Global Warming Controversy 2011 through 2022
"Greenhouse Effect", Ice Age Reversal, Climatic Changes, Ozone Layer.
The year 2011 through 2022

The year 2011.


• 1/3/2011 Quakes shakes southern Chile, rattling cities - and nerves by Eva Vergara, AP.
      Santiago, Chile - A magnitude-7.1 earthquake shook southern Chile, sending tens of thousands fleeing for higher ground for fear that it could generate a tsunami like the one that ravaged the coastline last year.    No damage or deaths, with some cell-phone communications and electrical power knocked out in a certain region and no tsunami.    On Feb. 27, 2010 a 8.8 quake and tsunami killed 521 people and left 200,000 homeless.    Todays quake is believed to be an aftershock of last year's mega-quake.
  
• 1/6/2011 Australia grapple with flooding - Disaster helps fuel rise in coal prices by Kristen Gelineau, AP.
      Sydney - Australia put an army general in charge of flood recovery after weeks of heavy rains deluged the nation's coal-producing northeast, crippling the area's economy and sending out reverberations felt in coal markets worldwide.    Floodwaters have forced most of Queensland state's coal mines to shut and some may not restart productions for months due to the rebuilding effort of damages totalling $5 billion, which includes crops and transport systems.    About 1,200 homes inundated, with another 10,700 suffering damage.
  
• 1/7/2011 Swamped town braces for flooding stream by AP.
      Brisbane, Australia - Australian officials urged residents to evacuate to higher ground as the Balonne River was forecast to peak higher than forecast after heavy rain the night before.
      On the 8th, at least 8 people were killed and 72 missing after the latest downpour as people were being rescued on their roofs.
      On the 13th, residents woke to find their community submerged after floodwaters pouring through streets reached their crest, with an estimated 11,900 homes inundated, and a death toll of 22 people since late November and also 74 people missing.
      On the 16th residents braced for a new river peak with 12,000 rubber-gloved volunteers hauled sodden debris from soaked homes, shoveled muck and helped out.    The floods have caused 26 deaths, and 14 others are missing.
  
• 1/7/2011 Floods, mudslides kill 35; 30,000 displaced by AP.
      Sao Paulo - Brazilian authorities say a couple and their two young daughters died in a mudslide in Sao Paulo state, bringing the death toll from heavy flooding to at least 35 people.    More than 30,000 people across Brazil have been forced from their homes.    Heavy rains have been pummeling Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Espirito Santo states since Christmas.
      On the 13th in Rio de Janeiro torrential rains killed at least 257 people in 24 hours, where in the town Teresopolis flash floods tossed cars into trees and mudslides poured tons of red earth over houses below as at least 114 died.
      On the 14th the death toll in Teresopolis, Brazil rose to 474 people, as Brazil has had about 14,000 people driven from their homes.
  
• 1/19/2011 7.2 quake shakes southwest Pakistan, felt far away by AP.
      Islamabad - A 7.2 magnitude earthquake rocked a remote area (Baluchistan province) of southwestern Pakistan, shaking many parts of the country and causing tremors as far away as India and the United Arab Emirates.    No reports of injury in the sparcely populated area.
  
• 1/28/2011 Global Warming? by Deepti Hajela, AP.
      New York - People across the Northeast wearily shoveled their sidewalks and dug out their cars - again - after getting clobbered by a never-ending string of snowstorms that packed more punch than anyone expected.    New York got 19 inches of snow, Philadelphia 17, Boston a foot, airports closed and nearly a half-million people lost power at some point.    Normally New York gets 21 inches of snow a winter, it has already received 55 inches.
      In the Washingotn area, up to 7 inches of snow created chaos coming down at rush hour putting commuters into treacherous, eight-hour drives home, including the president.    About 300,000 people lost power.
      Maryland had vehicle wrecks blocking roads and impeding snowplows.
  
• 2/2/2011 Vast storm paralyzes Midwest; Chicago airports closed by Michael Tarm, AP.
      Chicago - A winter weather colossus roared into the nation's heartland, laying down a paralyzing punch of dangerous ice and whiteout snow.    Ice-covered streets were deserted in Super Bowl host city Dallas, also shut down Oklahoma City and Tulsa, and Chicago was expecting 2 feet of snow.    This system that stretched more than 2,000 miles across a third of the country promised to leave in its aftermath temperatures in the single digits or lower.    Winds topped 60 mph in Texas.
  
