need to ensure our naval forces are adequately resourced and capable of rapid projection, to be able to get there in hours when hours count."
However, the U.S. does not plan to reestablish permanent military bases in the Philippines, Toolan said: "A U.S. footprint inside a country is intrusive. The reality is our presence in the Pacific is going to be more based on rotational forces," using nations such as Australia as training hubs and embarkation points for ship tours.
Natural disasters have killed an average of more than 70,000 people in the region annually over the past decade, Marine officials said.
U.S. and Philippine forces have rehearsed two years for a calamity such as Typhoon Haiyan, enabling the rapid buildup of disaster response forces, said Gen. James Amos, speaking to U-T San Diego during a visit Thursday to Camp Pendleton. "It's an example of being as ready as you can for something that is completely unpredictable."
The vast region "from Hollywood to Bollywood, from polar bears to penguins," as Robling says, is home to 61 percent of the world's population and seven of the U.S.'s top trading partners.
To overcome what Toolan called the "tyranny of distance," 22,500 Marines will serve west of the international dateline.
A rotational force in northwestern Australia that started last year with about 250 Marines will grow in April to about 1,300 and include an infantry battalion. Eventually, the Corps hopes to have 2,500 Marines in Australia.
About 9,000 Marines will be moved out of Okinawa.
Guam will get about 4,700, with the first units relocating in 2021 pending cCongressional support.
"The real pivot point is economic and political rebalancing. As Ronald Reagan said, peace is achieved through strength. That is what the military provides to the Pacific. But it is not the all-important rebalancing effort," Toolan said.
(Gretel C. Kovach, U-T)
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The environment "can't wait for the state to get its act together," Councilwoman Lisa Shaffer said Wednesday night as the council asked city staff to draft a bag ordinance similar to one approved by Solana Beach in 2012.
Solana Beach bans the use of plastic bags at grocery stores, food vendors, pharmacies and retail stores and mandates a 10-cent charge for paper bag use.
The Encinitas council voted 3-2 to pursue plastic bag restrictions, with Councilwoman Kristin Gaspar and Councilman Mark Muir opposed. Muir and Gaspar said they wanted to wait to see what happens to a plastic bag bill that the state Senate is expected to consider in early 2014.
"For me, timing is of the essence here and I'd like to see how (Sen. Alex) Padilla's bill plays out," Gaspar said.
But the council majority said the time had come to act. Encinitas first considered creating its own plastic bag ban five years ago, but held off out of fear that the city would be sued.
Councilman Tony Kranz said Wednesday that the proposed Senate bill has holes and Encinitas should enact the "more robust" ban used by Solana Beach.
Still, it could be many months before Encinitas shoppers see any change in their local stores.
City officials must create a draft form of the proposed ordinance for council approval and that's not expected to happen until well into 2014. An environmental review of the ordinance is likely take two to three months, officials said.
The council's decision came late in the night after hours of public testimony and debate on another agenda item — an appeal of a city Planning Commission decision.
Former Mayor Sheila Cameron asked the council to overturn a Sept. 19 commission decision allowing the nonprofit Leichtag Foundation to put offices within part of the 68-acre Ecke Ranch property along Saxony Road.
Cameron and her supporters argued that the commission's decision would eventually result in the end of agriculture on what is now the largest remaining bit of farmland in the city.
Leichtag representatives and their supporters said their offices would only occupy a small portion of the property — about 4,000 square feet of the 20,000 square feet of building space at the site. They stressed that they would continue farming the land and would emphasize new agricultural trends, including hydroponics.
The council denied Cameron's appeal in a 3-2 vote, with Gaspar and Muir opposed.
While more than a dozen public speakers testified during the farmland item, only three people spoke on the bag ban and all of them supported the proposal.
(Barbara Henry, U-T)
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Forecasters said the storm should clear to the east by Saturday morning, when daytime highs are expected to rise to the upper 60s at the coast and across most inland areas. Sunday will be marginally warmer, but seasonal temperatures may not return until Tuesday.
The California Highway Patrol has warned commuters to expect traffic delays because of the weather conditions.
More than 320 accidents were tallied by the CHP on San Diego County's freeways and roads in unincorporated areas from midnight to 9 p.m. Thursday, said CHP Officer Mary Bailey.
When the weather is good, 50 to 75 crashes occur in a day in the region, the CHP said.
Bailey said the agency's response time to crashes could be strained. "There might be delays in officers and tow trucks arriving because there are probably other active incidents," she said.
Bailey said if drivers are involved in a collision and there are no injuries, they should get off the freeway as soon as possible if their vehicles are drivable and then exchange insurance information.
She also said to watch the speedometer.
"Driving too fast is the No. 1 cause of collisions on a wet roadway," Bailey said. "We always say to reduce your speed, increase your following distance and try not to make any sudden movements."
Staff writers Debbi Baker and Lyndsay Winkley contributed to this report.
(Gary Robbins, U-T)
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Born in the Philippines and raised in San Diego's Mira Mesa neighborhood, McKee has used her social media, marketing and relief agency skills to turn a global spotlight on the poor island fishing village where she lived for most of the past three years and where her family’s roots run deep. She has volunteered countless hours over the past 12 days as a volunteer logistics liaison to PCI (Project Concern International), a San Diego-based relief group that has committed to helping rebuild Hernani.
On Nov. 8, Typhoon Haiyan swept across the eastern and central Philippines with wind gusts up to 235 miles an hour, leaving more than 5,000 people dead or reported missing. An additional 4 million have been displaced. One of the first places the storm made landfall was Hernani, an east coast village with just under 8,000 residents.
McKee was in San Diego visiting family when the typhoon struck. She said big storms hit the island with such regularity that Hernani residents habitually ignore evacuation warnings. As a result, most were caught off guard when an early-morning surge of seawater swamped the town, knocking out power and cellphone towers and destroying schools, churches and hundreds of homes, as well as much of the downtown area, including the only gas station.
About 67 Hernani residents were killed and 19 are still missing, according to unofficial figures, McKee said.
The night before the storm hit, town historian Maridel Terencia, 53, said she took her 1.5-year-old grandson Emilio to the Hernani elementary school, which was set up as an evacuation center. The night passed quietly, but around 3 a.m., a storm surge began pushing waves of seawater into the classrooms.
"The water was kneehigh inside the school room and we knew we had to get out as fast as we could," Terencia said Tuesday in a phone interview from a relief convoy near Tacloban City. "When we got outside, the water was as high as my chest. We managed to get to a higher place and then after just five or 10 minutes the biggest waves came and they were 20 feet high."
The surge knocked down trees and flattened all of the homes in the barrios along the shoreline, pushing a dangerous tide of debris into the village and as much as a half-mile inland. Terencia said she was struck on the shoulder by a floating door torn loose from a home. Her own house was washed away, with not a single piece of furniture or clothing left behind.
"Of course I was scared. We were hopeless because we didn't know if we'd still be alive," Terencia said. "My grandson has been affected by this very much. He's afraid of the ocean. He's afraid of the rain."
Terencia and her grandson made their way to Manila after the storm, where McKee was able to reach her by phone and get a firsthand description of the disaster. McKee said being in Oceanside has allowed her to organize aid in ways she couldn't have otherwise.
"If I was back there, I couldn't be helping them the way I am now," she said. "I couldn't have found PCI and I couldn't be raising money, putting people together, and using Facebook, email, texts and the phone to try and make things happen. It was meant to be."
McKee said she was watching the TV news on the day of the storm when she saw a report about PCI planning an aid mission in the Philippines. She posted a request for help on their Facebook page that night and they called her the next morning.
George Guimaraes, PCI's president and CEO, said McKee helped provide the logistic details, contacts and background they needed to fulfill their mission of helping the communities hardest- hit by the storm.
"With her support, we're able to go where the need is greatest," Guimaraes said, adding that he believes the scale of the catastrophe in the Philippines is on par with the destruction PCI found in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake.
McKee put the PCI relief team in touch with Terencia, and she agreed to ride back to Hernani this week on a PCI truck laden with food, hygiene kits, basic medical supplies, clothing and other necessities. Also on the truck — which should arrive in Hernani sometime today — are the U-T TV team of anchor Kristina Le, a native of the Philippines, and cameraman Nelvin Cepeda, a native of Guam.
McKee's family moved to San Diego from the Philippines when she was 3 years old, but her parents — Bob and Penny McKee-Rodriguez — always kept their ties to Hernani. Since the mid-1980s, they have owned a home there, and in 2008 they built a large hilltop house where they planned to retire one day.
McKee was working in marketing in Florida three years ago when her parents asked her to deal with some land issues related to the Hernani property. She moved there in May 2010 and said she fell in love with the town, despite its endemic problems and poverty.
Because there is no industry or tourism, most Hernani residents live on remittance — money mailed home from Filipino workers living abroad. The nearest full-service hospital is six hours away, electricity is so spotty the local government has regularly scheduled brownouts and a bad storm will knock out water, power and food deliveries for up to two weeks, McKee said.
"Things are so bad there that when elections are held, the politicians always hold up Hernani as the worst-case example of the type of poverty they plan to fix. But somehow, the government money never makes it to Hernani," McKee said.
After the typhoon hit, millions of dollars began pouring into the Philippines, but McKee worried that Hernani would be forgotten once again.
Armed with two years of experience working for the humanitarian agency World Vision International in Seattle, she started working the phones and Facebook to raise awareness of Hernani's plight. She wanted to work with PCI, she said, because its aid mission will extend far beyond the immediate needs of Hernani's residents.
"It's about going from relief to reconstruction," Guimaraes said. "Looking at the damage numbers right now, it looks like an enormous, huge destructive impact and there's a lot of work to be done."
PCI (Project Concern International)
What: A nonprofit organization founded in 1961 by a San Diego doctor. Now headquartered in Clairemont, it has
the highest rating from the watchdog group Charity Navigator.
Presence: Works in 16 countries, from Bangladesh, Botswana and India to Haiti, Indonesia and Nicaragua. Has 624 staff members.
Operating budget: About $44 million annually.
Focus areas: Include community health, economic empowerment, food and nutrition, HIV/AIDS programs, management of infectious diseases, water and sanitation, women's programs and emergency humanitarian assistance.
How to help: pciglobal. org, facebook.com/ PCIGlobal, or toll-free at (877) 724-4673.
(Pam Krage, U-T)
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Their uncannily accurate predictions — combined with television and radio warnings, text-message alerts and storm sirens — almost certainly saved lives as rare late-season tornadoes dropped out of a dark autumn sky. Although the storms howled through 12 states and flattened entire neighborhoods within a matter of minutes, the number of dead stood at just eight.
By Monday, another, more prosaic reason for the relatively low death toll also came to light: In the hardest-hit town, many families were in church.
"I don't think we had one church damaged," said Gary Manier, mayor of Washington, Ill., a community of 16,000 about 140 miles southwest of Chicago.
The tornado cut a path about an eighth of a mile wide from one side of Washington to the other and damaged or destroyed as many as 500 homes. The heavy weather also battered parts of Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and western New York.
Back in Washington, Daniel Bennett was officiating Sunday services before 600 to 700 people when he heard an electronic warning tone. Then another. And another.
"I'd say probably two dozen phones started going off in the service, and everybody started looking down," he said.
What they saw was a text message from the National Weather Service cautioning that a twister was in the area. Bennett stopped the service and ushered everyone to a safe place until the threat passed.
A day later, many townspeople said those messages helped minimize deaths and injuries.
Forecasting has steadily improved with the arrival of faster, more powerful computers. Scientists are now better able to replicate atmospheric processes into mathematical equations.
In the last decade alone, forecasters have doubled the number of days in advance that weather experts can anticipate major storms, said Bill Bunting of the National Weather Service.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced Monday the state was extending its Sandy buyout program to homeowners in Staten Island's Ocean Breeze section, a former beach colony surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean on one side and a tidal marsh on three others.
The community, like others on Staten Island's southeast coast, has flooded repeatedly since people started building small bungalows there in the early days of the automobile age, and the superstorm, spawned when Hurricane Sandy merged with two other weather systems, appears to have finally persuaded them to give the land back to the ocean.
Two elderly residents drowned when the storm struck in October 2012. Rushing floodwaters knocked down 20 houses. Most of the other houses were badly damaged. Some residents have made repairs, but many houses remain boarded up.
Under a program already at work in a neighboring area, Oak Beach, residents will be offered a little above the pre-storm value of their homes to give them to the state. Participation is voluntary, but Frank Moszczynski, an Ocean Breeze resident for 43 years and president of the local civic association, said 117 people have indicated they intend to say yes to the state's offer.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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"I'm not going to mince words," said Mel Fernandez, the editorial adviser for the Filipino Migrant News. "We would like every cent to reach those poor people there rather than getting waylaid."
Corruption is a concern after any major natural disaster, as millions of dollars in cash and goods rush in from around the world. But those worries are especially acute in the Philippines, where graft has been a part of life for decades.
The government of President Benigno Aquino III, who has made fighting corruption a priority, is promising full transparency in reconstruction spending in areas devastated by Typhoon Haiyan, known in the Philippines as Yolanda. It announced Monday that it has established a website called the Foreign Aid Transparency Hub where funds given by foreign donors can be tracked.
"There's an urgent call now for us to monitor the movement of foreign aid funds for Yolanda so they will go exactly where they're supposed to: to the survivors of the typhoon," Undersecretary of Budget and Management and Chief Information Officer Richard Moya said in a statement.
More than $270 million in foreign aid has been donated to help the victims of the Nov. 8 typhoon, which killed at least 3,976 people and left nearly 1,600 missing, according to government figures updated Monday. More than 4 million people have been displaced and need food, shelter and water. The typhoon also wrecked livelihoods on a massive scale, destroying crops, livestock, coconut plantations and fishing boats.
The U.S. military bumped up its typhoon relief effort in the Philippines Monday by activating a task force led by a three-star general.
Lt. Gen. John Wissler, commanding general of the Okinawa-based 3rd Marine Expeditionary Force, was tapped byU.S. Pacific Command to take charge of Joint Task Force 505.
The task force builds on the work of 3rd Marine Expeditionary Brigade, a middleweight crisis response force led by Brig. Gen. Paul Kennedy that provided "lifesaving support and critical relief supplies" in the first days after the storm struck Nov. 8., U.S. Marine Corps Forces, Pacific announced.
The task force now includes nearly 850 personnel on the ground and an additional 6,200 in the George Washington Strike Group. An additional 1,000 Marines and sailors with the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit are expected to arrive with dock landing ships Ashland and Germantown in about three days.
Several battered communities appeared to be shifting from survival mode to one of early recovery Monday. Markets were reopening, though with very limited wares. Some gasoline stations were pumping and residents were repairing damaged homes or making temporary shelters out of the remains of their old ones.
"The darkest night is over but it's not yet 100 percent," regional military commander Lt. Gen. Roy Deveraturda said.
On Sunday, Aquino toured the disaster area and promised to step up aid deliveries.
Aquino said he was happy to see typhoon-battered areas slowly rising from the devastation. The aid effort remained daunting, he said, adding that the government is feeding about 1.4 million people a day.
"One is tempted to despair," Aquino told reporters in Alangalang town in Leyte province, where he met with officials and survivors. "But the minute I despair, then everybody gets hampered in the efforts to get up."
Presidential spokesman Ricky Carandang said Aquino would stay for a second night in Tacloban city and visit more typhoon-battered towns today.
In one sign of how much work is ahead, Energy Secretary Jericho Petilla pledged to restore power in all typhoon-battered regions by Dec. 24, a job that will require erecting about 160 giant power transmission towers and thousands of electrical posts toppled by the typhoon. He said he will resign if he fails.
"It's difficult to celebrate Christmas without light," Petilla said.
The government wants to show that it will be more responsible than previous administrations were following other natural disasters, when funds intended for reconstruction were allegedly siphoned off. Prosecutors are investigating allegations that $20.7 million in government funds for rebuilding towns devastated by a 2009 storm in northern Luzon island were stolen by local officials via bogus nongovernmental agencies. On Nov. 7, a day before Typhoon Haiyan hit, Filipinos were glued to their television screens, watching Senate testimony in which Janet Lim Napoles denied allegations that she masterminded a plot to plunder millions of dollars of government funds intended for projects to relieve poverty.
It is far too soon to say how much aid intended for victims of last week's Typhoon Haiyan might end up in the wrong hands. Foreign donors demand strict antigraft measures in projects they fund, but privately admit that "leakage" of funds is sometimes inevitable.
Much of the assistance in the early phase of a disaster response is in the form of food, water and other supplies. Far richer opportunities for graft occur later when rebuilding occurs and contracts are up for grabs.
But corruption probably has already made this typhoon worse. Money for roads was diverted, giving people less ability to evacuate. Hospitals didn't get the resources they should have. Some houses might not have been flattened if they had been built to code.
"Petty corruption in urban areas means that building inspections don't happen and building codes are not enforced," said Steven Rood, the Manila-based representative of The Asia Foundation, a nonprofit development organization. "Even middle class homes are not built to withstand a typhoon, much less poor homes."
Filipinos working abroad and sending money home to their families are an important source of cash in the country under any circumstances, but Fernandez, the New Zealand editorial adviser, expects that they will be skeptical about giving money to the government.
Staff writer Gretel C. Kovach contributed to this report.
(Olier Teves & Nick Perry, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Illinois took the brunt of the fury as the string of unusually powerful late-season tornadoes tore across the state, injuring dozens and even prompting officials at Chicago's Soldier Field to evacuate the stands and delay the Bears game.
"The whole neighborhood's gone. The wall of my fireplace is all that is left of my house," said Michael Perdun, speaking by cellphone from the hardhit central Illinois town of Washington, where he said his neighborhood was wiped out in a matter of seconds.
An elderly man and his sister were killed when a tornado hit their home in the rural southern Illinois community of New Minden, said coroner Mark Styninger. A third person died in Washington, while two others perished in Massac County in the far southern part of the state, said Patti Thompson of the Illinois Emergency Management Agency. She did not provide details.
With communications difficult and many roads impassable, it remained unclear how many people were killed or hurt. The Illinois National Guard said it had dispatched 10 firefighters and three vehicles to Washington to assist with search and recovery operations.
In Washington, a rural community of 16,000, whole blocks of houses were erased from the landscape, and Illinois State Police Trooper Dustin Pierce said the tornado cut a path from one end of town to the other, knocking down power lines, rupturing gas lines and ripping off roofs. An auto-parts store with several people inside was reduced to a pile of bricks, metal and rebar; a battered car, its windshield impaled by a piece of lumber, was flung alongside it. Despite the devastation, all the employees managed to crawl out of the rubble unhurt, Pierce said.
"I went over there immediately after the tornado, walking through the neighborhoods, and I couldn't even tell what street I was on," Washington Alderman Tyler Gee told WLS-TV.
"Just completely flattened — hundreds of homes."
At OSF St. Francis Medical Center in Peoria, spokeswoman Amy Paul said 37 patients had been treated, eight with injuries ranging from broken bones to head injuries. Another hospital, Methodist Medical Center in Peoria, treated more than a dozen, but officials there said none of them was seriously injured. Steve Brewer, Methodist Medical Center's chief operating officer, said doctors and other medical professionals were setting up a temporary emergency care center to treat the injured before transporting them to hospitals, while others were dispatched to search through the rubble for survivors.
By nightfall, Trooper Pierce said there were reports of looting in Washington.
The storm also slammed through parts of Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Kentucky as it made its way east into the mid-Atlantic states on Sunday night. Tornadoes, large hail and damaging winds tore through several communities, leaving thousands without power as emergency crews tried to clear roads.
(Don Babwin, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The eruption, which began late Saturday and tapered off Sunday morning, didn't endanger any of the villages dotting the mountain's slopes, and no evacuation was ordered.
The airport in nearby Catania said airspace above the volcano was closed to flights, but that the airport was operating normally, including takeoffs and departures.
Etna, one of the most active volcanoes in the world, erupts occasionally. Its last major eruption occurred in 1992.