• 2/3/2011 Strong cyclone batters coast of NE Australia by Kristen Gelineau, AP.
      Cairns, Australia - A massive cyclone hit northeastern Australia tearing off roofs, toppling trees and cutting power to thousands.    Cyclone Yasi's eye roared ashore at the small resort town of Mission Beach in Queensland state with heavy rain and howling winds gusting to 186 mph.    This compounded the months of flooding that has killed 35 people.
      On the 4th at Tully, Australia rain and gusts from the weakening cyclone continued to bluster across Australia and passed as the worst was over and airports reopened and resumed flights.    No deaths were reported, but it devastated hundreds of millions of dollars of banana and sugar cane crops.
      On the 6th at Tully Heads, Australia the cyclone brought fresh misery to its south causing flash floods and continued to Melbourne.    More than 7 inches of rain fell in just a few hours and winds gusted to 80 mph.
  
• 2/4/2011 Midwest, Northwest begin digging out from destructive storm by Deanna Bellandi and Michael Tarm, AP.
      Chicago - A mammoth winter storm left dangerously slick roads and frigid Midwestern temperatures.    Three people were killed and five injured when their SUV plunged off an Oklahoma interstate 80 feet into an icy river.    Wind chills dipped to nearly 30 below in parts of the Midwest as the region began dealing with the storm's aftermath.    The storm unloaded as much as 2 feet of snow across its 2,000-mile path from Texas to South Dakota
• 2/7/2011 Wrath of La Nina - Pacific phenomenon sends winter's worst across U.S. by Randolph E. Schmid, AP.
      Washington - La Nina is to blame as Mother Nature decided to show us the blizzard of 2011 what winter is like again after a series of unusally mild winters.    So can we blame climate change?    No, says Louis Uccellini, director of the government's National Centers for Environmental Prediction, who says "you can't relate climate change to individual storm systems.    Clearly, there have been similar storms in previous decades."    The La Nina condition affecting the tropical Pacific Ocean does share some of the blame and might have contributed to the floods and cyclone that battered Australia.    The Arctic Oscillation has pushed cold weather farther south in the U.S. than had been expected, giving La Nina full control.
  
• 2/7/2011 Vast flooding forces more than a million to flee by AP.
      Colombo, Sri Lanka - More than a million people have been displaced by flooding in north-central and northeastern Sri Lanka, as monsoon rains fell for the sixth consecutive day, resulting in 8 deaths and two missing people.
• 2/21/2011 Scientists link extreme rain and snow to global warming by Seth Borenstein, AP.
      Extreme rainstorms and snowfalls have grown stronger, two studies suggest finding fingerprints of man-made global warming on downpours that often cause deadly flooding.
      One group of researchers from Canada and Scotland looked at the strongest rain and snow events of each year from 1951 to 1999 in the Northern Hemisphere and found that the more recent storms were 7 percent wetter.
      The second study connected flooding and climate change in Great Britain.
      The researchers found that global warming more than doubled the likelihood of that flood occuring.    Studies are under way to examine if last year's deadly Russian heat wave and Pakistan's floods - which were part of the same weather event - can be scientifically attributed to global warming.
      Scientists have been relying on basic physics and climate knowledge claiming global warming would likely cause extremes in temperatures and rainfall.    This year is the first time they have been able to point to a demonstrable cause-and-effect by using the human-caused climate change.    They took all the extreme rain and snow events from the 1950s through the 1990s and ran dozens of computer models numerous times, then put in the effects of greenhouse gases which come from burning of fossil fuels and ran the models, which they claim shows a similar increase to what actually happened.
  
• 2/23/2011 Storm disrupts Midwest travel by Chris Williams, AP.
      Minneapolis - A major snowstorm dealt another winter wallop to Wisconsin, Michigan and northern Ohio as it moved east out of Minnesota, leaving more than a foot of fresh snow in its wake.    Ice downed power lines in Michigan and Ohio, leaving tens of thousands of people without electricity.
  