Etna is the largest of the three active volcanoes in Italy, and is about two times the height of the next largest, which is Mount Vesuvius. In 1669, Etna produced one of its most destructive eruptions, with lava flows that destroyed at least 10 villages.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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In the first reported deaths as a result of looting, eight people were crushed to death when a wall collapsed as they and thousands of others stormed a rice warehouse on Leyte Island, the worst-hit region by Friday's storm, said National Food Authority spokesman Rex Estoperez.
The looters in Alangalang municipality carted away up to 100,000 sacks of rice on Tuesday, he said.
Since the storm, people have broken into homes, malls and garages, where they have stripped the shelves of food, water and other goods. Authorities have struggled to stop the looting. There have been unconfirmed reports of armed gangs involved in some instances.
The incident shows the urgency in getting food and water distributed to the disaster zone. Aviation authorities said two more airports in the region had reopened, allowing for more aid flights.
U.S. Brig. Gen. Paul Kennedy said that later today his troops would install equipment at Tacloban airport to allow planes to land at night. Tacloban city was nearly destroyed in Friday's typhoon and has become the main relief hub.
"You are not just going to see Marines and a few planes and some helicopters," Kennedy said. "You will see the entire Pacific Command respond to this crisis."
A Norwegian ship carrying supplies left from Manila, while an Australian air force transport plane took off from Canberra carrying a medical team. British and American navy vessels are also en route to the region.
The damaged airport on Tacloban, a coastal city of 220,000, houses makeshift clinics and thousands of people looking for a flight out. A doctor here said supplies of antibiotics and anesthetics arrived Tuesday for the first time.
"Until then, patients had to endure the pain," said Dr. Victoriano Sambale.
Interior Secretary Mar Roxas said disaster relief teams were redoubling their efforts to hasten the delivery of food, water, medicine and other supplies to millions of people, despite heavy rain brought by a tropical depression that hit the southern Philippines.
Typhoon Haiyan's winds leveled tens of thousands of homes in the region, which is used to typhoons. In some places, tsunami-like storm surges swept up to a mile inland, causing more destruction and loss of life. At least 580,000 people have been displaced. Most of the death and destruction appears concentrated on the islands of Samar and Leyte.
The damaged infrastructure and bad communications links made a conclusive death toll difficult to estimate.
The official toll from a national disaster agency rose to 1,883 on Tuesday. President Benigno Aquino III told CNN in a televised interview that the toll could be closer to 2,000 or 2,500, lower than an earlier estimate from two officials on the ground who said they feared as many as 10,000 might be dead.
"There is a huge amount that we need to do. We have not been able to get into the remote communities," U.N. humanitarian chief Valerie Amos said in Manila, launching an appeal for $301 million to help the more than 11 million people estimated to be affected by the storm.
"Even in Tacloban, because of the debris and the difficulties with logistics and so on, we have not been able to get in the level of supply that we would want to. We are going to do as much as we can to bring in more," she said. Her office said she planned to visit the city.
The $301 million request is on top of $25 million that the U.N. has released from its central emergency relief fund, said Amos.
"This is such a major tragedy for the Philippines," she said. "We have already seen so many crises, but this one is the most deadly and destructive."
More than 149,000 homes were destroyed, while the damage to infrastructure and agriculture has been estimated at $10.72 million.
Relief officials said comparing the pace of this operation to those in past disasters was difficult.
In Indonesia's Aceh, the worst-hit region by the 2004 tsunami, relief hubs were easier to set up than in Tacloban. The main airport there was functioning 24 hours a day within a couple of days of the disaster. While devastation in much of the city of Banda Aceh was total, large inland parts of the city were undamaged, providing a base for aid operations and temporary accommodation for the homeless.
World Bank chief Jim Yong Kim said the storm was a warning to the world about severe weather patterns.
"You cannot connect any single event to climate change. But the Philippines lives quite literally in the eye of the storm," Kim told reporters at a round-table briefing.
Kim said the international development organization will speed up its cash-transfer programs and direct assistance to poor people in the island nation.
The MCT News Service contributed to this report.
(Kristen Gelineau & Jim Gomez, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Four days after Typhoon Haiyan struck the eastern Philippines, only a trickle of assistance has made [it] to affected communities. Authorities estimated the storm killed 10,000 or more across a vast swath of the country. Millions are without shelter or food.
Tacloban, a city of about 220,000 people on Leyte island, bore the full force of the winds and the tsunami-like storm surges. Most of the city is in ruins, a tangled mess of destroyed houses, cars and trees. Malls, garages and shops have all been stripped of food and water by hungry residents.
Just after dawn today, two Philippine Air Force C-130s arrived at its destroyed airport along with several commercial and private flights. More than 3,000 people who camped out at the building surged onto the tarmac past a broken iron fence to get on the aircraft. Just a dozen soldiers and several police held them back.
Mothers raised their babies high above their heads in the rain in hopes of being prioritized. One lady in her 30s lay on a stretcher, shaking uncontrollably. Only a small number managed to board.
"I was pleading with the soldiers. I was kneeling and begging because I have diabetes," said Helen Cordial, whose house was destroyed in the storm. "Do they want me to die in this airport? They are stone hearted."
Most residents spent Monday night under pouring rain wherever they could find shelter — in the ruins of destroyed houses, in the open along roadsides and shredded trees. Some slept under tents brought in by the government or relief groups.
Local doctors said they were desperate for medicines. Beside the ruined airport tower, at a small makeshift clinic with shattered windows, army and air force medics said they had treated around 1,000 people since the typhoon.
"It's overwhelming," said air force Capt. Antonio Tamayo. "We need more medicine. We cannot give anti-tetanus vaccine shots because we have none."
International aid groups and militaries are rushing assistance to the region, but little has arrived yet. Government officials and police and army officers have all been caught up in the disaster themselves, hampering coordination.
The George Washington carrier strike group, which includes the San Diego-based cruiser Cowpens, was expected to arrive off the coast in about two days, according to the Pentagon.
The 3rd Marine Expeditionary Brigade based in Okinawa, Japan, is leading the U.S. military's humanitarian assistance and disaster relief mission in the Philippines. A forward command element of about 90 Marines arrived Sunday to assess storm damages and direct initial search and rescue efforts.
About 180 Marines are now in the Philippines with the brigade, which reactivated in December 2011 as a middleweight crisis response force for the Asia Pacific region. It is using C-130 cargo planes and MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotors to transport people and supplies on the devastated archipelago.
Meanwhile, San Diego-based commanders are standing by. Among them is the hospital ship Mercy and its crew, which so far have not been activated for the humanitarian mission.
Joselito Caimoy, a 42year-old truck driver, was one of the lucky ones at Tacloban airport. He was able to get his wife, son and 3-year-old daughter on a flight out. They embraced in a tearful goodbye, but Caimoy stayed behind to guard what's left of their home and property.
"There is no water, no food," he said. "People are just scavenging in the streets. People are asking food from relatives, friends. The devastation is too much ... the malls, the grocery stories have all been looted. They're empty. People are hungry. And they (the authorities) cannot control the people."
The dead, decomposing and stinking, litter the streets or remain trapped in the debris.
At a small naval base, eight swollen corpses — including that of a baby — were submerged in water brought in by the storm. Officers had yet to move them, saying they had no body bags or electricity to preserve them. The official death remained at 942. However, with shattered communications and transportation links, the final count was likely days away, and presidential spokesman Edwin Lacierda said "we pray" it does not surpass 10,000.
"I don't believe there is a single structure that is not destroyed or severely damaged in some way — every single building, every single house," U.S. Marine Brig. Gen. Paul Kennedy said after taking a helicopter flight over Tacloban on Monday. He spoke on the tarmac at the airport, where two Marine C-130 cargo planes were parked, engines running, unloading supplies.
Authorities said at least 9.7 million people in 41 provinces were affected by the typhoon, known as Haiyan elsewhere in Asia but called Yolanda in the Philippines. It was likely the deadliest natural disaster to beset the Southeast Asian nation.
Authorities said they had evacuated 800,000 people ahead of the typhoon, but many evacuation centers proved to be no protection against the wind and rising water. The Philippine National Red Cross, responsible for warning the region and giving advice, said people were not prepared for a storm surge.
"Imagine America, which was prepared and very rich, still had a lot of challenges at the time of Hurricane Katrina, but what we had was three times more than what they received," said Gwendolyn Pang, the group's executive director.
In Tacloban, residents stripped malls, shops and homes of food, water and consumer goods. Officials said some of the looting smacked of desperation but in other cases people hauled away TVs, refrigerators, Christmas trees and even a treadmill. An Associated Press reporter said he saw about 400 special forces and soldiers patrolling downtown to guard against further chaos.
Philippine President Benigno Aquino III declared a "state of national calamity," allowing the central government to release emergency funds quicker and impose price controls on staple goods. He said the two worst-hit provinces, Leyte and Samar, had witnessed "massive destruction and loss of life" but that elsewhere casualties were low.
The Philippines, an archipelago nation of more than 7,000 islands, is annually buffeted by tropical storms and typhoons. The impoverished and densely populated nation of 96 million people is in the northwestern Pacific, right in the path of the world's No. 1 typhoon generator, according to meteorologists. The archipelago's exposed eastern seaboard often bears the brunt.
Even by the standards of the Philippines, however, Haiyan was an especially large catastrophe. Its winds were among the strongest ever recorded, and it appears to have killed more people than the previous deadliest Philippine storm, Thelma, in which about 5,100 people died in the central Philippines in 1991.
Staff writer Gretel Kovach contributed to this report.
(Todd Pitman & Jim Gomez, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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San Diegans of all backgrounds have been moved by the terror across the ocean. Cities flattened, bagged corpses lining the streets, followed by the agony of uncertainty about survivors and rebuilding.
San Diego has the nation's second-largest Filipino community, after Los Angeles, and Filipinos make up a large percentage of some surrounding cities. They left an island nation where their lives were marked by the annual rainy season that ravaages crops, uproots banana trees, waters the rice fields and washes away homes and lives.
In National City, where about 1 in 6 people is of Filipino descent, according to the 2010 U.S. census, tailors airing TV in Tagalog and eateries serving barbecued pork and lumpia line the busy streets near I-805.
Monday around lunch time, people crowded into those restaurants for a taste of home. They checked Facebook updates from relatives near and far, transferred any extra cash they could afford to people who may or may not be capable to collect it, as the horrible absence of news from their loved ones filled their thoughts.
Then there are those with no connection to that country or region, who just want to step up and help whoever needs it most.
Like the Williams family, from Chula Vista. Elizabeth and Eddie Williams and their daughter Serina, 5, brought bags of clothes Monday afternoon at St. Michael Catholic Church in Paradise Hills, a donation center for the tragedy's victims.
The family's aim was to "give (victims) some hope that people care," said Eddie Williams, 49.
They sprang to action after Elizabeth Williams, 43, heard a woman asking for help on television. "She said, 'We don't want your pity, we just need your help and we need it now.' So I just went through our closets and started rummaging," Williams said.
She called her parents and sister, who also gave. After she dropped off the bags, she called friends and asked them to donate, too.
In two church offices, blankets, clothes and cans of food were stacked on tables. Because of an earlier tragedy in the same region — the Oct. 15 earthquake — large cardboard boxes were already densely packed and ready to be shipped. Newer, unsorted donations covered the floor.
The church is also holding a dinner on Nov. 23, for a $20 donation.
St. Michael's is one of several San Diego organizations that are collecting donations. Another charity dinner will be held at Jasmine Seafood Restaurant, in Kearny Mesa, on Nov. 20. One of the organizers, Mannie Rey Amoguis, grew up in Bohol, a Philippine province with a lush national park known as the Chocolate Hills. He and others spoke of its beauty and wondered what they would find there the next time they returned.
The region was affected by the magnitude 7.2 earthquake last month, and then the monstrous storm.
Amoguis lost his closest friend in the quake. Through Facebook, Amoguis stayed in touch with high school classmates, and when one disaster struck after another, he decided he had to bring people together and raise money for his ravaged homeland.
"I was thinking of a way I could really reach out to them and round up the Filipino American community. We are very well-bonded, well-knit." With the help of members from two Lions Clubs, the owner of the seafood restaurant and a Filipino- American community leader, Amoguis organized the fundraising dinner to rebuild day-care centers on the island.
They hope to raise at least $20,000, which will build one center.
Of all donations, money helps most because it can meet the most urgent needs, said Resfina Macoy-Torrevillas, a volunteer with St. Michael who is helping organize the church's fundraising efforts. Heavy or bulky items can take days or weeks to travel.
"Cash can help buy not only food but medicine, as well as help build temporary shelters," she said. But any donation is precious. "We really need help, very badly," she said. "Whatever help we can get."
Macoy-Torrevillas, like other Filipinos, is guided by strong Roman Catholic faith. Besides raising donations, she has turned to prayer. She heard from her sister and mother, but she's waiting on other relatives. Her mind is filling in the blanks, trying to stay positive. "It could be because of the time difference, the electricity, the signal," she said.
Wait and pray is all Soledad Vanmeter, 65, can do these days, besides focus on job and try to stay strong for her teenage daughter. She hasn't heard from her siblings and elderly mother. The last time they saw each other was two years ago.
Monday, she was sitting by herself outside a cash transfer store, preparing to send $100 — the most she could manage given her modest paychecks as a domestic worker — to relatives.
"I am very worried because I cannot speak with them, because (their) landline is not working," she said.
She heard that another storm is approaching. Her island, she added, is not prosperous — people there know hunger — but it has a far more precious resource: giving, resilient people, the kind that help when horror strikes. The kind that are in her new country, as well.
(Roxana Popescu, U-T)
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Three days after Typhoon Haiyan ravaged the region, the full scale of the disaster — the biggest faced by the Philippines — was becoming apparent. The winds and the waves whipped up were so strong that they washed hulking ships inland, which stood incongruously amid debris of buildings, trees, road signs and people’s belongings.
Authorities estimated that up to 10,000 people may have died. But the government, stunned by the scale of the disaster, has not given an official death toll yet. After surveying the areas, officials said there is little doubt that the death toll will be that high or even higher.
In Tacloban city, the capital of Leyte province, corpses hung from trees and were scattered on sidewalks. Many were buried in flattened buildings. The entire city appeared to have been obliterated.
From the air, the landscape resembled a giant garbage dump punctuated by a few concrete buildings that still stood.
Survivors wandered through the remains of their flattened wooden homes looking to salvage belongings or to search for loved ones.
Very little assistance had reached the city, residents reported. Some took food, water and consumer goods from abandoned shops, malls and homes.
"This area has been totally ravaged", said Sebastien Sujobert, head of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Tacloban. "Many lives were lost, a huge number of people are missing, and basic services such as drinking water and electricity have been cut off," he said.
He said both the Philippine Red Cross and the ICRC offices in Tacloban were damaged, forcing staff to relocate temporarily.
Haiyan hit the eastern seaboard of the Philippines on Friday and quickly barreled across its central islands, packing winds of 147 mph that gusted to 170 mph, and a storm surge of 20 feet.
Even though authorities had evacuated some 800,000 people ahead of the typhoon, the death toll was so high because many evacuation centers — brick-and-mortar schools, churches and government buildings — could not withstand the winds and water surges. Officials said people who had huddled in these buildings drowned or were swept away.
It inflicted serious damage to at least six islands in the middle of the eastern seaboard, with Leyte, Samar and the northern part of Cebu appearing to bear the brunt of the storm. About 4 million people were affected by the storm, the national disaster agency said.
Video from Eastern Samar province's Guiuan township — the first area where the typhoon made landfall — also showed a trail of devastation similar to Tacloban. Many houses were flattened and roads were strewn with debris and uprooted trees. The ABS-CBN video showed several bodies on the street, covered with blankets.
"I have no house, I have no clothes. I don't know how I will restart my life, I am so confused," an unidentified woman said, crying. "I don't know what happened to us. We are appealing for help. Whoever has a good heart, I appeal to you — please help Guiuan."
Even in a nation regularly beset by earthquakes, volcanoes and tropical storms, Typhoon Haiyan appears to be the deadliest natural disaster on record. Its sustained winds weakened to 74 mph as the typhoon made landfall in northern Vietnam early today after crossing the South China Sea. Authorities there evacuated hundreds of thousands of people, but there were no reports of significant damage or injuries.
Challenged to respond to a disaster of such magnitude, the Philippine government also accepted help from abroad.
In a statement Sunday, President Barack Obama said that the United States is prepared to help the Philippines recover.
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel ordered the military's Pacific Command to send ships and aircraft to help with search-and-rescue operations and carry emergency supplies to those in need.
In San Diego County, the Poway-based U.S. chapter of Gawad Kalinga has raised roughly $30,000 for the relief effort, said chairman Tony Olaes.
The money will pay for food packs to give to families in affected areas, he said on Sunday.
Each pack — containing water, canned goods and rice — costs $5 a piece and can feed a family of four for three to four days.
Monetary donations can be made at gk-usa.org.
Staff writer Chris Nichols and The Washington Post contributed to this report.
(Jim Gomez, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Though no major decisions are expected at the conference starting today in Warsaw's National Stadium, the level of progress could be an indicator of the world's chances of reaching a deal in 2015. That's the new watershed year in the U.N.-led process after a 2009 summit in Copenhagen ended in discord.
Climate change is "very, very scary stuff. And evidence is accumulating weekly, monthly as to how dangerous this will be. So there is a huge urgency that we get on with this," said Andrew Steer, the head of the World Resources Institute in Washington.
The urgency of the problem was underlined in a recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the U.N.-sponsored body that provides the scientific basis for the negotiations.
The IPCC said in September with more certainty than before that humans are warming the planet, mainly through carbon emissions from the burning of oil, coal and gas. It raised its projections for sea level rise and warned that the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free during summers before mid-century if the world doesn't act to curb emissions.
"Global greenhouse gas emissions need to peak this decade, and get to zero net emissions by the second half of this century," U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres said Thursday.
The hard part is deciding how to divide those cuts. Since they began in 1992, the U.N. talks have been bogged down by disputes between rich and poor countries over who should do what.
For a long time the U.S. was seen as the biggest foot dragger — it was the only industrialized country that didn't join the Kyoto Protocol, a 1997 emissions deal. America's standing has improved under President Barack Obama, who has increased fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks, worked to boost energy efficiency in federal buildings, invested in green energy, and acted to cut emissions from power plants.
While many countries say the U.S. should do more, increasing focus is falling on the world's top carbon polluter, China, which is under pressure to fuel its economic development in a cleaner way than the U.S. and other industrialized nations did.
Beijing points to the West's historical responsibility for having pumped carbon into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution took off in Britain in the 18th century. But that argument is losing weight as Chinese emissions surge.
U.S. climate envoy Todd Stern noted in a speech last month that the cumulative emissions of developing countries will have surpassed those of developed countries by 2020.
Also, "it is unwarranted to assign blame to developed countries for emissions before the point at which people realized that those emissions caused harm," Stern said.
(Karl Ritter & Monica Scislowska, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Capt. John Andrews, deputy director general of the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines, said he had received "reliable information" from his staff describing the death and destruction Typhoon Haiyan wreaked in Tacloban city on Leyte Island, about 360 miles southwest of Manila, where the storm made landfall Friday.
He said more than 100 bodies were in the streets and 100 were injured.
He said messages from civil aviation authorities in Tacloban to the capital, Manila, had to be relayed through another airport in the central Philippines once every five hours to conserve radio batteries.
The Philippine television station GMA reported its news team saw 11 bodies, including that of a child, washed ashore Friday, as well as 20 bodies at a pier in Tacloban hours after the typhoon ripped through the coastal city.
At least 20 more bodies were taken to a church in nearby Palo town that was used as an evacuation center but had to be abandoned when its roofs were blown away, the TV network reported. TV images showed howling winds peeling off tin roof sheets during heavy rain.
Ferocious winds felled large branches and snapped coconut trees. A man was shown carrying the body of his 6-year-old daughter who drowned, and another image showed vehicles piled up in debris.
Nearly 800,000 people were forced to flee their homes and damage was believed to be extensive.
Weather officials said Haiyan had sustained winds of 147 mph with gusts of 170 mph when it made landfall. Haiyan would be comparable to a strong Category 4 hurricane in the U.S., nearly in the top category, a 5.
Hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons are the same thing. They are just called different names in different parts of the world.
The typhoon's sustained winds weakened this morning to 109 mph with gusts of up to 131 mph as it blew farther away from the Philippines toward Vietnam.
In Vietnam, state media reported that several central provinces began evacuating some 300,000 people from high-risk areas. The typhoon was expected to make landfall in the central region early Sunday morning. Because of cutoff communications in the Philippines, it was impossible to know the full extent of casualties and damage. Officially, four people were listed as dead as of this morning, before the latest information came in from Tacloban.
Southern Leyte Gov. Roger Mercado said the typhoon ripped roofs off houses and triggered landslides that blocked roads.
The dense clouds and heavy rains made the day seem almost as dark as night, he said.
"When you're faced with such a scenario, you can only pray, and pray and pray," Mercado said by telephone, adding that mayors in the province had not called in to report any major damage.
"I hope that means they were spared and not the other way around," he said. "My worst fear is there will be massive loss of lives and property."
Eduardo del Rosario, head of the disaster response agency, said the speed at which the typhoon sliced through the central islands — 25 mph — helped prevent its 375-mile band of rain clouds from dumping enough of their load to overflow waterways. Flooding from heavy rains is often the main cause of deaths from typhoons.
"It has helped that the typhoon blew very fast in terms of preventing lots of casualties," regional military commander Lt. Gen. Roy Deveraturda said. He said the massive evacuation of villagers before the storm also saved many lives.
(Oliver Teves, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The proposed bag ban would eliminate disposable plastic bags from San Diego retail stores such as markets and pharmacies, encourage shoppers to bring reusable totes and require businesses to charge 10 cents for each paper bag.
"The objective is to wean ourselves from temporary bags," said Councilwoman Sherri Lightner, who shepherded the ordinance through the Rules and Economic Development Committee, which approved the draft rule last month.
The ban could eliminate 348 million single-use plastic bags from San Diego each year, the Equinox Center estimated in a report that coincided with the committee vote. It could save the city $160,000 per year in bag cleanup costs, preserve precious space at Miramar Landfill and keep plastics out of the ocean, the report concluded.
But the proposed rule has sparked opposition from some retailers who say its provisions would hurt mom-and-pop markets and their customers.
"I think one thing people aren't talking about is that that law as written will be very hard on working-class families, and will affect the working poor particularly," said Mark Arabo, president and CEO of the San Diego-based Neighborhood Market Association, which represents small markets in California, Arizona and Nevada.
"In essence, it's a bag tax. We're in the most underserved parts of the city, and our customers can't afford to pay a dollar or two more for bags every time they shop."
While the rule would be a sea change for San Diego, it's modeled after a host of existing laws.
More than 80 California cities — including Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose and others — have adopted similar measures in recent years, outlawing the filmy plastic sacks from their shops and supermarkets.
Several recent bills that aimed to expand the ban statewide died in the Legislature. After those failed this year, San Diego officials decided it was time to take local action, Lightner said.
"You know, we're not breaking new ground now, and it's about time we got up to speed with other jurisdictions," she said. Plastic bags have come under scrutiny following research showing that they accumulate in the ocean, choking or entangling marine mammals, birds, sea turtles and fish. Recent reports have highlighted the North Pacific Gyre, where high concentrations of trash swirl in ocean currents.
Scientists are studying how plastic debris affects marine ecosystems, and whether the pollutants the animals ingest make their way up the food chain to humans.
Californians use an estimated 14 billion plastic bags each year, according to an analysis of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data by the conservation group Californians Against Waste, said its policy associate Sue Vang. Although the bags are recyclable, only about 5 percent make it to recycling plants, the Equinox Center found. In San Diego, Lightner said, only 3 percent of bags are recycled.
"It's our understanding that over 460 million plastic bags from San Diego are disposed in landfills annually," said interim Mayor Todd Gloria. "We have a necessity to keep our landfill open as long as possible."
Bag bans aim to cut plastic bag use and introduce greener alternatives, but there are some catches.
The Equinox Center study examined existing bag bans in the cities of San Jose and Santa Monica, as well as one in Los Angeles County. It found that the bans reduce energy use, greenhouse-gas emissions and solid waste, but also increased water use because of the need to wash reusable bags.
Prior to the bans, disposable plastic bags made up three-quarters of checkout bags used in those areas. After the bans, that dropped to zero, the Equinox Center reported. However, paper bag use jumped from 3 percent to 16 percent, as customers switched from plastic to paper.
That's a problem for environmental officials who seek to cut waste by minimizing use of all types of disposable bags. And it's the reason various cities have adopted the charge for each paper bag. Although many merchants are willing to offer paper bags at no cost, waste experts have said a fee would discourage some customers from using throwaway bags at all.
That's unfair to the working poor clients of many convenience shops and small markets, Arabo said. While the draft ordinance makes exemptions for grocery shoppers on public assistance, people scraping by on low incomes without food aid don't get that break, he said.
Many customers can't afford to stock up on reusable bags, Arabo said. Some use public transportation, so they can't stash them in a car for unplanned purchases like other shoppers do. And the 10-cent paper bag charge, while nominal, could add up to a financial burden for those families, he said.
While the draft law makes noncompliance with the 10 cent fee a misdemeanor offense, Arabo said he's willing to risk that penalty.
"Our stores will not charge, period," he said. "If they want to ban plastics, it's one thing. But don't charge 10 cents per (paper) bag."
And although the current draft version of San Diego's proposed ordinance doesn't spell it out, officials said the language would allow large non-food retailers to continue to distribute plastic bags — which Arabo said is another inequity.
Cathy Brown, general manager of plastic bag maker Crown Poly in Huntington Park, said there are other hidden downsides to bans on plastic bags. Many disposable plastic bags are reused for household trash or pet waste, she said. Eliminating free bags at markets would encourage customers to buy plastic bags for those purposes, undermining the goal of a net reduction in landfill waste, she said.
"It's not a single-use bag," Brown said. "People constantly reuse them for other purposes. When people don't talk about that, it's frustrating."
Lani Lutar, executive director of the Equinox Center, said even plastic bags that are reused once or twice still end up in landfills. And the ordinance would allow continued use of other plastic sacks for carrying produce, bread and pharmaceuticals, so those could still double as waste disposal bags, she said.
San Diego officials said city staff would conduct an environmental review of the proposed ban and return to the City Council with the final wording within a few months to a year.
"In the whole of human existence, we've had plastic bags for a couple decades," Gloria said. "We've been able to succeed without them before, we'll be able to succeed again."
(Deborah Sullivan Brennan, U-T)
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Telephone lines appeared down as it was difficult to get through to the landfall site 405 miles southeast of Manila where Typhoon Haiyan slammed into a rural area of the country.
"195 mph winds, there aren't too many buildings constructed that can withstand that kind of wind," said Jeff Masters, a former hurricane meteorologist who is meteorology director at the private firm Weather Underground.
Masters said the storm had been poised to be the strongest tropical cyclone ever recorded at landfall. He warned of "catastrophic damage."
Haiyan's wind strength at landfall had been expected to beat out Hurricane Camille, which was 190 mph at landfall in the United States in 1969, Masters said.
Already authorities reported having trouble reaching colleagues in the landfall area, with forecaster Mario Palafox of the Philippines national weather bureau saying contact had been lost with staff in the area.
More than 125,000 people had been evacuated from towns and villages in the typhoon's path, the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council said. Among them were thousands of residents of Bohol who had been camped in tents and other makeshift shelters after a magnitude-7.2 earthquake devastated many towns on the island province.
Masters said the Philippines might get a small break because the storm is moving so fast that flooding from heavy rains — usually the cause of most deaths from typhoons in the Philippines — may not be as bad.
After hitting Guiuan on the southern tip of Samar island, the typhoon pummeled nearby Leyte island.
"I think this is the strongest so far since the 1960s," Southern Leyte Gov. Roger Mercado said on ABS-CBN television. "This is really a wallop. All roads are impassable due to fallen trees."
A reporter for the network in Tacloban city was drenched in the pounding rain and said he was wearing a helmet as protection against flying debris. Visibility was so poor that only his silhouette could be seen through the thick curtain of water.
Television images showed a street under knee-deep floodwater carrying debris that had been blown down by the fierce winds. Tin roofing sheets ripped from buildings were flying above the street.
Weather forecaster Gener Quitlong said the typhoon was not losing much of its strength because there is no large land mass to slow it down; the region comprises islands with no tall mountains.
Officials in Cebu province have shut down electric service to the northern part of the province to avoid electrocutions in case power pylons are toppled.
(Jim Gomez, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Arizona Department of Public Safety officials said 19 vehicles — 10 commercial vehicles, seven passenger cars, one tanker and one recreational vehicle — were involved in chain-reaction collisions south of Casa Grande shortly after noon.
Television footage showed several cars and tractor-trailers smashed into each other near Picacho Peak in south-central Arizona, with at least one passenger car pinned between two eighteen- wheelers and others wedged under big rigs.
Medical helicopters airlifted several of the injured to hospitals in Tucson and Phoenix, and DPS officials said at least one person was in critical condition.
Officials identified one of those killed as George Lee Smith, 77, of Mead, Wash.
They said Smith's wife was injured, but her condition wasn't disclosed.
The names and hometowns of the other two killed weren't immediately available, authorities said.
It was not immediately clear what sparked the pileup, but DPS spokesman Bart Graves said human error is normally a factor in incidents such as this one.
The Picacho Peak area is prone to dust storms that develop suddenly and can quickly reduce visibility to zero for drivers.
The National Weather Service had issued a blowing dust advisory shortly before the crashes, with wind gusts of up to 30 mph reported in the area. Graves said Tuesday's crash was one of the worst chain-reaction accidents in that area in the past seven years.
Parts of the westbound lanes of I-10 at the crash scene were closed for more than five hours.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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But for others, there remains a long road ahead and much work to be done. And for those who lost loved ones, the grief remains.
Sandy came ashore on Oct. 29, 2012, sending flood waters pouring across the densely populated barrier islands of Long Island and the Jersey Shore. In New York City, the storm surge hit nearly 14 feet, swamping the city's subway and commuter rail tunnels and knocking out power to the southern third of Manhattan. The storm was blamed for at least 182 deaths in the U.S. — including 68 in New York and 71 in New Jersey — and property damage estimated at $65 billion.
Here is a look at anniversary observances through a series of vignettes detailing how people are commemorating the unprecedented storm: At Meade's bar in the South Street Seaport, a "lights out" Sandy party was planned for Tuesday night to observe the historic neighborhood's recovery.
"The neighborhood's been here hundreds of years," said owner Lee Holin. "It's not going anywhere."
Still, Holin's mood wasn't festive. "I don't just want to be the bar that survived Sandy," he said as a street artist friend who goes by the nickname "NDA" painted a mural in a stairwell above an eye-level water mark on the wall left by flooding.
Meade's bar gained a loyal following by being one of the first businesses to open after the storm. But storefronts that went dark for months are starting to get new retail tenants willing to pay higher rents and charging customers more — in his eyes, bad news for the die-hard locals.
"They're trying to turn this into the Meatpacking District," he complained, referring to the expensive, uber-trendy neighborhood on Manhattan's west side.
Ken Mandelbaum remembered looking out of his Brooklyn apartment window at the lower part of Manhattan and not being able to see a single thing, Sandy's surging waters causing massive power outages. "It was completely dark, it was unreal," he said Tuesday, joining a couple of dozen others at Brooklyn Bridge Park, where they held electric candles to mark the anniversary of Sandy's landfall, a commemoration that was also being done in other parts of coastal New York City and along the New Jersey shore.
Mandelbaum and his wife, who live on the 12th floor of a building at the water's edge, didn't evacuate during Sandy and spent days without power, using the stairs to get up and down from their home to the street.
Beatrice Spagnuolo was one of 23 people on Staten Island who died when Superstorm Sandy struck a year ago.
The 79-year-old woman was killed when her Midland Beach home flooded.
On Tuesday, her son Vincent Spagnuolo joined about 200 others who marched on a Midland Beach boardwalk to honor the memory of those who died on Staten Island.
As bagpipers played "Amazing Grace," Vincent Spagnuolo said he still hadn't gotten over his mother's death. Spagnuolo's own Staten Island home was also destroyed when Sandy struck.
Myra Camacho's home in the Rockaways still has no electricity.
She spent nearly two months after Sandy trying to survive in her frigid, powerless home with her boyfriend, Walter Negron.
"We wrapped ourselves in blankets. We ate out of the churches," Negron said.
They moved out after Camacho had a heart attack. She moved in with relatives. Negron has been staying elsewhere.
Their luck might be about to change.
The couple spent Tuesday morning with an inspector from a nonprofit housing group, who told them he could help with the restoration. He estimated it would cost $15,000.
"He said, 'Don't worry about it. We're going to take care of it,' " Camacho said. "I don't know. We've heard things like this before. I'm hopeful."
(Meghan Barr, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Japan's meteorological agency said the quake was an aftershock of the magnitude-9.0 earthquake and tsunami that struck the same area in 2011, killing about 19,000 people and devastating the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Tsunamis of up to 15 inches were reported today at four areas along the coast, but a tsunami advisory was lifted after two hours.
Japanese television images of harbors showed calm waters. The quake hit at 2:10 a.m. Tokyo time, about 170 miles off Fukushima, and it was felt in Tokyo, some 300 miles away. "It was fairly big, and rattled quite a bit, but nothing fell to the floor or broke," Satoshi Mizuno, a Fukushima prefectural government official, said by phone.
Mizuno said the operator of the troubled Fukushima plant, Tokyo Electric Power Co., said no damage or abnormalities have been found.
The U.S. Pacific Tsunami Warning Center did not post warnings for the rest of the Pacific. Japan’s 50 nuclear reactors remain offline as the government decides whether they meet more stringent requirement enacted after the 2011 quake, which triggered multiple meltdowns and radiation leaks at the Fukushima plant about 160 miles northeast of Tokyo.
(Mari Yamaguchi, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The team, gathered in La Jolla at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said it's too soon to know what happened to the oarfish, which was found five days after an 18-foot specimen was discovered dead off the coast of Catalina on Oct. 13. Oarfish sightings are rare because the long silvery fish typically live in water more than 600 feet deep.
Though experts were still studying the data, observers on social media were quick to spout theories about the deaths, ranging from fallout from the Fukushima nuclear disaster to the possibility that a major earthquake could soon strike Southern California.
Japanese legend holds that oarfish beachings are a predictor of big temblors. According to news accounts, 10 oarfish washed ashore in Japan about a year before a devastating 8.9 earthquake struck the northeast part of the country in March 2011.
Scientists said Monday there was nothing to support a connection between oarfish and earthquakes.
"You would need more evidence to establish cause and effect," said Milton Love, a marine biologist at the University of California Santa Barbara. "If someone drank a gallon of milk before a heroin overdose, did the milk cause the overdose?"
Still, Love, who has been studying tissue samples from the larger oarfish discovered by a snorkeler off Catalina, said he couldn't completely dismiss the Internet theories, which have included underwater oil drilling and global warming climate change.
"The number of oarfish that beach themselves worldwide in a year is typically either one or zero, so this is unusual," he said. "It's possible any of those theories are true. I think it's a little early to say anything."
The scientists gathered in La Jolla to study the Oceanside specimen called the discoveries an exciting opportunity to analyze the eating habits of oarfish, their physical structure and other details.
"There's not much known about them because no one gets to see them alive," said Antonella Preti, a fisheries biologist for NOAA. "We're trying to understand every single aspect of how they live."
Preti said ocean currents and other changes in their environment could have killed the fish, which are believed to be relatively weak swimmers. She also said it was possible the cause of death would never be known.
The scientists said they didn't even attempt to weigh the oarfish, which was cut into four large pieces before being transported from Oceanside to La Jolla on Friday night. Guesses ranged from 700 to 2,000 pounds.
They also said the age of the fish was a mystery.
During Monday's autopsy, Beverly Macewicz, a NOAA research biologist, was digging through soggy flesh in search of one of the oarfish's earbones, which can help determine age similar to tree rings, she said.
Macewicz said the team discovered Monday morning that the oarfish was releasing eggs, which is known as spawning or giving birth. "I came to cut pieces of the ovary for analysis," she said.
Macewicz said it's possible the samples taken Monday would lead to medical discoveries or a better understanding of many biological subjects.
"This is a big day," she said.
It's not the first time oarfish have been spotted in San Diego. In 1996, a 23-foot oarfish washed ashore at a Coronado naval base; in 1988, a 14-foot specimen was pulled in by fishermen about 150 miles off the coast; and in 1984, a 16-foot oarfish was caught by a commercial fisherman about 30 miles west of Point Loma.
While oarfish are rarely seen alive, researchers have captured video of them swimming deep under water in the Gulf of Mexico and near Baja California in recent years.
Regarding the seismic speculation, Pat Abbott, a San Diego State University geologist who's an expert on earthquakes, said scientists haven't adequately studied whether animals have senses that can predict things.
"I find the topic fascinating, but how do you go out and prove something like that?" Abbott said. "Scientifically, nothing's ever been demonstrated that oarfish deaths are an omen or a precursor to an earthquake."
(David Garrick, U-T)
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Firefighters worked through the night, bulldozing containment lines through the Blue Mountains region and using helicopters to help back-burn tracts of forest, New South Wales Rural Fire Service Commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons told reporters Monday. Temperatures are set to rise and winds strengthen today, he said.
More than 2,000 emergency personnel are tackling about 60 blazes across the state, including 13 that are uncontained, Fitzsimmons said. Authorities urged residents of some townships in the Blue Mountains, about 50 miles west of Sydney, to leave their homes or face being isolated without power for several days if the fire front reaches them.
State Premier Barry O'Farrell declared an emergency over the weekend, giving police and firefighters the power to forcibly evacuate people, tear down threatened buildings and cut off power and gas supplies.
More than 200 homes have been destroyed by the blazes, while the Insurance Council of Australia says claims total $90 million.
A 63-year-old man who died from a heart attack while protecting his home from a fire on the Central Coast, about 70 miles north of Sydney, is the only recorded fatality, according to police.
The Defense Department, meanwhile, said it was investigating whether there was any link between one massive fire, which started Wednesday, and military exercises using explosives at a nearby training range on the same day.
"Defense is investigating if the two events are linked," the department said in a statement on Saturday.
Rural Fire Service spokesman Matt Sun said the cause of the fire was also under investigation by fire authorities and would be made public when determined.
Arson investigators are examining the origins of several of more than 100 fires that have threatened towns surrounding Sydney.
Crews are working to link two fires in the Blue Mountains to help starve them of fuel and prevent them from converging with a third, Fitzsimmons said.
The nation's bushfire season has started early after the warmest September on record.
Wildfires are a regular feature of Australia's warmer months. In February 2009, bush fires across Victoria state killed 173 people and destroyed 150 homes in the worst blazes in Australian history.
(BLOOMBERG NEWS & ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Jasmine Santana of the Catalina Island Marine Institute needed more than 15 helpers to drag the giant sea creature with eyes the size of half dollars to shore Sunday. Staffers at the institute are calling it the discovery of a lifetime. "We've never seen a fish this big," said Mark Waddington of the institute. "The last oarfish we saw was three feet long."
Because oarfish dive more than 3,000 feet deep, sightings of the creatures are rare and they're largely unstudied, reported the institute. The obscure fish apparently died of natural causes. Tissue samples and video footage were sent to be studied by biologists at the University of California Santa Barbara. The carcass was on display Tuesday for fifth-, sixth and seventh-grade students studying at the institute. It will be buried in the sand until it decomposes and then its skeleton will be reconstituted for display, Waddington said.
The oarfish, which can grow to more than 50 feet, is a deep-water pelagic fish — the longest bony fish in the world, the institute reported. They're likely responsible for sea serpent legends throughout history.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The three were rescued in nearby Cebu province hours after Tuesday's quake shattered office buildings and homes and caused many centuries-old churches to crumble.
In Bohol, the quake's epicenter, rescuers counted 100 dead, said regional military commander Lt. Gen. Roy Deveraturda. Cebu reported nine fatalities, and one died on another island.