• 2/23/2011 Quake hits New Zealand city; injuries reported by AP.
      Wellington, New Zealand - A strong 6.3-magnitude earthquake rocked the southern city of Christchurch, seriously injuring people and damaging buildings throughout the city.    Buildings collapsed into the streets, which were strewn with bricks and shattered concrete, sidewalks and roads were cracked and split, and screaming and crying residents wandered through the streets as sirens blared throughout the city.    People in tall buildings were thrown across the room, others clinging to their desks, with large filing cabinets toppling over.    Power and telephone lines were knocked out, and pipes burst, flooding streets with water, and vehicles were buried under the rubble on the streets.
      A 5.6-magnitude aftershock hit shortly after 7 miles east of the city at a depth of 3.7 miles.    The area had a 7.1 magnitude earthquake on Sept. 4 last year, causing damage and a handful of injuries, but no deaths.    The city is home to about 350,000 people.
      In Christchurch, the death toll may be at least 75 and 100 more people are missing.
      On the 24th rescuers searched for survivors in the rubble which has killed 76 people and left 238 missing, as the prime minister declared the quake a national disaster.    Hundreds of troops, police and emergency workers raced agaisnt time and aftershocks that threaten to collapse more buildings.    Teams rushed in from Australia, the U.S., Britain, Japan and Asia to help.
      On the 25th the death toll was 113 bodies pulled from the rubble and 228 are listed missing.
      On the 27th the death toll was 146 and more than 200 missing and assessments said that at least a third of the buildings must be razed and rebuilt.
      On March 1st the death toll reached 154 and could reach 240, and damages have been assessed to around $15 billion.
      On the 2nd the death toll was the same as it may be that many of the bodies were pulverized by the buildings that collapsed on them.
  
• 3/2/2011 Flood-weary Ohio city is inundated once again by John Seewer, AP.
      Findlay, Ohio - Floodwaters slowly began to recede after soaking several hundred homes, the third major flood to swamp this northwest Ohio city in the past four years.    The floods were part of the aftermath of storms that swept through the Midwest and South in the past two days, spawning tornadoes and heavy rains and killing at least five people, including four in Tennessee.    All 88 of Ohio's counties are threatened by flooding, but the worst was in Findlay, where the Blanchard River topped above flood level by 5 feet or more.
  
• 3/9/2011 New Kilauea vent spews lava, fumes with vigor by AP.
      Honolulu - The latest eruption at Kilauea volcano in Hawaii has a new working name.    Volcanologists said they are calling it the Kamoamoa Fissure Eruption after the area it is located at Kilauea, one of the world's most active volcanoes.    Kamoamoa, which cracked open is continuing to spew out loads of lava and gases.    Visitors flocked to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park hoping to catch a glimpse of the 2,000-degree glowing, red-orange lava that is shooting 65 feet high.    [Comment: I am sure we will be hearing more about this volcano in the near future.]
  
• 3/11/2011 Earthquake kills at least 24, topples homes in China by Tini Tran, AP.
      Beijing - An earthquake toppled more than 1,000 houses and apartment buildings in China's southwest near the border with Myanmar, killing at least 24 people and injuring more than 200.    Police, firefighters and soldiers rushed to the area to pull out people trapped in the rubble.    Parts of a supermarket and a hotel caved in, while sidewalks were lined with 207 injured on blankets.    The quake was a 5.8 magnitude centered in Yingjiang and 127,000 people have been evacuated to nearby shelters.
  
• 4/18/2011 Deadly storms slam across U.S. - N.C. hardest hit with 62 tornadoes by Brock Vergakis and Emery P. Dalesio, AP.
      Raleigh, N.C. - Rescue crews searched for survivors in wind-blasted landscapes in North Carolina, the state hardest hit by a storm system that spawned dozens of tornadoes from Oklahoma to Virginia and killed dozens.    North Carolina had 62 tornadoes and 11 people were confirmed dead in rural Bertie County, and 4 dead in Bladen County for a total of 21.
  
• 4/20/2011 Supreme Court signals it will toss out global warming suit by David G. Savage, Tribune Washington Bureau.
      Washington - The Supreme Court justices indicated they would throw out a huge global warming lawsuit brought by six states against coal-fired power plants in the South and Midwest, and do so with the support of the Obama administration.
      Acting U.S. Solicitor General Neal Katyal urged the justices to end the lawsuit, insisting the problem of global warming and greenhouse gases is too big for a single judge to handle.    It is a regulatory problem for the EPA, to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.    The suit targeted the coal-fired power plants that emit about 10 percent of the nation's greenhouse gases (American Electric Power Co. of Ohio; Cinergy Co., now part of Duke energy Corp. of North Crolina; Southern Co. Inc. of Georgia; and Xcel Energy Inc. of Minnesota).
  