There seems little hope of finding any large number of survivors from beneath the rubble of leveled buildings, homes and churches.
The small coastal town of Loon reported 20 fatalities, the highest in Bohol, including those buried in a hospital and a church.
Many roads and bridges were damaged, making rescue operations difficult. But historic churches dating from the Spanish colonial period suffered the most. The country's oldest, the 16th-century Basilica of the Holy Child in Cebu, lost its bell tower.
Nearly half of a 17-th century limestone church in Loboc town, southwest of Carmen, was reduced to rubble, as was the largest church on the island in Loon town, where three worshippers were buried alive.
The entire province was without electricity after the quake cut power supplies.
Authorities set up tents for those displaced by the quake, while others who lost their homes moved in with their relatives, Bohol Gov. Edgardo Chatto said.
Extensive damage also hit densely populated Cebu city, across a narrow strait from Bohol, causing deaths when a building in the port and the roof of a market area collapsed.
The quake set off two stampedes in nearby cities. When it struck, people gathered in a gym in Cebu rushed outside in a panic, crushing five people to death and injuring eight others, said Neil Sanchez, provincial disaster management officer.
"We ran out of the building, and outside, we hugged trees because the tremors were so strong," said Vilma Yo rong, a provincial government employee in Bohol.
"When the shaking stopped, I ran to the street, and there I saw several injured people. Some were saying their church has collapsed," she told The Associated Press by phone.
Offices and schools were closed for a national holiday — the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha — which may have saved lives.
Aledel Cuizon said the quake that caught her in her bedroom sounded like "a huge truck that was approaching and the rumbling sound grew louder as it got closer."
She and her neighbors ran outside, where she saw concrete electric poles "swaying like coconut trees." It lasted 15-20 seconds, she said.
(Bullit Marquez, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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And eventually the whole world in 2047.
A new study on global warming pinpoints the probable dates for when cities and ecosystems around the world will regularly experience hotter environments the likes of which they have never seen before.
And for dozens of cities, mostly in the tropics, those dates are a generation or less away.
"This paper is both innovative and sobering," said Oregon State University professor Jane Lubchenco, former head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who was not involved in the study.
To arrive at their projections, the researchers used weather observations, computer models and other data to calculate the point at which every year from then on will be warmer than the hottest year ever recorded over the past 150 years.
For example, the world as a whole had its hottest year on record in 2005. The new study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, says that by the year 2047, every year that follows will probably be hotter than that record-setting scorcher.
Eventually, the coldest year in a particular city or region will be hotter than the hottest year in its past.
Study author Camilo Mora and his colleagues said they hope this new way of looking at climate change will spur governments to do something before it is too late.
"Now is the time to act," said another study co-author, Ryan Longman.
Mora, a biological geographer at the University of Hawaii, and colleagues ran simulations from 39 different computer models and looked at hundreds of thousands of species, maps and data points to ask when places will have "an environment like we had never seen before."
The 2047 date for the whole world is based on continually increasing emissions of greenhouse gases from the burning of coal, oil and natural gases. If the world manages to reduce its emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases, that would be pushed to as late as 2069, according to Mora.
But for now, Mora said, the world is rushing toward the 2047 date.
(Seth Borenstein, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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More than an inch of rain fell at several mountain locations, and snow started falling at 5,500 feet after 9 p.m. Thunder and lightning were reported in Escondido about 8:30 p.m. Wednesday.
The storm represents the first significant rain in San Diego County since March, at a time when federal forecasters say virtually all of the county is experiencing severe drought conditions.
Rainfall totals through 7:15 p.m. Wednesday ranged from 0.04 inches at Lindbergh Field to 1.35 inches at Lake Cuyamaca.
Other totals included Montgomery Field, 0.25 inches; Point Loma, 0.22 inches; Ramona, 0.49 inches; Poway, 0.40 inches; Valley Center and Santee, 0.27 inches; La Mesa, 0.16 inches; Fallbrook, 0.12 inches; Escondido, 0.09 inches; and Oceanside and Encinitas, 0.08 inches.
Many spots in the county set records for the lowest peak temperature for Oct. 9. Vista, Ramona, Alpine, El Cajon, Borrego Springs and Palomar Mountain set records.
The fast-moving storm produced wind gusts exceeding 60 mph at Volcan Mountain near Julian.
The winds also reached 40 mph in Encinitas and turned breaking waves along the coast into a riot of foam.
Both the Coast Guard and San Diego Harbor Police said no major problems were reported on the water. A small-craft advisory was in effect until 3 a.m. today, as was a high-wind warning for the county’s mountains and deserts.
The California Highway Patrol responded to 44 traffic collisions in the county between 2 and 4 p.m., and 94 collisions between 4 and 6 p.m., Officer Robert Catano said.
About 2:15 p.m., when Catano said rain was falling in North County, a Honda Civic and an ambulance collided on state Route 78 west of Nordahl Road. One person in the Civic was seriously injured, he said. A traffic alert was issued, and two lanes of the freeway were blocked for about an hour.
In East County, a woman was trapped when her vehicle went off rain-slicked state Route 94 at Freezer Road near Dulzura and rolled into a creek about 5 p.m., Catano said. She was rescued by Cal Fire and did not require medical transport, he said. The CHP reported flooding on Wednesday evening at South Grade Road and Scenic View Road in Alpine. The weather service said Alpine had 0.42 inches of rain by that time.
Daytime high temperatures along the coast should reach only the upper 60s today and Friday, ushering in a cooler-than-normal weekend. Temperatures also will linger in the 60s across most inland foothills and valleys until a modest warming trend starts Saturday.
(Gary Robbins & Susan Shroder, U-T)
Related to this, a small plane went missing near Volcan Mountain where high wind speeds were experienced:
Searchers looking for overdue plane on mountain near Julian
NORTH COUNTY - Searchers were looking Wednesday night on Volcan Mountain near Julian for a small plane overdue from Palm Springs to Gillespie Field, the Sheriff's Department said.
The department was notified by the state Office of Emergency Services about the plane at 6:19 p.m., sheriff's Lt. Dave Schaller said.
The National Weather Service reported that wind gusts of 64 mph were reported on Volcan Mountain on Wednesday during the county's first fall storm.
A sheriff's helicopter searched, along with a ground team of deputies and volunteers, Schaller said the plane was registered to someone in San Diego, but that person was not reached by phone.
Schaller said he did not know how many people were on the plane, or the time it was due in El Cajon.
He said that authorities had not ruled out the pilot had landed somewhere and had not checked in with authorities.
(Susan Shroder, U-T)
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Due to regulatory restrictions, the allocation of water from the Delta to Southern California has been cut back significantly, with counties in Southern California only getting 35 percent of their allocations. For too long Southern California has been the victim of these "feast or famine" variations in the weather. Reservoirs fill up during wet years, and then they drain lower and lower during dry years as we hope and pray for a change in climate conditions.
This is why Southern California needs new, 21st century water infrastructure that includes Delta conveyance and local waste water recycling and seawater desalination projects.
The Bay Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP) is critical to providing Southern California with a more consistent and reliable annual water flow. However, parties on all sides of the issue acknowledge that new local water resources must also be developed to complement the BDCP.
Southern California has made investments in local water supply solutions, which include conservation, recycling, storm water runoff capture and seawater desalination. Many of us remember the devastating drought that hit California from 1987 to 1992 and the impact that it had on residents and businesses throughout the state.
Locally controlled water solutions are critical to the water supply reliability that we need to keep our economy strong and maintain our quality of life.
Any discussion of water supply must begin — but not end — with conservation. Southern Californians use less water per capita now than we did 20 years ago, and measurably less today on average than Northern Californians. More and more residents and businesses are using drought-tolerant "California friendly" plants and are capturing rainwater on their property to use for irrigation. We must continue to enhance our water conservation efforts throughout the region.
San Diego County Water Authority wisely worked with Poseidon Water in a public-private partnership to develop a seawater desalination facility in Carlsbad.
This project will provide 50 million gallons of fresh drinking water per day and is an excellent example of how to use modern technology to develop locally controlled, drought-proof water supplies.
Now, Orange County is poised to follow in San Diego's footsteps and will build its own seawater desalination facility for our communities.
In November, the California Coastal Commission is scheduled to consider approval of the final permit needed to construct the large-scale desalination project in Huntington Beach. Like the Carlsbad facility, the proposed Huntington Beach project complies with Coastal Act requirements. The entire drought-stricken state will be closely watching the Coastal Commission's proceedings to see if California is serious about its commitment to water supply reliability. Seawater desalination is not a silver bullet that will solve our water supply crisis on its own, but the technology is proven and state regulators have determined that plants can be built and operated in an environmentally responsible manner.
Meanwhile, Orange County has led the way on wastewater recycling, with the Groundwater Replenishment System (GWRS) — the world's largest water purification system for potable reuse. Operational since January 2008, GWRS has provided an additional 100 billion gallons of safe drinking water over the past five years. A phase-two expansion of GWRS is underway. Just as Orange County is following San Diego County's lead on seawater desalination, San Diego County is looking to replicate Orange County's success with recycled waste water.
Hurricane Katrina and Superstorm Sandy were devastating natural disasters and scientists predict that within the next 40 years there is a 60 percent chance of an earthquake that would devastate the Delta and the water supply for 26 million Californians. But an extended drought in California is a natural disaster in slow motion and is no less devastating. As state leaders we must put parochial interests aside and address our collective need for a holistic water supply reliability strategy now instead of waiting for the disaster that will inevitably come.
(Mimi Walters (R, Laguna Hills) & Lou Correa (D, Santa Ana), state senators from Orange County)
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The tornado at 7:20 a.m. Monday hit the industrial area of Frederickson, tearing a hole in the roof of the Northwest Door factory, blowing out car windows at a nearby Boeing factory, and damaging a building where sections of a downtown Seattle tunnel project were being assembled.
A team from the Weather Service office in Seattle went to the scene and confirmed the tornado from eyewitness accounts, meteorologist Johnny Burg said.
Parts of the Northwest got more rain in a day or two over the weekend than typically falls in the entire month.
"We basically had conditions well off shore that were very reminiscent of late fall-early winter," said Dana Felton, meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Seattle.
With Mondays' precipitation still to be added, it's been the wettest September on record in Olympia and the second-wettest in Seattle.
Nearly 8 inches fell in Olympia, topping a 1978 record and swamping the usual 1.7 inches that fall in that time, the National Weather Service said. Sea-Tac Airport's September total of 5.6 inches came second to a 1978 record, while downtown Portland saw 6.2 inches — the most since record-keeping began in 1872.
The storm brought the first significant snow of the season to the mountains. Forecasters expected 6 to 12 inches by Tuesday morning in the Olympics and 10 to 20 inches in the Cascades.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Nearly 5,000 firefighters were battling the blaze, but in a sign of progress some were expected to be released to go home, said Daniel Berlant, spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. "We continue to gain the upper hand, but there's still a lot of work to be done," he said.
The 2-week-old blaze burning in the Sierra Nevada northeast of Fresno has scorched 315 square miles of brush, oaks and pine, making it the largest U.S. wildfire to date this year and the fifth-largest wildfire in modern California records.
Containment was estimated at 32 percent.
Winds had been blowing dense smoke plumes northeast into the Lake Tahoe area and Nevada, but a shift Friday brought them west down to the San Joaquin Valley floor. Regional air pollution control authorities issued a health caution for San Joaquin, Stanislaus, Merced, Madera, Fresno and Tulare counties.
Residents who see or smell smoke were urged to stay inside, especially people with heart of lung problems, older adults and children.
Evacuation advisories were lifted Thursday in Tuolumne City, Soulsbyville and Willow Springs but remained in place for other communities, and evacuations remained mandatory along the fire's southeastern edge.
About 75 square miles of the fire are inside Yosemite, but at some distance from the national park's major attractions, including glacially carved Yosemite Valley's granite monoliths and towering waterfalls.
Park officials expect about 3,000 cars a day to pass through gates during the long Labor Day holiday weekend instead of the nearly 5,000 that might typically show.
The fire has caused some people to cancel reservations in the park but those vacancies have been quickly filled, officials said. "Valley campgrounds are still full and skies in Yosemite Valley are crystal clear," said park spokeswoman Kari Cobb.
A 4-mile stretch of state Route 120, one of three western entrances into Yosemite, remained closed, hurting tourism-dependent businesses in communities along the route.
Costs reached $47 million, including firefighters from 41 states and the District of Columbia and significant aviation resources including helicopters, a DC-10 jumbo jet and military aircraft equipped with the Modular Airborne Firefighting System. Aircraft have dropped 1.7 million gallons of retardant and 1.4 million gallons of water.
The fire started Aug. 17 and its cause remains under investigation.
It's expected to keep burning long after it is fully contained, and recovery will be extensive.
Some 7,000 damaged trees next to power lines will need to be removed by utility crews and 800 guardrail posts will need to be replaced on Route 120, a fire fact sheet said.
Although the fire has reached the Hetch Hetchy reservoir, the source of drinking water for 2.6 million San Francisco Bay Area residents and businesses, officials said the ash falling on the surface has had no impact on water quality. Firefighters remain on site to protect the reservoir and water and power infrastructure on the western edge of the park.
The Yosemite Conservancy announced it was launching a fundraising campaign to help restore trails and lost habitat in the tens of thousands of acres in the park that have been burned since the fire began on Aug. 17.
"We anticipate that significant work will be needed to restore areas affected in the park once the heroic efforts of firefighters are completed," conservancy President Mike Tollefson said in a statement.
(Gosia Wozniacka, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The weather service got an early warning Friday that the day's conditions could make some people weak in the knees.
Shortly before dawn, a weather balloon launched from Miramar determined there were 2.21 inches of precipitable water, or PW, in the atmosphere. That was the highest reading in the nation at that time. (PW refers to the amount of rain that would fall if you could wring all of the moisture out of a specific column of air.) Also, Tropical Storm Juliette had churned within 500 miles of San Diego, throwing moist and unstable air toward Southern California just before it veered sharply to the west and died over the Pacific.
The twin streams of moisture sent the temperature rocketing to 97 degrees in Escondido (nine degrees above normal) and 89 at San Diego's Lindbergh Field (12 degrees above average).
The heat was inescapable. The humidity also spiked, reaching 67 percent in places like National City. It's rarely that humid at or near the coast.
Some people also had to dodge thunderstorms. A particularly nasty system erupted at Oak Grove, near Palomar Mountain, dropping 1.5 inches of rain in a short time.
The wild mix caught the attention of scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, where one researcher sent an intra-office email that said the precipitable water was "just shy of the all-time record for the Miramar site of 2.23 inches ... set back on August 10, 1998. I believe this is also the highest measured in the U.S. today — substantially higher than places like Key West, FL (1.84 inches) or Corpus Christi, TX (1.73 inches)."
(Gary Robbins, U-T)
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Those who keep their hard-to-get Labor Day lodging reservations in Yosemite will enjoy a pleasant surprise: stunning views of the towering granite icons Half Dome and El Capitan with less of the usual holiday congestion.
The park has seen some reservation cancellations and some nearby mountain communities have had a serious drop-off in business due to the 311-square-mile Rim fire, which was 33 percent contained late Thursday. More than 20,000 acres of the fire are along the northern edge of the 750,000-acre national park.
But 20 miles upwind in Yosemite Valley, the sky is clear, with not a scent of smoke in the air.
Park officials expect about 3,000 cars a day to pass through the gates this weekend instead of the nearly 5,000 that might typically show on the holiday. Most of the missing will be day tourists, not folks who have waited months and even years for a campsite along the Merced River or a room at the historic Ahwahnee Lodge. "We've had minimal cancellations, and when we do we fill them immediately," said park spokesman Scott Gediman. "The campsites are full and there are plenty of people, but because of the publicity we're slower."
It's a familiar pattern of panic, cancellation and rebooking in the rugged national park that has been shaped by all manner of disaster. In years past, when boulders tumbling from 3,000-foot granite monoliths have sent tourists scrambling, or when a mouse-borne illness killed tent cabin guests, cancellations poured in. But the park never has enough lodging for the 4 million tourists who visit annually, so vacant rooms rarely go unfilled for long.
That's not the case in nearby Groveland, a scenic Gold Rush community along a road that carries 2.2 million cars into the park every year. Early on, fire tore along Highway 120, forcing its closure and cutting off the town's lifeblood.
Since then, the historic hamlet has been the dateline on scores of ominous news stories describing the inferno that has long since chewed its way north. The notoriety has taken a toll.
"I laid off all my girls" on Wednesday, said Laura Jensen, owner of the Firefall Coffee Roasting Co. "This has totally drained us. It's like winter when we slow down and take care of the locals, but this should be our busiest time of the year."
The Iron Door Saloon, which calls itself the oldest in California, also laid off employees this week, as did the Hotel Charlotte, a 1920s boutique hotel on Main Street.
"I've had $20,000 worth of cancellations in the past few days," said Doug Edwards, who owns the hotel with his wife, Jen. "It's fear-driven. People don't want to drive on a road that looks like Hiroshima or Nagasaki."
Making matters worse for Groveland was Thursday's fire-forced cancellation of the Strawberry Music Festival, which draws 20,000 bluegrass lovers to town every Labor Day weekend.
"We're coming into the crescendo of our season," Edwards said. "Our hotel should be completely full."
The impact is being felt as far north as Lake Tahoe, where thick smoke settled this week in the alpine basin that draws outdoor enthusiast from around the world, affecting everything from hotel reservations to bicycle rentals. The sky was clear Thursday, but tourists had yet to come back.
"It has dropped off drastically the past week," said Travis McCoy of Camp Richardson Mountain Sports Center on the lake's south shore. His usual rental income of up to $3,000 daily has fallen to less than $500.
Some hotels and motels at South Lake Tahoe were experiencing as much as a 10 percent to 20 percent drop in business.
(Tracie Cone, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Minnesota's largest school district called off classes Thursday and today in 27 buildings with little or no air conditioning. The decision came after days of complaints from teachers and some parents about difficult learning conditions as temperatures hovered in the upper 90s with high humidity.
"We tried to have school and get off to a good, quality start here," spokeswoman Rachel Hicks said, adding the persistent heat was taking a toll on students and staff. "The decision really came down to the consecutive days of heat."
Classes were to resume Tuesday after the Labor Day holiday, and students won't have to make up the time.
Schools in and around Fort Collins, about 60 miles north of Denver, also will be closed today because of the heat. Denver Public Schools said schools on its West Campus would release students at noon today due to extreme heat and that schools without air conditioning could decide to do the same.
Students are being released early all week in Eagle Grove, Iowa, where window air conditioners in the 1920sera school simply couldn't keep up, Superintendent Jeff Toliver said.
"The hallways and gym are going to be 85 degrees, even without the students," said Toliver, who oversees about 800 students. "You get all of that hot, stale air, and then you bring kids into the room. My feeling is that's not a very good educational environment."
In the south-central Nebraska town of Hastings, students have been dismissed early each day for the past two weeks because of the heat, said Trent Kelly, the school district's technology and operations director. Three of the district's six elementary schools have classrooms with no air conditioning, so administrators placed industrial-sized fans in doorways to draw in cooler, morning air.
Some teachers were holding class in air-conditioned gymnasiums. Kelly said the temperature in one second floor classroom climbed to 91 degrees.
"I've been here 12 years, and I don't remember ever doing (early dismissals) for this long a period," Kelly said. "But this is Nebraska. It's going to be hot."
In Colorado, the Downtown Denver Expeditionary School made attendance optional on Thursday, and the charter school planned to be closed today because temperatures are once again predicted to be in the 90s. Denver Public Schools has dozens of buildings without air conditioning, with some built more than 100 years ago.
(Grant Schulte, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The MQ-1 unmanned aircraft being remotely piloted hundreds of miles away quickly alerted fire bosses to a new flare-up they otherwise wouldn't have immediately seen. "They're piping what they're seeing directly to the incident commander, and he's seeing it in real time over a computer network," said National Guard Lt. Col. Tom Keegan.
Previously, ground commanders relied on helicopters that needed to refuel every two hours.