• 4/21/2011 Wildfires blaze wide path of destruction across Texas - No part of state spared from flames by AP.
      Forth worth, Texas - Ranchers flung open gates in hopes their livestock could escape fast-moving flames.    Horses were catching on fire as they galloped away in flames, homes, barns and oil field pump jacks and thousands of acres of rangeland are now blackened.
      Such were the scenes in drought-plagued West Texas, where the mammoth Rock House Fire has raged for two weeks.    No part of Texas has been spared as fierce winds have burned nearly 2 million acres.
      On the 22nd at Possum Kingdom Lake, Texas a once-picturesque lakeside community will take years to recover after the fire has turned the upscale resort homes into ash heaps.    Firefighter have made progress in containing the blaze since it started a week ago and has destroyed 160 of the 3,000 homes.
  
• 4/24/2011 St. Louis starts storm cleanup - Hundreds of homes damaged in area; airport slammed by tornado reopens by Jim Salter and Jim Suhr, AP.
      St. Louis - Debris from splintered homes covered the ground in neighborhoods around St. Louis, while downed trees and overturned cars littered lawns and driveways from a tornado that roared through the airport and several nearby suburbs.    Some 750 homes were damaged and crews worked to restore power to 26,000 customers.    The tornado at the airport tore off part of the roof of the main terminal and blew out half of the plateglass windows.
  
• 4/25/2011 Giving soot the boot - Scientists study heat absorbing dirt that sullies Arctic by Randolph E. Schmid, AP.
      The Arctic is often pictured as a vast white wasteland, but scientists believe a thin layer of soot - mostly invisible - is causing it to absorb more heat.    Soot, or black carbon, is produced by auto and truck engines, aircraft emissions, burning forests and wood-or coal-burning stoves.    "The Arctic serves as the air conditioner of the planet," explained Patricia Quinn of NOAA, and said the Arctic has been warming more rapidly than other regions.    But studies indicate that cutting the concentration of short-lived pollutants, such as soot, will reduce the rate of warming in the Arctic faster than cuts in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, which last far longer in the atmosphere.    In February the U.N. Environmental Program urged cuts in soot emissions.    The Arctic Council, which represents the eight countries that border the Arctic, is deciding whether to seek reductions in soot from other nations and will be using data from this project in its deliberation.
  
• 4/26/2011 Burdened levee spurs Mo. evacuation by AP.
      Poplar Bluff, Mo. - Thousands of southeastern Missouri residents watched helplessly as water from the Black River crept toward their homes after flowing over the levee protecting their town.    Continued heavy rain from Missouri to Arkansas to Illnois led to flooding in the areas.    This flood was likely to displace about 7,000 people as many went to a Coliseum which seats 5,000.
  
• 4/29/2011 South's twisters among the worst by Randolph E. Schmid and Kristi Eaton, AP.
      Washington - Some of the killer tornadoes that ripped across the South may have been among the largest and most powerful ever recorded, experts suggested - leaving a death toll that is approaching that of a tragic "super outbreak" of storms almost 40 years ago ( In 1974 about 300 people in 13 states, and 747 deaths in 1925).    Some of these were a mile wide, on the ground for ten miles and had wind speeds over 200 mph that battered Tuscaloosa, Ala., then covered the 60 miles to Birmingham.    This tornado developed in Mississippi and traveled 300 miles, which is unusual for a super cell.
      In Pleasant Grove, Alabama the death toll was 290 people across six states, with two-thirds of them in Alabama.    Residents were warned up to 24 minutes ahead of time the tornadoes were coming.
• 4/30/2011 South reels as even its rescuers struggle - Death toll up to 329 in 7 states as Obamas visit hard-hit Alabama by Jay Reeves and Greg Bluestein, AP.
      Tuscaloosa, Ala. - Southerners tried to emerge from the deadliest U.S. tornado disaster since the Great Depression.    Emergency buildings are wiped out.    Bodies are stored in refrierated trucks.    The death toll reached 329 across seven states, including 238 in Alabama as the deadliest tornado outbreak since March 1932 came through.
  
• 5/4/2011 Study: Arctic ice melting faster than anticipated by AP.
      Stockholm - Arctic ice is melting faster than expected and could raise the average global sea level by as much as five feet, an authoriative new report suggests from the international Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program.    It says that Arctic temperatures in the past six years were the highest since measurements began in 1880, and that feedback mechanisms believed to accelerate warming have started kicking in.    One mechanism involves the ocean absorbing more heat when it's not covered by ice, which reflects the sun's energy.
  