The 12-day-old Rim fire continued to grow, expanding to 301 square miles. But crews building lines around the flames made significant progress, and containment jumped to 30 percent. Cooler temperatures and lighter winds are aiding firefighters. Increasingly confident fire officials said they expect to fully surround the blaze in three weeks, although it will burn for much longer than that.
"We continue to get line around this fire," California fire spokesman Daniel Berlant said Wednesday. "It's not nearly as active as it was last week."
While unmanned aircraft have mapped other fires, use of the Predator will be the longest sustained mission by a drone in California to broadcast information to firefighters in real time.
The drone, the size of a small Cessna, will remain over the burn zone for up to 22 hours at a time, allowing fire commanders to monitor fire activity, determine the fire's direction of movement, the extent of containment and confirm fires ignited by lightning or flying embers.
The drone is being flown by the 163rd Wing of the California National Guard at March Air Reserve Base in Riverside and is operating from Victorville Airport. It generally flew over unpopulated areas on its 300-mile flight to the Rim fire. Outside the fire area, it will be escorted by a manned aircraft.
Officials were careful to point out the images are being used only to aid in the effort to contain the fire.
In 2009, a NASA Predator equipped with an infrared imaging sensor helped the U.S. Forest Service assess damage from a fire in Angeles National Forest. In 2008, a drone capable of detecting hot spots helped firefighters assess movement of a series of wildfires stretching from Lake Arrowhead to San Diego.
The Rim fire in and around Yosemite started Aug. 17 and quickly exploded in size, becoming one of the 10 largest California wildfires on record. Its progression slowed earlier this week when it moved from parts of the forest with thick underbrush that had not burned in nearly a century to areas that had seen fire in the past two decades.
But it will burn for months, possibly until California's dry season ends this fall. "My prediction is it will burn until we see rain," said Hugh Safford, a regional ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service.
That means the smoke could continue to foul air north of Yosemite in the Lake Tahoe basin and neighboring Nevada, although residents received something of a reprieve Wednesday when for the first time in three days blue sky was sometimes visible through the haze.
The air quality index in the Reno area improved to the "unhealthy" level on Wednesday, and in Douglas County, Nev., school children were kept indoors again when the index registered in the "hazardous" category Wednesday.
The air was clear, however, in the tourist mecca of Yosemite Valley, home to the towering Half Dome and El Capitan rock formations and the 2,425-foot plunge of Yosemite Falls.
The Rim fire has destroyed 111 structures, including 11 homes, and posed a threat to ancient giant sequoias.
The fire also has threatened San Francisco’s water supply at the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, but Stratton said it was burning itself out as it approached.
(Brian Skoloff, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The fire had ravaged 282 square miles by Tuesday, the biggest in the Sierra's recorded history and one of the largest on record in California. Containment increased to 20 percent but the number of destroyed structures rose to 101 and some 4,500 structures remained threatened. The types of lost buildings were not specified. Firefighters were making stands at Tuolumne City and other mountain communities.
The blaze was 40 acres when it was discovered near a road in Stanislaus National Forest on Aug. 17, but firefighters had no chance of stopping it in the early days.
Fueled by thick forest floor vegetation in steep river canyons, it exploded to 10,000 acres 36 hours later, then to 54,000 acres and 105,620 acres within the next two days. On its 11th day it had surpassed 179,400 acres, becoming the seventh-largest California wildfire in records dating to 1932.
Federal forest ecologists say that historic policies of fire suppression to protect Sierra timber interests left a century's worth of fuel in the fire's path. "That's called making the woodpile bigger," said Hugh Safford, an ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service in California.
Two years of drought and a constant slow warming across the 350-mile-long Sierra Nevada also worked to turn the Rim fire into an inferno. For years, forest ecologists have warned that Western wildfires will only get worse.
Also Tuesday, a fire apparently sparked along Interstate 80 spread to a grassy hillside, jumped into trees and then burned several homes in a crowded northeast San Francisco Bay Area neighborhood.
Fire officials said two houses were destroyed and three were damaged in the city of Fairfield, about 40 miles from San Francisco.
(Tracie Cone, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The decision to shut Vermont's only operating reactor was based on natural gas prices, the high cost of running the single-unit plant and "artificially low" power prices in the region, New Orleans-based Entergy said in a statement Tuesday. Entergy won renewal of the plant's license in 2011, allowing it to operate until 2032, and filed suit to prevent the state from closing the reactor earlier. It employs about 630 people.
"The plant was no longer financially viable," Entergy Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Leo Denault said.
Vermont Yankeeis the fifthU .S. nuclear reactor this year to announce plans to permanently close, the highest-ever annual total, as power prices have slumped amid booming gas production.
San Onofre operator Southern California Edison announced in June the decision to retire the nuclear plant in northern San Diego County. Onofre stopped producing power in January 2012 after a radiation leak was traced to the rapid degradation of recently replaced steam generators.
Reactors also face higher maintenance costs from stricter regulations after Japan's 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. Nuclear units in New Jersey, Wisconsin and Florida are being shut, reducing the U.S. total to 99 from 104.
More retirements of single-unit reactors may be coming for Entergy and the industry, Julien Dumoulin-Smith and Andrew Gay, analysts for UBS, wrote in a research note Tuesday. Vermont Yankee's cost of producing power was probably about $50 a megawatt-hour, they wrote. Spot prices for on-peak power averaged $35.27 a megawatt-hour during the past month in New England.
Entergy filed suit againstVermont's governor and attorney general in 2011 to prevent the state from shutting the 605-megawatt reactor. The company said at the time it had failed to find a buyer for the unit. An appeals court this month ruled the state doesn't have authority to shut the plant, located in Vernon, about 2 miles north of the Massachusetts border.
Some state officials, including Democratic Gov. Peter Shumlin, opposed the federal government's relicensing of the reactor, raising questions about leaks of radioactive tritium at the site and a collapsed cooling tower. The state's utilities no longer buy power from Vermont Yankee, and closing it will offer an opportunity to develop more renewable power sources, Shumlin said Tuesday.
(BLOOMBERG NEWS)
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The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously refused a request from San Francisco-area Chinese restaurants and their suppliers to allow the sale of the soup while they pursue their lawsuit to overturn the state law. The suit to overturn the law and reinstate the sale of the soup is also supported by the Obama administration. The law took effect last month.
The Chinese restaurants wanted sales to continue until a trial court decided the lawsuit. But the appeals court said the restaurants failed to show they would suffer "irreparable harm" if the ban went into effect while the lawsuit was pending. The state law that passed in 2011 bans the serving of shark fin soup, a traditional Chinese delicacy. The law was sponsored by conservation and animal-protection groups.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The super cloud arose from monsoon moisture from Baja California. A thunderstorm formed about 2 p.m. south of the border, near Boulevard. A second storm formed a short time later along Interstate 8. Both were consumed around 3 p.m. by a stronger thunderstorm that took shape over Pine Valley.
The system's warm, moist air quickly rose up the south face of Mount Laguna. The cloud soon grew to about 15 miles in diameter.
The moist air cooled and turned icy as it rose. But it had enough energy to form an anvil-shaped cap about 50,000 feet above the ground, when the system touched the stratosphere and spread in a north-south direction.
For more than 30 minutes, the midsection of the super cloud seemed to billow with smoke. In reality, it was proof that new clouds were forming.
The super cloud dropped more than an inch of rain in the Mount Laguna-Pine Valley area and drenched Warner Springs and Banner. Its power literally drained away as hail fell within the cloud and rain dropped to the ground. From start to finish, the super cloud lasted about 75 minutes, dying around 4:15 p.m.
Meanwhile, the Sunday downpour that caused flash flooding in Borrego Springs — sending water and mud flowing though parts of the town — has prompted county officials to set up sandbag stations there and in Julian.
Free sand and bags are available at Cal Fire Station 50 in Julian, 1587 state Route 78. Residents must bring their own shovel, according to the county government.
In Borrego Springs, free bags are available at the Sheriff's Department substation at 571 Palm Canyon Drive.
(Gary Robbins, U-T)
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Nearly 3,700 firefighters battled the approximately 230-square-mile blaze, the biggest wildfire on record in California’s Sierra Nevada. They reported modest progress, saying the fire was 15 percent contained.
"We're not there yet, but we're starting to get a little bit of a handle on this thing," said Lee Bentley, fire
spokesman for the U.S. Forest Service. "It's been a real tiger. He's been going around trying to bite its own tail, and it won't let go but we'll get there."
The fire is contributing to a run-up in California's firefighting expenses early in the season.
The Department of Finance estimated Monday that the state has spent $44 million fighting fires thus far. Lawmakers budgeted $172 million for the entire season.
"We're eight weeks in (the fiscal year) and we've spent roughly a quarter of what's budgeted," said H.D. Palmer, the spokesman for the department.
Meanwhile, utility officials monitored the clarity of the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir and used a massive new $4.6 billion gravity-operated pipeline system to move water quickly to reservoirs closer to the big city. The Hetch Hetchy supplies water to 2.6 million people in the San Francisco Bay Area, 150 miles away.
"We're taking advantage that the water we're receiving is still of good quality," said Harlan Kelly Jr., general manager of the city's Public Utilities Commission. "We're bringing down as much water as possible and replenishing all of the local reservoirs."
At the same time, utility officials gave assurances that they have a six-month supply of water in reservoirs near the Bay Area.
So far the ash that has been raining onto the Hetch Hetchy has not sunk as far as the intake valves, which are about halfway down the 300-foot O'Shaughnessy Dam. Utility officials said that the ash is nontoxic but that the city will begin filtering water for customers if problems are detected. That could cost more.
On Monday the fire was still several miles away from the steep granite canyon where the reservoir is nestled, but several spot fires were burning closer, and firefighters were protecting hydroelectric transmission lines and other utility facilities.
"Obviously we're paying close attention to the city's water supply," said Glen Stratton, an operations chief on the fire suppression team.
Power generation at the reservoir was shut down last week so that firefighters would not be imperiled by live wires. San Francisco is buying replacement power from other sources to run City Hall and other municipal buildings.
It has been at least 17 years since fire ravaged the northernmost stretch of Yosemite that is under siege.
Park officials cleared brush and set sprinklers on two groves of giant sequoias that were seven to 10 miles away from the fire's front lines, said park spokesman Scott Gediman. While sequoias have a chemical in their bark to help them resist fire, they can be damaged when flames move through slowly.
The fire has swept through steep Sierra Nevada river canyons and stands of thick oak and pine, closing in on Tuolumne City and other mountain communities. It has confounded ground crews with its 300-foot walls of flame and the way it has jumped from treetop to treetop.
Crews bulldozed two huge firebreaks to try to protect Tuolumne City, five miles from the fire's edge.
"We've got hundreds of firefighters staged in town to do structure protection," Stratton said. "If the fire does come to town, we're ready."
Meanwhile, biologists with the Forest Service are studying the effect on wildlife. Much of the area that has burned is part of the state's winter-range deer habitat. Biologist Crispin Holland said most of the large deer herds would still be well above the fire danger.
Biologists discovered stranded Western pond turtles on national forest land near the edge of Yosemite. Their marshy meadow had burned, and the surviving creatures were huddled in the middle of the expanse in what little water remained.
"We're hoping to deliver some water to those turtles," Holland said. "We might also drag some brush in to give them cover."
Wildlife officials were also trying to monitor at least four bald eagle nests in the fire-stricken area.
While it has put a stop to some backcountry hiking, the fire has not threatened the Yosemite Valley, where such sights as the Half Dome and El Capitan rock formations and Yosemite Falls draw throngs of tourists. Most of the park remained open to visitors.
The U.S. Forest Service said the fire was threatening about 4,500 structures and destroyed at least 23.
The MCT News Service contributed to this report.
(Brian Skoloff & Tracie Cone, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The rainfall came from a seasonal monsoon and Tropical Storm Ivo, which produced thunderstorms across the eastern and northern parts of San Diego County starting Sunday.
A few more thunderstorms hit East County on Monday and turned the weather humid west of the mountains, including at the coast, where there was virtually no onshore breeze.
Meteorologists don't expect the humidity to be as bad today as the monsoon weakens. But they said the weather system will still have enough strength to generate scattered thunderstorms and brief yet heavy rain at times. Temperatures will rise to seasonal levels, or just above, along the coast, even though a low-pressure system will cause the marine layer to thicken, according to the National Weather Service.
Most of the damage in Borrego Springs happened in the De Anza Desert Country Club neighborhood, where the waterline reached as high as 2 feet above ground, sheriff's Deputy Pat Morrissey said.
"There's probably more than 40 homes damaged," Morrissey said.
Particularly hard-hit were homes on Montezuma Drive and De Anza Drive, surrounding the 15th fairway of the club's course, although debris littered much of the development. A small part of Lazy S Road was still under water Monday evening.
"There's mud in many homes," Morrissey said. Backyard swimming pools were also filled to the brim with muddy runoff after a torrential downpour Sunday over Indian Head Peak sent water flowing into the town, Morrissey said.
The storm flooded roadways and left mud and rocks littering the streets.
Montezuma Valley Road from Ranchita to Borrego Springs was shut down and will remain closed until further notice due to boulders in the roadway and the threat of more rock slides, authorities said. Sections of Borrego Valley Road and Borrego Springs Road were temporarily closed, but both roads had reopened by Monday afternoon.
Most of the homes in De Anza are unoccupied this time of year — August in Borrego can be brutally hot — but residents Jim Bennett and Cathy Gay were home Sunday on De Anza Drive. It had been raining much of the day, really hard in the afternoon.
A golf tournament had just ended on television about 3:30 p.m. when the couple heard a strange noise.
"We looked out, and there was a 2-foot wall of water charging into our house and into the windows," Bennett said. "It was like a river was going around the house and across the road and into the fairway."
Brick walls surrounding the backyard of the home and a neighbor's home broke apart. Bennett's patio furniture and much of his landscaping was washed away. He still hasn’t found a couple of chairs.
"It could have been much worse," Bennett said. The windows didn't break. Instead, a few inches of mud seeped into his house.
"It's another interesting life experience," he said.
Handyman Jim Zuehl, a 22-year resident of Borrego Springs, was going from house to house of various clients Monday morning, examining the damage and then calling owners with the bad news.
"It's pretty much devastation, a lot of destruction," Zuehl said.
"There are a lot of poor families whose houses have been inundated by flash floodwaters."
He has seen flash flooding before, most recently in 2004, when he said water got as high as 6 feet.
"This is part of Borrego. This is part of living in the desert," he said.
"This desert was carved by wind and water, so we don't like this, but we expect it. This is part of desert living, unfortunately."
Anyone who needs information about their property in Borrego Springs can call the Borrego sheriff's station at (760) 767-5656.
Staff writer Gary Robbins contributed to this report.
(Debbi Baker & J. Harry Jones, U-T)
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"We've already evacuated the horses," said Bunney, who was keeping an eye on his Slide Mountain Guest Ranch on Sunday. "I think they're worried about the fire sparking over these hills."
As fire leapfrogs across the vast, picturesque Sierra forests, moving from one treetop to the next, residents in the fire’s path are moving animals and children to safety.
The fire has moved northeast away from Groveland, where smoke gave way to blue skies Sunday. But at Tuolumne City's Black Oak Casino in Tuolumne City, the slot machines were quiet as emergency workers took over nearly all of the resort's 148 hotel rooms.
"The casino is empty," said casino employee Jessie Dean, who left her four children at relatives' homes in the Central Valley. "Technically, the casino is open, but there's nobody there."
Hundreds of firefighters were deployed Sunday to protect Tuolumne City and other communities in the path of the Rim fire. Eight fire trucks and four bulldozers were deployed near Bunney's ranch on the west side of Mount Baldy, where two years of drought have created tinder-dry conditions.
"Winds are increasing, so it's going to be very challenging," said Bjorn Frederickson, a spokesman for the U.S. Forest Service.
The fire continues burning in the remote wilderness area of Yosemite, but park spokesman Tom Medena said it's edging closer to the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, the source of San Francisco's famously pure drinking water.
Despite ash falling like snowflakes on the reservoir and a thick haze of smoke limiting visibility to 100 feet, the quality of the water piped to the city 150 miles away is still good, say officials with the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission.
The city's hydroelectric power generated by the system has been interrupted by the fire, forcing the utility to spend $600,000 buying power on the open market.
Park employees are continuing their efforts to protect two groves of giant sequoias that are unique in the region by cutting brush and setting sprinklers, Medena said.
The fire has consumed more than 225 square miles of picturesque forests. Officials estimate containment at just 7 percent.
"It's slowing down a bit, but it's still growing," Frederickson said.
Fire lines near Ponderosa Hills and Twain Hart are being cut miles ahead of the blaze in locations where fire officials hope they will help protect the communities should the fire jump containment lines.
"There is a huge focus in those areas in terms of air support and crews on the ground building fire lines to protect those communities. We're facing difficult conditions and extremely challenging weather," Frederickson said.
The blaze sweeping across steep, rugged river canyons quickly has become one of the biggest in California history.
(Brian Skoloff & Tracie Cone, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The governor had earlier declared an emergency for the area around the fire, and Friday night extended it to San Francisco, saying the blaze posed a threat to the city's power lines and stations in the fire area.
The city gets 85 percent of its water from the Yosemite-area Hetch Hetchy Reservoir and that has yet to be affected.
But San Francisco has been forced to shut down two of its three hydroelectric power stations in the area, and further disruptions or damage could have an effect on the power supply.
The week-long blaze has spread to more than 165 square miles and was 2 percent contained. It continued to grow in several directions, although "most of the fire activity is pushing to the east right into Yosemite," said Daniel Berlant, spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
It spread into Yosemite National Park on Friday as authorities urged more evacuations in nearby communities where thousands have been forced out by flames marching through the timbered slopes of the western Sierra Nevada.
The fire hit the park at the height of summer season, as officials geared up for a busy Labor Day weekend. It has closed some backcountry hiking but was not threatening the Yosemite Valley region, one of California’s most popular tourist destinations.
Also, smoke blowing across the Sierra into the state of Nevada forced officials in Reno and several surrounding counties to cancel outdoor school activities and issue health advisories, especially for people with respiratory problems.
The fire was threatening about 4,500 residences, according to the U.S. Forest Service. The blaze has destroyed four homes and 12 outbuildings in several different areas. More than 2,000 firefighters were on the lines and one sustained a heat-related injury.
While the park remained open, the blaze closed a 4mile stretch of state Route 120, one of three entrances into Yosemite on the west side. Two other western routes and an eastern route were open.
Five wildfires also were burning in Yellowstone National Park, but not nearly as vigorously since portions the park in northwest Wyoming got half an inch or more of rain Wednesday.
Park officials continued to monitor a 12-square-mile fire five miles north of Lake Village. They didn't plan to send in firefighters and continued to let the fire burn to help the ecosystem.
(Gosia Wozniacka, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Now, 2.5 years later, experts fear it is about to reach the ocean and greatly worsen what is fast becoming a new crisis at Fukushima: the inability to contain vast quantities of radioactive water.
The looming crisis is potentially far greater than the discovery earlier this week of a leak from a tank that stores contaminated water used to cool the reactor cores. That 80,000-gallon leak is the fifth and most serious from a tank since the March 2011 disaster, when three of the plant's reactors melted down after a huge earthquake and tsunami knocked out the plant's power and cooling functions.
But experts believe the underground seepage from the reactor and turbine building area is much bigger and possibly more radioactive, confronting the plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., with an invisible, chronic problem and few viable solutions. Many also believe it is another example of how TEPCO has repeatedly failed to acknowledge problems that it could almost certainly have foreseen — and taken action to mitigate before they got out of control.
It remains unclear what the impact of the contamination on the environment will be because the radioactivity will be diluted as it spreads farther into the sea. Most fishing in the area is already banned, but fishermen in nearby Iwaki City had been hoping to resume test catches next month following favorable sampling results. Those plans have been scrapped after news of the latest tank leak.
"Nobody knows when this is going to end," said Masakazu Yabuki, a veteran fisherman in Iwaki, just south of the plant, where scientists say contaminants are carried by the current. "We've suspected (leaks into the ocean) from the beginning. ... TEPCO is making it very difficult for us to trust them."
To keep the melted nuclear fuel from overheating, TEPCO has rigged a makeshift system of pipes and hoses to funnel water into the broken reactors. The radioactive water is then treated and stored in the aboveground tanks that have now developed leaks. But far more leaks into the reactor basements during the cooling process — then through cracks into the surrounding earth and groundwater.
About 270,000 gallons of underground water from the mountains flows into the plant compound each day, of which 108,000 gallons seep into the reactor and turbine basements and get contaminated.
(Mari Yamaguchi, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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California Gov. Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency due to the huge fire, one of several blazes burning in or near the nation's national parks and one of 50 major uncontained fires burning across the western United States. As flames approached an area of Pine Mountain Lake with 268 homes in the afternoon, deputies went door to door to deliver the news and to urge people to leave, Tuolumne County Sheriff's Department Sgt. Scott Johnson said.
The evacuations aren't mandatory, but Johnson stressed the fire, smoke and the potential for power outages pose imminent threats.
Fire officials said the blaze, which started Saturday, had grown to more than 84 square miles and was 2 percent contained Thursday, down from 5 percent a day earlier. Two homes and seven outbuildings have been destroyed.
While the park remains open, the blaze has caused the closure of a 4-mile stretch of State Route 120, one of three entrances into Yosemite on the west side, devastating areas that live off park-fueled tourism.
Officials also have advised voluntary evacuations of more than a thousand other homes, several organized camps and at least two campgrounds. Yosemite Valley is clear of smoke, all accommodations and attractions are open, and campgrounds are full, a park spokesman said. Also, the heavy smoke from the wildfire has triggered an air quality alert in Reno and surrounding areas 150 miles away.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The remote blaze in Stanislaus National Forest west of Yosemite grew to more than 25 square miles and was 5 percent contained, threatening homes, hotels and camp buildings.
The fire has led to the voluntary evacuation of the private gated summer community of Pine Mountain Lake, population 2,800, as well as several organized camps, at least two campgrounds and dozens of other private homes. Two residences and seven outbuildings have been destroyed. The fire also caused the closure of a 4-mile stretch of state Route 120, one of the gateways into Yosemite on the west side. Park officials said the park remains open to visitors and can be accessed via state Routes 140 and 4.
The fire was among the nation's top firefighting priorities, according to the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho.
Fifty-one major uncontained wildfires are burning throughout the West, reported the center, including in Alaska, Arizona, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming. More than 19,000 firefighters are battling the fires.
On Wednesday, the National Interagency Fire Center listed two fires in Montana as the nation's number one priority.
They include a wildfire burning west of Missoula that has surpassed 13 square miles, destroyed five homes, closed U.S. Highway 12 and led to multiple evacuations. The Lolo Fire Complex was zero percent contained. At least 19 other notable fires were burning in Montana.
(Gosia Wozniacki, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The 18-acre blaze broke out about 2:20 p.m. in sparse brush on low hillsides near Aurora Drive north of Interstate 8.
Lakeside fire officials said the flames spread quickly, and engines were directed to protect structures on Lavala Lane, Lomacita Terrace, Cindy Lynn Lane and Amelia Drive.
A San Diego Fire-Rescue Department helicopter was called to the area. More strike teams and a second helicopter were requested to protect homes.
The fire was contained by about 3:45 p.m. The road was reopened in both directions by 6:35 p.m.
Two firefighters suffered from heat exhaustion or other injuries and were taken to a hospital.
(Pauline Repard, U-T)
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In three days, the fire has destroyed two residences and five outbuildings, but some 2,500 houses, hotels and camp buildings were under threat, U.S. Forest Service spokesman Jerry Snyder said. Most were in Groveland, a community of about 3,500 people, which hasn't been evacuated.
The fire has surged to more than 15 square miles and was burning out of control in remote, steep, difficult-to-reach terrain with no containment lines. About 450 firefighters were working the blaze with water-dropping planes.
Meanwhile, wildfires burning in Oregon, Idaho and Montana are taxing national firefighting resources and helping to push spending past $1 billion for the year.
The National Interagency Fire Center in Boise upped the national wildfire preparedness level Tuesday to the highest level for the first time in five years.
The center lists two central Idaho wildfires as the country's top priorities, helping provide crews and resources for the Beaver Creek fire, which forced the evacuation of 1,250 homes in the resort area of Ketchum and Sun Valley and has cost nearly $12 million so far.
President Barack Obama was briefed Tuesday morning on the wildfires by his homeland security adviser, Lisa Monaco. A White House official said the administration's focus is on supporting state and local first responders and that Obama’s team is in ongoing contact with federal and local partners.
More than 40 uncontained, active and large wildfires dot the U.S. map with 17,800 people dispatched to the fires.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The Government Flats Complex of fires was burning in hilly country near The Dalles, a Columbia River city that’s a favorite hangout for windsurfers. Officials said 50 structures were ordered evacuated. It wasn’t clear how many of those were homes.
The wildfire is the latest to grab the attention of regional fire crews as hot, dry weather persists across the West.
In Idaho, authorities slowly were allowing evacuees to return to homes that days ago were deemed at risk from a big and erratic wildfire burning near the affluent resort towns of Hailey, Ketchum and Sun Valley.
The Blaine County sheriff ended the mandatory evacuation order for up to 250 homes. Most of those residences are in subdivisions on the east side of the main highway connecting these communities and are farthest from the 160-square mile Beaver Creek Fire, ignited by lightning Aug. 7.
About 1,150 firefighters, including elite teams known as Hotshots, looked to reinforce fire lines with the help of 14 helicopters and likely other aircraft. The fire was about 8 percent contained.
In Northern California, erratic winds fanned a wildfire that threatened more than 300 structures in rural Butte County. But the hundreds who evacuated from homes over the weekend were allowed to return as containment lines expanded.
The 3-square-mile fire just outside Bangor was 64 percent contained. So far, one residence, a garage and three outbuildings have been destroyed since the blaze broke out Friday, said Capt. Scott McLean of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.
Another wildfire onMonday forced the shutdown of a highway that serves as a busy gateway to Yosemite National Park.
The wildfire in the Stanislaus National Forest crossed state Route 120, shutting down the roadway in both directions. No westbound traffic was being allowed out of Yosemite, and people trying to get in were being told to use alternate routes.
In Montana, two lightning-caused fires burning west of the community of Lolo grew rapidly Monday, burning homes and leading authorities to issue evacuation notices and warnings to residents to be ready to flee.
Firefighters confirmed that homes had been damaged, but they were not immediately able to verify how many, the Missoulian reported.
Voluntary evacuations were in effect and homeowners in the Bear Creek area were given notice to be ready to flee if the fire spreads. Lolo is about 20 miles southwest of Missoula, Mont. The Columbia River Gorge is known for its strong winds and on Monday those winds fanned the Government Flats Complex of fires burning south of The Dalles.
By late Monday afternoon, authorities had ordered the evacuation of 50 structures.
"It's a very flammable fuel right now, because it's been dried with lack of moisture, and it's also been heated from the heat coming up the slope," said fire supervisor Kelly Niles, overlooking a charred grassy field. "This stuff, here it's just ready to explode."
(Jonathan J. Cooper, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Officials said the blaze grew only about 12 square miles because of cloud cover Saturday and the arrival of additional crews and equipment. Many firefighters worked Sunday putting in protective fire breaks.
"Today they're very optimistic that we will reinforce those lines in case the fire does flare up as we saw on Thursday and Friday," fire spokeswoman Shawna Hartman said.
More than 1,200 people and 19 aircraft are now battling the lightning-caused Beaver Creek Fire, which started Aug. 7 and is 9 percent contained. Nearly 90 fire engines also are in the region, many protecting homes in the affluent area where celebrities like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tom Hanks and Bruce Willis own pricey getaways.
Fire managers said both of the nation's DC-10 retardant bombers have been used to battle the fire, but one experienced an engine malfunction after a drop Thursday. The jet made it back safely to Pocatello in southeastern Idaho but remains unavailable.
Hartman said most of the fire's containment is on the south and west sides. The more populated areas are on the eastern side of the blaze and are where the mandatory evacuations are in place.
Blaine County spokeswoman Bronwyn Nickel said Idaho National Guard soldiers are manning checkpoints at evacuated neighborhoods and helping relieve local law enforcement officers. The Blaine County Sheriff's Office is warning evacuated residents not to return until notified it's safe to do so.
Officials say no structures have been destroyed since a house and outbuildings burned Thursday. On the fire line, a few minor injuries have been reported.
Authorities have told Ketchum and Sun Valley residents to be ready to evacuate if necessary. About 2,700 people live in Ketchum, 1,400 in Sun Valley.
Hartman said retardant was being dropped on the flank of Bald Mountain — the Sun Valley Resort's primary ski hill — to reinforce a fire line. That means the famed ski mountain known as "Baldy" and often used in publicity photos will have a red line of retardant visible from Ketchum.
Hartman said the drop was part of a plan by fire managers to bolster protection for the tony resort town.
Elsewhere in the West, the last evacuation orders were scheduled to be lifted today after a series of mountain fires burned more than a dozen homes in Utah.
More than 100 residents who were forced to leave two communities about 45 miles east of Salt Lake City will be allowed to return in the morning.
Fire officials said Sunday the nearly 2,000-acre Rockport fire near the resort town of Park City was 70 percent contained.
Utah's biggest blaze, the Patch Springs Fire, was estimated at 50 square miles and 25 percent contained Sunday.
No evacuation orders remained for that fire, which burned 10 homes near Willow Springs.
(Keith Ridler, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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People in Kagoshima city wore masks and raincoats and used umbrellas to shield themselves from the ash after the Sakurajima volcano erupted Sunday afternoon. Drivers turned on their headlights, and local media described the ash like driving through snow at night. Railway operators stopped service in the city temporarily so ash could be removed from the tracks.
Kyodo News reported no injuries have occurred. It said the smoke plume was 3 miles high and lava flowed about a half mile from the fissure.
TV news reports this morning showed masked residents sprinkling water and sweeping up the ash. The city was mobilizing garbage trucks and water sprinklers to clean up.
Japan is on the Pacific "Ring of Fire" and has frequent seismic activity. Sakurajima erupts often, and the Japan Meteorological Agency maintains a warning against people going near the volcano.
It is about 6 miles from Kagoshima city in Kagoshima prefecture.
Kyodo cited JMA as saying there are no signs of a larger eruption at Sakurajima but similar activity may continue.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Vaccine-wielding health workers face a daunting challenge: accessing areas of Somalia controlled by al-Qaeda-linked militants, where 7 of 10 children aren't fully immunized.
Polio is mostly considered eliminated globally except mainly in three countries where it is considered endemic: Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan. India marked a major success in February 2012 by being removed from the World Health Organization’s list of countries plagued by the disease.
Somalia has 105 cases, figures released Friday show, and another 10 cases have been confirmed across the border in a Kenyan refugee camp filled with Somalis. Globally, there have been 181 cases of polio this year, including those in Somalia and Kenya.
Vaccination campaigns in Somalia have reached 4 million people since the outbreak began in May, but those health officials have limited access to about 600,000 children who live in areas of Somalia controlled by the armed Islamist group al-Shabab.
"It's very worrying because it's an explosive outbreak and of course polio is a disease that is slated for eradication," said Oliver Rosenbauer, a spokesman for the Global Polio Eradication Initiative at the World Health Organization in Geneva. "In fact, we're seeing more cases in this area this year than in the three endemic countries worldwide."
In a bit of good news, Rosenbauer said in a phone interview that polio numbers are down in the three remaining endemic countries.
"The only way to get rid of this risk is to eradicate in the endemic countries, and there the news is actually paradoxically very good," he said.
Somalia was removed from the list of endemic polio countries in 2001, and this year’s outbreak is the second since then.
It began one month after Bill Gates helped unveil a six-year plan to eradicate polio at the Global Vaccine Summit. That effort will cost $5.5 billion, three-quarters of which has been pledged, including $1.8 billion from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The outbreak in Somalia does not set back the six-year plan, said Rosenbauer, because unpredictable and intermittent outbreaks were programmed into the timeline.
In al-Shabab controlled south-central Somalia, disease surveillance is functioning, but health officials are likely not able to detect all polio cases.
Mohamud Yasin, a retired doctor who has treated polio throughout his career, said: "It's indeed worrying
because this comes at a time when the country is still hugely affected by the raging fighting, which prevents volunteers from accessing people in need of vaccines. It may take time before we can confidently say we have universal coverage of the immunization."
In a sign of how difficult it is for medical providers to operate in Somalia, the aid group Doctors Without Borders announced this week it was pulling out of the country after 22 years because of attacks on its staff members.
MSF, as the group is also known, was not taking part in the polio vaccination campaign.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The evacuation orders for the 100-square-mile Beaver Creek Fire included homes in drainages and foothills west of the towns of Hailey and Ketchum in central Idaho. Managers at the Sun Valley Ski Resort turned on water cannons normally used for wintertime snowmaking.
One home in an outlying valley was destroyed Thursday night, said Bronwyn Nickel, a spokeswoman for Blaine County, where the fire is burning.
More than 600 state and federal firefighters were dispatched to the blaze in the affluent resort region that is a second home to celebrities such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tom Hanks and Bruce Willis. Fire managers planned to augment the crews as other fires in Idaho and Utah come under control. Also, some private insurers have sent in crews to provide structural protection for homes with values that can stretch into the millions of dollars, Nickel said. "There are private engines that insurance companies have sent in," she said. "They're on site, they're working with our local firefighters and law enforcement."
Fire officials said strong, gusty winds, low humidity and tinder-dry vegetation created unstable conditions surrounding the Beaver Creek Fire, where a huge DC-10 tanker, capable of carrying 12,000 gallons of retardant, was among aircraft making drops on the blaze.
Jack Sibbach, a Sun Valley Resort spokesman, had to leave his home south of Ketchum on Friday. He said he watched as airplanes and helicopters dropped water and red retardant to create a barrier against flames west of U.S. Highway 75.
The resort turned on snow cannons on Bald Mountain, he said, largely to protect lodges atop the mountain, should the fire advance that far. The towns of Ketchum, with a population of 2,700, and Sun Valley, with 1,400, were under pre-evacuation orders.
(John Miller, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Fire crews were fighting a total of 35 large fires in about a dozen Western states, where drought has dried out the landscape and contributed to the extreme fire behavior. Health officials, meanwhile, monitored air quality in areas that have been blanketed by smoke for days.
There were seven fires reportedly burning in California. The two biggest were a 22,400-acre blaze in the Sierra National Forest in the central Sierra Nevada, which was 90 percent contained Tuesday, and a 10,310[-acre?] wildfire in the Klamath National Forest near the Oregon border, which was 45 percent contained, the National Interagency Fire Center reported.
In Utah, shifting winds pushed the fire toward a community dotted with multimillion-dollar homes near the mountain resort of Park City. Mike Eriksson of the Utah Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands says the fire burned about 2 square miles Tuesday, and flames were about 100 acres from some homes on a ridgeline.
He says authorities have confirmed at least three of the 10 to 15 structures burned were homes.
(Michelle L. Price, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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By early Monday, nearly a third of the structure at Summer Bay Resort had collapsed. All 105 guests staying in the villa were evacuated, as were those in the neighboring buildings. No injuries were reported. The villa, with 24 units on three stories, was a total loss.
Inspectors remained on the scene Monday afternoon to determine whether the other two buildings near the sinkhole — a common occurrence in Florida — would be safe to re-enter.
The first sign of trouble came about 10:30 p.m. Sunday. Security guard Richard Shanley had just started his shift, and he heard what sounded like shouting from a building.
Aguest flagged him down to report that a window had blown out. Shanley reported it to management, and another window popped. The resort's staff decided to evacuate the villa.
Shanley said the building seemed to sink by 10 to 20 inches and banisters began to fall off the building as he ran up and down three floors trying to wake up guests. One couple with a baby on the third floor couldn't get their door open and had to break a window to get out, he said.
"I's a scary situation," Shanley said, and guests credited him with saving lives by knocking on doors to awaken them. Inside, they heard what sounded like thunder and then the storm of water, as if it were a storm. Evacuation took about 10 to 15 minutes, according to staff and witnesses.
Amy Jedele heard screams coming from one of the adjacent buildings around 10:30 p.m., and several minutes later, the sounds of sirens. She and her fiance, Darren Gade, went outside. "That's when you could hear the pops and the metal, the concrete and the glass breaking," she said.
(Kyle Hightower, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Yet for all its chaos, scientists said, the fire was working its own ecological order in the backcountry, clearing more than a century of forest overgrowth.
Flames torched some stands of trees entirely but scalded only the understory of others, said Bob Poole, a spokesman for the U.S. Forest Service.
"There was a mosaic where the fire cleansed the forest floor," Poole said. "It burned through the leaf litter and slash and downed timber."
To Rich Minnich, a fire scientist at the University of California Riverside's earth sciences department, it's a poster child for how Southern California wildfires should burn.
"We got an old-growth forest that burned slowly in good weather," he said. "We got a fantastic house cleaning. Someone finally vacuumed the rugs."
The fire ignited on private land south of Idyllwild on July 15, Poole said, burning east toward Palm Canyon through thick chaparral. By midweek, the wind shifted and pushed the flames northward toward the mountain village.
Residents there are firesavv; the town faces annual wildfire threats and has weathered several close calls in recent years. The arson-caused Esperanza fire near Banning brought the risk home in 2006, when Idyllwild firefighter Mark Loutzenhiser and four colleagues died battling the brush fire on the northwest slope of Mount San Jacinto.
So when authorities issued an evacuation order on July 19, most locals heeded the warning. They gathered valuables, traded tips on where to stable their horses and urged one another to protect firefighters by staying out of harm's way.
Earlier that week, the contingent of scientists from the San Diego Natural History Museum faced their own evacuation order on the mountain top. The team was wrapping up a five-year resurvey of the historic Grinnell Transect — zoologist Joseph Grinnell's landmark 1908 study on the flora and fauna of Mount San Jacinto.
By examining how wildlife and plant populations have changed since Grinnell cataloged them a century ago, they hope to learn how environmental changes — including fire ecology — have shaped the landscape.
This time, the fire charted the scientists' course. During a midday hike to Mount San Jacinto, mammalogist Scott Tremor saw a plume of smoke billow over Red Tahquitz Peak to the south as the wind shifted northward. Upon descent, he encountered no one but a fire spotter.
"He said you better get the heck out," Tremor said. "Right when he said that, the fire went over the ridge. So we packed up and left."
For each expedition, the researchers assemble a field lab with food, tents, traps, cameras and other equipment. It takes 27 porters to haul the gear.
With only five researchers left to carry those supplies out on Wednesday, the team abandoned all but the most crucial electronics and specimens. They hope to retrieve what remains this week.
Their study is almost finished, and some findings are clear. Over nearly 60 surveys across 20 sites, the researchers documented some of the same changes the fire revealed: "That forest until last week was much denser than it was in 1908," said Phil Unitt, the museum's curator of birds and mammals.
Dense enough to alter fauna, said researchers, who noted that three species have vanished since Grinnell's time.
One of those is the San Bernardino flying squirrel — a big-eyed, gliding rodent that sails through open canopies. Its disappearance has been attributed to changes in food, water and climate, but Tremor thinks it may have simply lost the space to soar.
Another suite of animals has thrived in the thicket. Two birds, the hermit thrush and Townsend's solitaire, weren't present when Grinnell studied the mountain, but have appeared in recent years, Unitt said. The brown creeper was present in Grinnell's time but is far more numerous now.
An 1898 timber assessment by U.S. Geological Survey surveyor John Leiberg said the absence of decayed ground cover and leaf litter in the San Jacintos makes "the occurrence of hot and lasting fires in the forest impossible."
More than a century later, museum researcher Lori Hargrove said: "I don't think anyone would describe the forests in the San Jacinto Mountains that way today!"
Southern California forests are two to three times denser than they were then, Minnich said, and pack far more ground fuel. He also said the thickly wooded peaks of Mount San Jacinto had not burned in 130 years — more than twice the site's historical 50-year fire cycle.