• 5/4/2011 Missouri levee destroyed - Blast eases threat to Illinois town, but areas downstream might see more trouble by Jim Suhr and Jim Salter, AP.
      Wyatt, Mo. - A demolition by the Army Corps of Engineers of the Birds Point levee sent water pouring onto thousands of acres of Missouri farmland, easing the Mississippi River floodwaters threatening the tiny Illinois town of Cairo.    This did nothing to ease the risk of more trouble downstream at Tennessee, Mississippi and Louisiana.    The wall of water onto 200 square miles of corn, soybean and wheat fields will ruin crop prosects for this year and also damaged or destroyed about 100 homes.    The blast worked as the water receded to save Cairo.
  
  

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      As of May 6, 2011, I have stopped typing from news articles and began using the Electronic Edition of the Courier-Journal newspaper so from this point on the articles are from those pages and may be shortened in some cases for highlights and space considerations.
  

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• 5/10/2011
  
  Extreme April a record-breaker - Were rain, heat, La Nina’s fault? by Seth Borenstein, Associated Press
      WASHINGTON — April was a historic month for wild weather in the United States, and it wasn’t just the killer tornado outbreak that set records, according to scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
      April included an odd mix of downpours, droughts and wildfires. Six Midwestern states — Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia — set records for the wettest April since 1895. Kentucky, for example, got nearly a foot of rain, which was more than three times its normal for the month, NOAA reported.
      Yet the U.S. also had the most acres burned by wildfires for April since 2000. Nearly 95 percent of Texas has a drought categorized as severe or worse, exacerbated by the fifth-driest April on record for the Lone Star state.    Add to a record 305 tornadoes from April 25-28, which killed at least 309 people and the most tornadoes ever for all of April: 875.    The death toll and total tornado figures are still being finalized.
      Much of the Southern and Eastern United States had near record heat for April, while northwestern states were cooler than normal.    Overall, the month was warmer than normal for the nation, but not rec-ord- setting.
      The odd mix of massive April showers and bonedry drought can be blamed on the cooling of the cen-tral Pacific Ocean, which causes storm tracks to lock in along certain paths, said Mike Halpert, deputy director of NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center.
      “It’s very consistent with La Nina; maybe we’ve had more extremes,” Halpert said. “It’s a shift of the jet stream, providing all that moisture and shifting it away from the south, so you’ve seen a lot of drought in Texas.”
      U.S. scientists also looked for the fingerprints of global warming and La Nina on last month’s deadly tornadoes but couldn’t find evidence to blame those oft-cited weather phenomena.
      NOAA research meteorologist Martin Hoerling tracked three major factors that go into tornadoes — air instability, wind shear and water vapor — and found no long-term trends that point to either climate change or La Nina.    That doesn’t mean those factors aren’t to blame, but Hoerling couldn’t show it, he said.
      Climate models say that because of changes in instability and water vapor, severe thunderstorms and maybe tornadoes should increase in the future.    But it may take another 30 years for the predicted slow increase to be statistically noticeable.
  
  Misery moves downriver - Areas beyond Memphis suffer by Holbrook Mohr and Shelia Byrd, Associated Press
      VICKSBURG, Miss. — The Mississippi River’s crest rolled past Memphis on Tuesday, going easy on much of the city, but downriver in the mostly poor, fertile Delta region, floodwaters washed away crops, damaged hundreds of homes and closed casinos key to the state’s economy.
      In Vicksburg, the river was forecast to peak slightly above the record level set during the flood of 1927.    Nearly 600 households had suffered water damage, said Greg Flynn, a spokesman for the state emergency management agency.
      Flynn was surprised at the low number of people staying at shelters.    In Warren County, where Vicksburg is located, residents walked through town on an elevated railroad track with water several feet deep on both sides, yet no one was staying in a shelter.    To the north, in Tunica County, 24 people slept in a shelter on Monday night, Flynn said.    Widespread flooding is expected along the Yazoo River, a tributary that is backed up because of the bulging Mississippi.    Farmers built homemade levees in an attempt to protect their corn, cotton, wheat and soybean crops, but many believed the crops would be lost entirely.
      The Mississippi crested in Memphis at nearly 48 feet Tuesday, falling short of its all-time record but still soaking low-lying areas with enough water to require a massive cleanup.
      Shelby County and four others were declared disaster areas by President Barack Obama, which means that they’ll be eligible for much-needed federal disaster aid.
      The state’s key gambling industry was taking a hit, too.    All of the 19 casinos along the river were to be shuttered entirely by the end of the week, costing governments about $12 million to $13 million in taxes per month.
  