Firefighting agencies make heroic efforts to protect public safety and structures during wildfires. In this case they deployed more than 3,000 firefighters and flew airdrops in DC-10 planes, which deposit more than twice the flame retardant of smaller aircraft, Poole said.
Following the fire, a crew of scientists assembled by the forest service — called the Burned Area Emergency Response Team — are mapping soil conditions, hydrology, biology and other features of the burn site to determine how the forest fared. While scientists differ on the merits of aggressive firefighting, they agree it alters the ecological equation.
"Some of the fuels out there are really old and really decadent, and have changed the forest," said Anne Poopatanapong, district biologist for the Forest Service. "So what you're seeing is not necessarily the way the fire would naturally occur."
Minnich, a longtime critic of fire suppression, has warned that efforts to stamp out smaller blazes only fuel infernos of hundreds of thousands of acres — orders of magnitude larger than historic burns.
Extinguishing every wildfire generates "fuel ladders" of small trees and brush that conduct flames into the canopy, he said. Also, putting out fires in cooler, calmer weather can result in blazes running rampant during Santa Ana winds or heat waves, the very times when they're hardest to control.
"When you put out fires, you're selecting for the big fires to escape in more extreme weather than by chance," said Minnich, citing the 2003 Cedar fire in San Diego County, which burned more than 280,000 acres and leveled vast swaths of old-growth forest in the Cuyamacas.
But the Mountain fire grew to 27,531 acres during moderate weather, leaving scientists hopeful about its results.
"It's very reasonable that the fire-suppression agencies have the policy that they do for other public interests," said Ken Kietzer, a senior environmental scientist for California State Parks.
In this case, he said, it appears to have also worked out well for Mount San Jacinto State Park.
"When the fire got into the park, it was for the most part not a crown fire. It was a creeping ground fire," Kietzer said. "That is going to be very favorable to reducing the buildup of ground fuels and thinning out some of the smaller, shade tolerant understory, which will probably in the long run be a benefit for the park."
Minnich is optimistic that the Mountain fire may renovate the San Jacintos and serve as a model for other "sky island" forests.
"And there's a lot of California in that ballpark," he said.
(Deborah Sullivan Brennan, U-T)
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About a foot of rapidly flowing water that became mixed with mud and rocks temporarily blocked about 10 vehicles shortly after 3 p.m. on state Route 78, nearly 10 miles southeast of the Borrego Springs city center.
The flow was about 30 feet wide, according to Mark Moede, a forecaster with the National Weather Service in Rancho Bernardo.
Earlier in the day, Moede said, a strong thunderstorm had formed over the nearby mountains and remained stationary. The heavy downpour turned a normally dry wash into a rushing stream.
To the northeast, Warner Springs recorded more than an inch of precipitation in an hour and 1.41 inches in two hours. Nearby Palomar Mountain received 0.47 inches of rain Monday, a record for the date.
Campo, with 0.09 of an inch of precipitation, tied its record for the date, and Alpine (0.06) and Vista (0.01) set records.
The storms were the result of a multi-day influx of monsoonal moisture.
On Sunday, 2.48 inches fell on Mount Laguna, causing additional but minor mud flows in the Chariot fire burn area. Mount Laguna received an another 0.18 of an inch Monday, the weather service said.
Moede said the region's atmosphere is drying out. He said any storms that form over the mountains today should be much smaller and less widespread.
Seasonal temperatures are expected for the rest of the week, with highs projected to reach the mid-70s along the coast and the low to mid-80s in the inland valleys.
Moede said the forecast shows a slight chance that thunderstorms could return in the mountains and deserts on Friday.
(Robert Krier, U-T)
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Moist, unstable air from Arizona and northern Mexico flowed into the county over the weekend, sparking thunderstorms that began before dawn on Sunday and lasted late into the afternoon.
The system hit unusually hard in the Mount Laguna area, which recorded almost 2.5 inches of rain. The eastern desert areas of Canebrake, Agua Caliente and San Felipe received 1.67 inches, 1.34 inches and 1.22 inches of rain, respectively, and Julian recorded 0.71 inches. Rain fell all the way to Balboa Park, Del Mar and Oceanside, but the precipitation west of the mountains was light.
Rock slides were reported on Montezuma Valley Road near Ranchita, which was closed. Debris flows were seen near the site of this month's Chariot wildfire, which burned more than 7,000 acres and destroyed 149 structures. About six inches of water was on the road in Pine Valley.
California Highway Patrol also reported heavy rain caused mud and debris in the roadway at Highway 78 at Yaqui Pass Road and on Borrego Springs Road near the Highway 78 junction. Radar showed over an inch per hour on east slopes of the mountains and in the desert.
Flash-flood warnings, which were in effect much of Sunday, could be issued again today for the mountains and desert.
(Gary Robbins & Robert Krier, U-T)
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The earthquake hit at 5:09 p.m. local time, 35 miles south-southwest of the capital city, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It was stronger than the magnitude 6.3 quake that killed 185 people in the South Island city of Christchurch two years ago.
The powerful shake, which lasted about 20 seconds, threw goods from store shelves and caused people to run from buildings such as movie theaters, witnesses said. Four people were hospitalized with minor injuries, state broadcaster TVNZ reported. There were no reports of fatalities.
Downtown Wellington was largely deserted as aftershocks continued to shake the city. Civil Defense advised people to stay at home. Parts of the central business district are cordoned off as smashed glass and debris is removed from sidewalks and engineers assess the safety of high-rise office towers. "We'd prefer people to stay away while we finish the job," Deputy Mayor Ian McKinnon told Radio New Zealand. "There is certainly glass that's come out of windows throughout the CBD area."
Major services such as water, sewage, power and gas are running smoothly, though train services have been halted as tracks are checked, he said.
Wellington port is closed after a stretch of reclaimed land some 200 meters long and as much as 10 meters wide slid into the sea, taking a shipping container with it, said Steve Harris, port operations general manager.
(Matthew Brockett, BLOOMBERG NEWS)
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The Riverside County Sheriff's Department lifted evacuation orders at 11 a.m. for the communities of Idyllwild, Fern Valley and Pine Cove, from which thousands had fled the advancing flames five days before. Authorities said only local residents and business people would be allowed to return.
Evacuation orders for several smaller nearby communities had been lifted earlier in the day.
Some 6,000 people fled the idyllic little towns that dot the San Jacinto Mountains between Palm Springs and Hemet after the fire broke out Monday and quickly raged across the heavily wooded area. Twenty-three structures, including the seven homes, were destroyed. There were no reports of injuries.
With the arrival of an inch and a half of rain Sunday, firefighters began to beat back the flames and had the blaze just about halfway contained.
"With diminished fire activity, firefighters made great progress with line construction, particularly along the east side toward Palm Springs," said U.S. Forest Service spokesman John Miller.
The fire was still far from extinguished, however.
The thunderstorm helping douse the flames could also bring lightning, wind and flooding, said Miller, all hazardous conditions for fire crews.
The fire was less than two miles from Idyllwild on its western flank. It was a similar distance from Palm Springs below on the desert floor, where an enormous plume of smoke could be seen.
The Palm Springs Aerial Tramway, which carries people nearly 6,000 feet up a rugged canyon to a mountain peak overlooking the tourist resort, was closed Sunday because of unhealthy air quality. Crews were also building fire breaks in the area.
Authorities have said the fire was human-caused, but they wouldn't say whether it was accidental or intentional.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The voluntary departures by people in Pine Cove, on the fire's western flank, came in addition to mandatory evacuations involving 6,000 others who spent a third day away from home as the fire spread in three directions.
The blaze in the San Jacinto Mountains has expanded to roughly 42 square miles and was 15 percent contained, U.S. Forest Service spokeswoman Kate Kramer said.
Some communities on the eastern edge of the fire were reopened to residents, but about 5,600 homes remained under potential threat.
The fire was about two miles from Idyllwild on its western flank and the same from Palm Springs, below on the desert floor. However, it was burning relatively slowly with the most active area south of town.
An enormous plume of smoke could be seen from Palm Springs.
A storm front headed toward the region could provide some relief with cooler weather and a chance of rain, fire spokesman Capt. Mike Lindbery said.
But it could also make the situation more volatile because of an increased chance of thunderstorms and lightning strikes, along with increased winds. The arriving storm front could bring a 20 percent chance of rain and 15- to 24-mph winds with gusts to 40 mph that could push the flames in erratic ways. Popular campgrounds, hiking trails and a 30-mile section of the Pacific Crest Trail, which runs from the Mexican border to Canada, remained closed. A small stretch of a local highway was also closed. Some 3,300 firefighters, aided by nearly 30 aircraft, battled the fire, which stretched from 4,000 feet to 9,000 feet along the mountains.
The Mountain fire, which began Monday, has burned six homes and mobile homes, one cabin, and more than a dozen other buildings. One home also was damaged.
Also Friday, a brush fire briefly forced the closure of a freeway interchange near San Bernardino. Caltrans officials say the westbound Interstate 10 to the northbound Interstate 215 was closed and traffic backed up on a Friday afternoon full of travelers, but it was reopened shortly after.
And a 400-acre fire burning near the Grapevine section of Interstate 5 caused an evacuation order for about two dozen homes and threatened the shutdown of the heavily-traveled stretch of highway between Los Angeles and the Central Valley.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Millett and his wife scooped up things that matter most from their three-story Riverside County home: their two cats, his paintings and sculptures and one of his family's prized heirlooms — his father's Medal of Honor.
Millett was among the 6,000 residents and tourists told to evacuate the community in the San Jacinto Mountains about 115 miles northeast of San Diego as the wildfire grew to more than 35 square miles Thursday, wreathing a ridge about 2 to 3 miles from town, fire officials said. The blaze also was 2 miles away from Palm Springs, but no homes were threatened there.
The fire, which began Monday, destroyed at least six houses and mobile homes and several cars when winds shifted Wednesday and sent the blaze toward Idyllwild.
"It's never been this bad, and it's never been this close," Millett, 61, said as he sat in an evacuation center in Hemet, a nearby community. "I have high anxiety."
Fire officials said the blaze was 15 percent contained and was growing in an atypical manner. "Usually it cools down at night and we get more humidity. That hasn't happened," said Tina Rose, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. "It's been burning like it's daytime for 72 hours in a row."
Temperatures in the area could top 100 degrees today.
"What we're concerned about is what you see right here," said U.S Forest Service Fire Chief Jeanne Pincha-Tulley, pointing to a hazy sky. "When you get a column that puts out this much smoke, embers get into the column and can drop anywhere."
She added the column was expected to go right over Idyllwild for the next two days. While authorities said 5 percent of the town rebuffed evacuating, they cautioned they might not be able to help those who remain if conditions worsen.
"We cannot guarantee your safety if the fire runs into town," said Idyllwild Fire Protection District Chief Patrick Reitz.
The 22,800-acre fire spread in three directions through thick brush and trees. Roughly 4,100 houses, condos, cabins and several hotels in Idyllwild and surrounding communities were threatened. Fire crews struggled to carve fire lines around the town to block the towering flames. Authorities said the fire was "human-caused" but they wouldn't say whether it was accidental or intentional. There have been no reports of injuries.
The small town on the other side of the mountains that tower over the desert community of Palm Springs is known for the arts and is surrounded by a national forest popular with hikers and flanked by two large rocks that are favorites for climbers. Popular campgrounds, hiking trails and 30 mile section of the Pacific Crest Trail that runs 2,650 miles from the Mexican border to Canada were closed.
Nearly 3,000 firefighters and more than a dozen aircraft were assigned to the fire.
(Greg Risling, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The fire grew to about 8,000 acres — or 12.5 square miles — in a matter of hours as it burned in the San Jacinto Mountains.
A few buildings were damaged or destroyed, but it was not immediately clear whether they were homes or other structures, U.S. Forest Service spokesman Lee Beyer said.
The fire was burning between Palm Springs and Hemet near a rural Riverside County community known as Mountain Center. It was moving east toward the desert and away from small communities of homes, summer cabins and ranches. A change in the wind could easily sweep it back toward the homes, authorities said. "It's a rapidly changing animal," Beyer said.
About 24 homes were evacuated after the fire started Monday afternoon, along with a dog and cat sanctuary. An additional 24 homes were evacuated Tuesday.
As temperatures soared to 110 in Indio, the John H. Furbee Aquatics Center swimming pool was closed Tuesday because of falling ash from the fire.
The fire raged in thick brush and trees at an elevation of 5,000 to 7,500 feet, sending flames 100 feet high. Beyer said some of the area had not burned in 35 years.
"We only had 40 to 50 percent of normal precipitation" over the winter and no rain at all since early April, he said.
About 650 firefighters and 18 aircraft were assigned to the blaze.
Firefighters and equipment were sent to assist from Cal Fire, the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department, Heartland Fire & Rescue, and the Sycuan Fire Department's Golden Eagles hotshots.
Staff writer Susan Shroder contributed to this report.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper called the level of flooding "stunning" and said officials don't know yet if it will get worse, but said the water has peaked and stabilized and noted the weather has gotten better.
Overflowing rivers washed out roads and bridges, soaked homes and turned streets into dirt-brown waterways around southern Alberta. Royal Canadian Mounted Police Sgt. Patricia Neely told reporters three were dead and two bodies were recovered. The two bodies recovered are the two men seen floating lifeless in the Highwood River near High River on Thursday, she said.
Harper, a Calgary resident, said he never imagined there would be a flood of this magnitude in this part of Canada. "This is incredible … The magnitude is just extraordinary," he said. "We're all very concerned that if [it] gets much more than this it could have real impact on infrastructure and other services longer term."
Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi said the water levels have reached a peak, but haven't declined.
"We've sat at the same level for many, many hours now," Nenshi said.
Twenty-five neighborhoods in the city, with an estimated 75,000 people, have been evacuated in Calgary, a city of a million-plus people that hosted the 1988 Winter Olympics and serves as the center of Canada's oil industry. Alberta Premier Alison Redford said Medicine Hat, east of Calgary, was under a mandatory evacuation order affecting 10,000 residents. The premier warned that communities downstream of Calgary had not yet felt the full force of the floodwaters.
About 350,000 people work in downtown Calgary on a typical day. However, officials said very few people needed to be moved out, since most heeded warnings to not go to work Friday.
A spokesman for Canada's defense minister said 1,300 soldiers from a base in Edmonton were being deployed to the flood zone.
Police were asking residents who were forced to leave the nearby High River area to register at evacuation shelters. The town of High River remained under a mandatory evacuation order.
In downtown Calgary, water was inundating homes and businesses in the shadow of skyscrapers. Water has swamped cars and train tracks.
The city said the home rink of the National Hockey League's Calgary Flames flooded and the water inside was 10 rows deep. That would mean the dressing rooms are likely submerged.
The flood was forcing emergency plans at the Calgary Zoo, which is situated on an island near where the Elbow and Bow rivers meet. Lions and tigers were being prepared for transfer, if necessary, to prisoner holding cells at the courthouse.
Schools and court trials were canceled Friday and residents urged to avoid downtown. Transit service in the core was shut down.
Residents were left to wander and wade through streets waist-deep in water.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The air force dropped paratroopers, food and medicine for people trapped in up to 100 towns and villages cut off since Sunday in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand where thousands of people are stranded, many of them Hindu pilgrims who were visiting four shrines in the area.
Uttarakhand state Chief Minister Vijay Bahguna said 556 bodies have been noticed buried deep in slush and the army was trying to recover them. He spoke to CNN-IBN television channel on Friday.
Rescuers also Friday found 40 bodies floating in the Ganges near Haridwar, a Hindu holy city, said police officer Rajiv Swaroop.
Bahguna said the eventual toll would be in the hundreds. Rakesh Sharma, another state official, had said Thursday the death toll might reach the thousands but the exact figure wouldn't be known until the entire region is checked.
Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde told reporters in New Delhi that 34,000 people have been evacuated so far and 50,000 were stranded in the region. Roads and bridges were washed away by the floods or blocked by debris.
Uttarakhand spokesman Amit Chandola said the rescue operation centered on evacuating nearly 27,000 people trapped in the worst-hit Kedarnath temple area — one of the holiest Hindu temples dedicated to Lord Shiva, located atop the Garhwal Himalayan range. The temple escaped major damage, but debris covered the area around it and television images showed the bodies of pilgrims strewed around the area.
Soldiers and other workers reopened dozens of roads by building makeshift bridges, accelerating the evacuation, Chandola said. More than 2,000 vehicles carrying stranded Hindu pilgrims have moved out of the area since late Thursday, he said.
Thousands of soldiers continued efforts to reach the worst-hit towns and villages, Chandola said.
Thirty-six air force helicopters have been ferrying rescue workers, doctors, equipment, food and medicine to Kedarnath, the town closest to many of those stranded, said Priya Joshi, an air force spokeswoman. Another seven aircraft carried paratroopers and fuel to the region.
Hundreds of people looking for relatives demonstrated in Dehradun, the Uttarakhand state capital, where flood survivors were taken by helicopters. They complained the government was taking too long to evacuate the survivors, with small helicopters bringing in four to five people at a time.
Jasveer Kaur, a 50-yearold housewife, said she and her family survived by taking shelter in a Sikh shrine, which withstood the flood, located in Govind Dham.
"There was destruction all around," said Kaur after she was evacuated by an air force helicopter. "It was a nightmare."
Google has launched an application, Person Finder, to help trace missing people in Uttarakhand. The version is available in both Hindi and English languages, according to a Google India blog.
The annual monsoon rains sustain India's agriculture but also cause flooding that claims lives and damages property. Neighboring Uttar Pradesh state reported 17 flood-related deaths since the heavy rains Sunday.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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With temperatures topping 80 degrees in Anchorage, and higher in other parts of the state, people have been sweltering in a place where few homes have air conditioning.
They're sunbathing and swimming at local lakes, hosing down their dogs and cleaning out supplies of fans in at least one local hardware store. Mid-June normally brings high temperatures in the 60s in Anchorage, and a month ago, it was snowing.
The weather feels like anywhere but Alaska to Jordan Rollison, 18, who was sunbathing with three friends and several hundred others lolling at the beach of Anchorage's Goose Lake.
"I love it, I love it," Rollison said. "I've never seen a summer like this, ever."
State health officials have taken the unusual step of posting a Facebook message reminding people to slather on the sunscreen.
Some people aren't so thrilled, complaining it's too hot. "It's almost unbearable to me," said Lorraine Roehl, who has lived in Anchorage for two years after moving here from Sand Point in Alaska's Aleutian Islands. "I don't like being hot. I'm used to cool ocean breeze."
On Tuesday, the official afternoon high in Anchorage was 81 degrees, breaking the city's record of 80 set in 1926 for that date.
Other smaller communities throughout a wide swath of the state are seeing even higher temperatures.
All-time highs were recorded elsewhere, including 96 degrees on Monday 80 miles to the north in the small community of Talkeetna, purported to be the inspiration for the town in the TV series "Northern Exposure" and the last stop for climbers heading to Mount McKinley, North America's tallest mountain.
And it's been hot for a while. The city had six days over 70 degrees, then hit a high of 68 last Thursday, followed by five more days of 70 degrees and up.
Anchorage's record of consecutive days with temperatures of 70 or above was 13 days recorded in 1953, said Eddie Zingone, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.
With the heat comes an invasion of mosquitoes many are calling the worst they've ever seen.
At the True Value Hardware store in Anchorage, people have grabbed up five times the usual amount of mosquito warfare supplies, said store owner Tim Craig.
The store shelves also are bare of fans, which is unusual, he said.
"Those are two hot items, so to speak," he said.
Weather forecasters say a high pressure system that has locked the region in clear skies and baking temperatures has shifted, and on Wednesday a cooling trend began with a high of 73 degrees.
(Rachel D'Oro, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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On Thursday, authorities combed through debris in Granbury, while residents awaited the chance to see what was left of their homes. Witnesses described the two badly hit neighborhoods as unrecognizable, with homes ripped from foundations and others merely rubble.
Granbury, about 40 miles southwest of Fort Worth, bore the brunt of the damage. The National Weather Service's preliminary estimate was that the tornado had wind speeds between 166 mph and 200 mph. Other tornadoes spawned from the violent spring storm damaged nearby Cleburne and Millsap.
"I tell you, it has just broken my heart," said Habitat for Humanity volunteer Elsie Tallant, who helped serve lunch every weekend to those building the homes in a Granbury neighborhood and those poised to become homeowners.
Hood County Commissioner Steve Berry said Thursday he couldn't tell one street from another in Granbury's Rancho Brazos Estates neighborhood because of the destruction. Half of one home was torn away while the other half was still standing, glasses and vases intact on shelves. Trees and debris were scattered across yards, and fences were flattened. Sheet metal could be seen hanging from utility wires.
The weather service said the preliminary storm estimate for the Granbury tornado was an EF-4, based on the Fujita tornado damage scale. An EF-5 is the most severe.
Of the homes in the Rancho Brazos Estates, 61 of them were built by Habitat for Humanity, according to Gage Yeager, executive director of Trinity Habitat for Humanity in Fort Worth. He said most of those homes were damaged, including at least a dozen that were destroyed.
Raul Rodriguez was among the lucky ones: His Habitat for Humanity home was still standing. The 42year-old mechanic rode the storm out in a closet with his wife and three children as he heard the windows shattering outside, but realized their fortune when they emerged to see a heartbreaking scene.
"Injured people, bloody people, started coming to our house, asking us to call 911," said Rodriguez, who has lived in the neighborhood for more than two years. He assessed his own home, finding only shattered windows, lost roof shingles and a collapsed garage.
"My neighbors to the right, they lost everything," he said.
Habitat for Humanity volunteer Bill Jackson said the homes, built primarily for low-income people, were insured and can be rebuilt. But that doesn't alleviate Tallant's pain. She'd gotten to know the people who had waited for years to become homeowners.
"We were going to dedicate a house this weekend, and her home was destroyed," she said.
Hood County Sheriff Roger Deeds said Thursday afternoon that two of the dead were women and four of them men; one man and one woman in their 80s.
"Some were found in houses. Some were found around houses," Deeds said. Six or seven people have not been accounted for, he said at a news conference.
"I'm very confident we'll find those people alive and well," Deeds said, adding that 37 injured people were treated at hospitals. "We're going to keep looking. We're not going to give up until every piece of debris is turned over."
(Angela K. Brown & Jamie Stengle, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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As a result, the fire that broke out Thursday quickly moved through the Camarillo Springs area without destroying a single home.
Firefighters were hoping for the same success on Friday, as the fire raged out of control miles away near the coast.
Fifteen structures in the area 50 miles northwest of Los Angeles sustained some damage, and other homes in a wooded area were being threatened Friday by the blaze that had roared across 43 square miles. Some 900 firefighters using engines, aircraft, bulldozers and other equipment had it just 20 percent contained. Since daybreak, the fire has nearly tripled in size.
"That's the way this fire has behaved, it has been a very fast-moving, feisty fire," said Ventura County Fire Department spokesman Bill Nash.
To the north of the fire, parts of the Newbury Park community of Thousand Oaks are under mandatory and voluntary evacuations, Nash said.
Overnight, Nash said firefighters plan to stockpile resources along a road that lies between the fire and Malibu, protecting homes on the fire's eastern front.
The good fortune of the Camarillo Springs area wasn't the result of luck or clairvoyance by firefighters. It came after years of planning and knowing that sooner or later just such a conflagration was going to strike.
"When developers want to go into an area that is wildland, it's going to present a unique fire problem," county fire spokesman Tom Kruschke said. "And you have to be prepared for that."
Camarillo Springs, which was nothing more than rugged backcountry when homes began to go up there 30 years ago, was well prepared.
Its homes were built with sprinkler systems and fireproof exteriors from the roofs to the foundations. Residents are required to clear brush and other combustible materials to within 100 feet of the dwellings, and developers had to make sure the cul-de-sacs that fill the area's canyons were built wide enough to accommodate the emergency vehicles seen on TV racing in to battle the flames.
"All of our rooftops are concrete tile and all of the exteriors are stucco," said Neal Blaney, a board member of The Springs Homeowners Association and a 15-year resident. "There's no wood, so there's almost no place for a flying ember to land and ignite something."
When the blaze broke out, Blaney said, volunteer emergency officers in the neighborhood gave the first alert to residents. As a result, when the flames got close, residents were ready to get out of the way of firefighters.
Residents in the area are also particularly vigilant about clearing brush from the hillsides next to their yards, Kruschke said. Normally, firefighters remind people in such areas to do that every June, but in Camarillo Springs people do it every few months. The work paid off this week.
The type of blaze that hit the area usually doesn't strike Southern California wildland until September or October, after the summer has dried out hillside vegetation. But the state has seen a severe drought during the past year, with the water content of California's snowpack only 17 percent of normal.
That created late-summer conditions by May, and when hot Santa Ana winds and high temperatures arrived this week, the spring flames that firefighters routinely knock down once or twice a year quickly roared up a hillside — out of control.
"It's just the beginning of May and we already have a 10,000-plus acre fire that's burning intensely," Kruschke said. "That doesn't bode well for the rest of the season."
(Raquel Maria Dillon & John Rogers, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The largest fire scorched about 120 acres east of Brown Field. It began about 2:20 p.m. near Otay Mesa and Harvest roads, burning near a salvage yard, said Cal Fire Battalion Chief Ray Chaney.
As firefighters made progress on that blaze, air resources were diverted an hour later to state Route 78 and Highway 2 east of Julian, where a quarter-acre blaze was reported. Firefighters kept it to 15 acres.
Another fast attack kept a blaze that began about 10:30 a.m. in Valley Center near Lilac and Sierra Rojo roads to about 2 acres.
About 60 to 80 firefighters were on the ground for each incident, with air support from tankers and helicopters, Chaney said. No one was injured.
Cal Fire's philosophy is to make ground and aerial attacks quickly, and that's what occurred Friday with successful outcomes, the battalion chief said.
"If you catch them early, you have a higher chance of controlling those fires," he said.
The county was under a red-flag fire danger warning Friday due to warm, windy and dry conditions, making it even more crucial that the fires were quickly snuffed.
The message is that fire season is here, Chaney said. He said residents need to clear brush around their houses to create defensible space, and should refrain from using heavy equipment in vegetation after 10 a.m.
In fact, he said, the Valley Center fire was determined to have been ignited by a man who was grinding metal posts while working on a chicken coop. The cause of the other fires is being investigated.
No structures were damaged in the blazes. One home that was threatened in the fire east of Julian was saved.
Fire officials in the city of San Diego also issued a message about preparedness on Friday, warning residents that brush management and preparation is key to protecting their homes during a wildfire. Fire Chief Javier Mainar, Mayor Bob Filner and others gathered at a fire station in Rancho Peñasquitos to announce that fire personnel would be going door to door in the area to make sure residents are ready for fire season.
Don't think your life won't be affected by a wildfire in San Diego County,
Chaney said. "It will be," he said.
Staff writers Kristina Davis, Debbi Baker & Teri Figueroa contributed to this report.
(Susan Shroder, U-T)
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The intertwined factors cited include a parasitic mite, multiple viruses, bacteria, poor nutrition, genetics, habitat loss and pesticides.
The multiple causes make it harder to do something about what is called colony collapse disorder, experts say. The disorder has caused as much as one third of the nation's bees to disappear each winter since 2006.
Bees, especially honeybees, are needed to pollinate crops.
The federal report, issued Thursday by the Agriculture Department and the Environmental Protection Agency, said the biggest culprit is the parasitic mite varroa destructor, calling it "the single most detrimental pest of honeybees."
The problem has also hit bee colonies in Europe, where regulators are considering a ban on a type of pesticides that some environmental groups blame for the bee collapse.
The U.S. report cites pesticides, but near the bottom of the list of factors.
And federal officials and researchers advising them said the science doesn't justify a ban of the pesticides.
The report is the result of a large conference of scientists that the government brought together last year to figure out what's going on.
Participant May Berenbaum, a top bee researcher from the University of Illinois, said the class of chemicals known as neonicotinoids hasn't been proven to be the sole culprit in the bee loss.
In an interview, she said she was "extremely dubious" that banning the chemical would have any effect on bee health. She was the chairwoman of a major National Academy of Sciences study on the loss of pollinators.
Dave Gaulson of the University of Stirling in Scotland, who conducted a study last year that implicated the chemical, said he can't disagree with the overall conclusions of the U.S. government report.
However, he said it could have emphasized pesticides more.
Pollinators, like honeybees, are crucial to the U.S. food supply.
About $30 billion a year in agriculture depends on their health, said the USDA's Sonny Ramaswamy.
USDA bee researcher Jeff Pettis said modern farming practices that often leave little forage area for bees is a big problem.
At a news conference Thursday with federal officials, Berenbaum said there's no single solution to the bee problem.
"We're not really well equipped or even used to fighting on multiple fronts," Berenbaum said.
(Seth Borenstein, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The blaze erupted during morning rush hour along U.S. 101 in the Camarillo area, about 50 miles west of Los Angeles. It was quickly spread by the winds, which also pushed other damaging blazes across the region.
The evacuation orders included the smoke-choked campus of California State University Channel Islands, which has 5,000 students.
Flames quickly moved down slopes toward subdivisions, according to the Ventura County Fire Department. More than 6,500 acres — some 10 square miles — were charred, with no containment. It was 10 percent contained Thursday night.
A cluster of RVs in a mobile home parking lot was destroyed by flames. No homes were damaged and no injuries reported.
The National Weather Service issued a red flag warning for southwestern California, including inland and mountain regions of San Diego County.
It's to remain in effect until 6 tonight.
"A combination of strong winds, low relative humidity and warm temperatures will create explosive fire growth potential," the weather service advisory said.
In Lakeside around 4:20 p.m. Thursday, a brush fire broke out off state Route 67 near Channel Road. The fire burned two to three acres and was quickly put under control, San Diego authorities reported. Two freeway ramps were temporarily shut.
In Ventura County, more than 850 firefighters and law enforcement officials from multiple agencies worked to protect numerous homes around Camarillo Springs Golf Course and in a section of adjacent Thousand Oaks. Air tankers and helicopters dropped water and retardant to create a perimeter and contain the fire.
The Santa Ana winds sent plumes of smoke and embers over the homes and strawberry fields to the south. The vegetation-withering dry winds out of the northeast caused humidity levels to plunge from 80 percent to single digits in less than an hour. Temperatures soared into the 90s in Camarillo.
About 100 miles to the east in Riverside County, two homes, a number of outbuildings and several vehicles were destroyed, and two other homes were damaged in a 12-acre grass fire that prompted the evacuation of an elementary school in Jurupa Valley, a Cal Fire spokeswoman said.
Also in Riverside County, a 4.5-square-mile fire that began Wednesday north of Banning was 40 percent contained after destroying one home. Nearly 700 firefighters and aircraft worked the fire. About 185 firefighters from across San Diego County were sent to help in Riverside County.
[U-T] Staff writers Debbi Baker, Susan Shroder and Kristina Davis contributed to this report.
(Christopher Weber, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The fast-moving wildfire about 100 miles northeast of San Diego broke out just after noon and was moving westward through largely undeveloped foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains, but it was dangerously close to subdivisions to the south, in Banning.
At least 425 firefighters were working to gain control of the fast-moving fire, which has destroyed one structure and is 30 percent contained, said Jody Hagemann, spokeswoman for the county fire department. Six helicopters and six air tankers were making water drops.
Authorities ordered the evacuation of the Highland Springs Mobile Home Park, where there are about 200 homes. Evacuations were also ordered for homes on two streets, but the number of people affected was not immediately known.
Joe Kiener, 53, was on his lunch hour at the childhood home where he lives when he saw smoke approaching. He and his dog were pulling out when a deputy came up and told him to evacuate. A few hours later the house was destroyed. "It's a total loss," Kiener told the Riverside Press-Enterprise. "It really hasn't hit me yet. But it hurts me to lose the house."
The house next door was untouched after a timely wind change. "It was close!" Kiener’s neighbor David Pena said. "It's a miracle."
Winds of 29 mph were driving the fire, and if they continued, the fire could reach communities in Cherry Valley and Beaumont.
Much of Southern California was under red flag warnings for fire danger due to heat, wind and low humidity levels.
In Northern California, firefighters were battling fires fueled by gusty winds in wine country.
In Sonoma County, the Yellow Fire north of Calistoga was less than half contained after burning 125 acres. The Silverado Fire near Yountville, in Napa County, burned an even smaller area and was 75 percent contained.
State fire spokesmanDaniel Berlant said neither fire was threatening structures, but the blazes across California could be an ominous sign.
Forecasters said high pressure over the Great Basin would send Santa Ana winds through and below passes and canyons and near coastal foothills until this afternoon.
(ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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(U-T NEWS SERVICES)
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The bladders of the totoaba (toe-TWAHbah) fish can each fetch as much as $10,000 or more on the black market abroad, U.S. Attorney Laura Duffy said at a news conference at the federal building in downtown San Diego.
They are highly sought for use in a Chinese soup, and are prized for their supposed benefits for boosting fertility, skin vitality and circulation.
The seven charged since February are accused of trying to cross from Mexico into the United States with 529 of the valuable bladders. One man charged last week, 73-year-old Song Shen Zhen, was found with 27 of them in his vehicle at the Calexico Port of Entry.
Investigators with U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service later found Zhen had what Duffy described as a stash house for fish bladders in Calexico. Investigators found another 214 bladders at the home, spread around the floors of the otherwise empty house. Large fans were working to dry them.
Investigators pegged the total value of the haul from Zhen at $3.6 million, with the black market value estimate at $5,000 for each bladder and $10,000-plus in foreign Asian markets.
This is the time of year the species spawns in the Sea of Cortez and is most vulnerable to poaching. The fish is protected in Mexico and, since 1979, in the U.S.
Duffy called the spike in cases a "unique and troubling" trend. And, she added, "Without question, I think the smuggling of totoaba fish bladders has got to be one of the strangest categories of items we have seen smuggled across the border in recent years."
In the past, officials have seized items as diverse as iguana meat and shark fins from Mexico. All of the items have one thing in common: great value on the black market because they are rare or tightly regulated species that are hard to come by.
The totoaba, a member of the croaker family of fish, can grow to more than six feet in length and weigh more than 200 pounds. Its large and valuable bladder is an internal gas-filled organ that helps the fish control its buoyancy.
The fish is endemic to the Sea of Cortez, which is east of the Baja Peninsula and west of the Mexican mainland, and is also known as the Gulf of California. The totoaba was once abundant there, but intensive fishing from the 1940s on nearly decimated the species, which was put under protection in Mexico in 1975.
Jill Birchell, special agent in charge of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for California and Nevada, said the wave of arrests for bladder smuggling is unprecedented.
"Whenever you've got a black market commodity that is as high in value as these totoaba fish bladders are, trade is going to follow that commodity," Birchell said. "We've had occasional seizures over the years, but this is the first year we've had this high of a number of seizures all at once."
Other cases charged include a Monterey Park man caught with 11 bladders on Feb. 27, and a man from Imperial caught with 170 bladders hidden in three coolers.
(Greg Moran, U-T)
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Mississippi River communities in Iowa, Illinois and Missouri are expected to see significant flooding — some near-record levels — by the weekend, a sharp contrast to two months ago when the river was approaching record lows. Michigan, Wisconsin and Indiana had flooding, too. All told, dozens of Midwestern rivers were well over their banks after rains that began Wednesday dumped up to 6 inches of water on saturated soil.
In Quincy, Ill., the normally slow to swell Mississippi River rose nearly 10 feet in 36 hours, National Weather Service hydrologist Mark Fuchs said. A bridge could be shut down and the sewage plant was threatened.
"That's pretty amazing," Fuchs said of the fast-rising river. "It's just been skyrocketing."
Smaller rivers in Illinois seemed to be causing the worst of the flooding. In suburban Chicago, which got up to 7 inches of rain in a 24-hour period ending Thursday, record levels of water were moving through the Des Plaines River past heavily populated western suburbs and into the Illinois River to the south.
As many as 1,500 residents of the northern Illinois town of Marseilles were evacuated after nine barges broke free from a tugboat and struck a levee on the Illinois River. The swollen Spoon River topped a levee and inundated the central Illinois town of London Mills, and about half of the 500 residents had to be evacuated. Police Chief Scott Keithley said some homes were half under water, and abandoned cars were sent floating in the torrent of water.
Mississippi River flooding wasn't as pronounced as its water level varies greatly but is typically highest in the spring, so minor flooding is not uncommon. "Flood stage" is a somewhat arbitrary term that the National Weather Service says is the point when "water surface level begins to create a hazard to lives, property, or commerce."
When river levels exceed flood stage by several feet, serious problems can occur. Days ago, the Mississippi was well below flood stage. Forecasters expect it to climb up to 12 feet above flood stage at some spots in Missouri and Illinois.
High water has closed hundreds of roads and swamped hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland as planting season approaches. If it spills into sewage plants, waste could flow untreated into the river.
After the devastating Mississippi River floods of 1993, the government bought out thousands of homes once in harm's way, tore them down and replaced them with green space where development isn't allowed. New and bigger levees have been built, and flood walls reinforced.
Clarksville, Mo., is one of the few places at the mercy of the river. The quaint community of 442 filled with century-old historic homes has no flood wall or levee. Widespread flash-flooding accompanied the week's rains. An 80-year-old woman died in De Soto, Mo., about 40 miles southwest of St. Louis, when a creek flooded a street and swept away her car.
Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon has declared a state of emergency.
(Jim Salter, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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The quake — measured by China's seismological bureau at magnitude-7 and the U.S. Geological Survey at 6.6 — struck the steep hills of Lushan county shortly after 8 a.m., toppling buildings, many of them older brick structures.
Tiles fell from roofs, and pictures dropped from walls, sending people into the streets in their underwear and wrapped in blankets.
"Generally, the quake felt much stronger than that from five years ago. Many decorations at home got smashed," said Zhao Zheng, a resident of Ya'an city, near the quake.
He was reached by direct message on his Twitter-like microblog and said he was awakened by the earthquake.
The People's Daily newspaper said 56 people had been killed, including at least 28 in the epicenter of Lushan.
Sichuan Online, the website of the official provincial newspaper, quoted a provincial earthquake bureau official it did not name as saying more than 100 people have been injured or killed.
The quake's shallow depth, less than 8 miles, likely magnified the impact.
The official Xinhua News Agency said the quake rattled buildings in the provincial capital of Chengdu, 70 miles to the east. It caused the shutdown of the city's airport for about an hour before it was reopened, state media said.
Lushan is home to 1.5 million people where the fertile Sichuan plain meets foothills that rise to the Tibetan plateau. Known for its mountains, the area is near a well-known preserve for pandas and is considered one of the birthplaces of Chinese tea culture.
Social media users who said they were in Lushan county posted photos of collapsed buildings and reported that water and electricity had been cut off.
A man who answered the phone at the Ya'an city government said telecommunications were cut and medical and rescue teams are on the way to the area. "I felt the strong quake this morning in my office. All drawers of the desk opened and some stuff on the table fell on the floor," said the man, who refused to give his name, as is usual with low-ranking Chinese government officials.
The area lies near the same Longmenshan fault where the devastating 7.9-magnitude quake struck in May 2008, leaving more than 90,000 people dead or missing and presumed dead.
"We pray together for the safety of those in the disaster area," a post on the New China News Agency's microblog said.
Photographs posted on the Internet from Lushan County showed cracked buildings and piles of rubble. Other photos showed injured people lying on a sidewalk being treated by emergency crews. Residents wrote that many houses were destroyed.
The quake was felt by residents in neighboring provinces and in the provincial capital of Chengdu, causing many people to rush out of buildings, according to accounts on China's Twitter-like Sina Weibo micro-blogging service.
State news agency Xinhua said 2,000 troops were heading to the area to help with rescue efforts.
State television CCTV said only emergency vehicles were being allowed into Ya'an.
Numerous aftershocks jolted the area, the largest of which was magnitude 5.1.
Reuters News Service and the MCT News Service contributed to this story.
(Didi Tang, ASSOCIATED PRESS)
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