  
• 5/12/2011
  
  River engulfs Miss. Delta, forcing many from homes by Associated Press     RENA LARA, Miss. — Floodwaters from the bloated Mississippi River and its tributaries spilled across farm fields, cut off churches, washed over roads and forced people from their homes Wednesday in the Mississippi Delta, a poverty-stricken region only a generation or two removed from sharecropping days.    People used boats to navigate flooded streets as the crest rolled slowly downstream, bringing misery to poor, low-lying communities. Hundreds have left their homes in the Delta in recent days as the water rose toward some of its highest levels on record.
      The crest is expected to push its way through the Delta by late next week.
      “It’s getting scary,” said Rita Harris, 43, whose tiny wooden house lies in the shadow of the levee in Rena Lara, population 500.    “They won’t let you go up there to look at the water.”
      Officials in the town, which has no local newspaper or broadcast station, tried to reassure residents they are doing what they can to shore up the levee and they will warn people if they need to leave.
      Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour urged people to get out if they think there is even a chance their homes will flood.    He said there is no reason to believe a levee on the Yazoo River would fail, but if it did, 107 feet of water would flow over small towns.
      “More than anything else, save your life and don’t put at risk other people who might have to come in and save your lives,” Barbour said.
      The Delta, with a population of 465,000, is a leaf-shaped expanse of rich soil between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers, extending 200 miles from Memphis, Tenn., to Vicksburg, Miss.
      While some farms in the cotton-, rice- and corn-growing Delta are prosperous, there is also grinding poverty.    Nine of the 11 counties that touch the Mississippi River in Mississippi have poverty rates at least double the national average of 13.5 percent, the U.S. Census Bureau said.
      The Mississippi has been breaking flood records from the 1920s and ’30s.    It is projected to crest at Vicksburg on May 19, shattering the 1927 mark.
  
  Death toll rises after 2 earthquakes in Spain
      Madrid - Two earthquakes struck southeast Spain in quick succession Wednesday, killing at least 10 people, injuring dozens and causing major damage, officials said.
      The epicenter of the quakes — with magnitudes of 4.4 and 5.2 — was close to the town of Lorca, and the second came about two hours after the first, an official with the Murcia regional government said on condition of anonymity in line with department policy.
      The Spanish prime minister’s office put the death toll at 10.    Large chunks of stone and brick fell from the facade of a church in Lorca as a reporter for Spanish state TV was broadcasting live.
  
  
• 5/15/2011
  
  Open La. floodgate eases pressure - Floodwaters to hit Cajun countryside, spare cities by Mary Foster and Melinda Deslatte, Associated Press
      MORGANZA, La. — Water from the inflated Mississippi River gushed through a floodgate Saturday for the first time in nearly four decades and headed toward thousands of homes and farmland in the Cajun countryside, threatening to slowly submerge the land under water up to 25 feet deep.    As the gate was raised, the river poured out like a waterfall, at times spraying 6 feet into the air.    Fish jumped or were hurled through the white froth, and within 30 minutes, 100 acres of what had been dry land was under about a foot of water.    Opening the Morganza Spillway diverted water away from Baton Rouge, New Orleans and the numerous oil refineries and chemical plants on the lower reaches of the Mississippi.    Shifting water away from the cities eased the strain on levees and foiled flooding that could have surpassed Hurricane Katrina’s.
      “We’re using every flood-control tool we have in the system,” Army Corps of Engineers Maj. Gen. Michael Walsh said during a news conference on the dry side of the spillway, before the bay was opened.
      The Morganza Spillway is part of a system of locks and levees built after the great flood of 1927, which killed hundreds and left many more without homes.
      When it opened Saturday, it was the first time three flood-control systems have been unlocked at the same time on the Mississippi River, a sign of just how historic the current flooding has been.
      Earlier this month, the corps intentionally blew holes into a levee in Missouri to employ a similar cities-first strategy, and it opened a spillway northwest of New Orleans.    Snowmelt and heavy rain swelled the Mississippi, and the river has peaked at levels not seen in 70 years.
      In Krotz Springs, La., one of the towns in the Atchafalaya River basin bracing for floodwaters, Monita Reed, 56, recalled the last time the Morganza was opened in 1973.
      “We could sit in our yard and hear the water,” she said as workers constructed a makeshift levee of sandbags and soil-filled mesh boxes in hopes of protecting the 240 homes in her subdivision.
      Some residents of the threatened stretch of countryside had begun to head out.    Reed’s family packed her furniture, clothing and pictures in a rental truck and a relative’s trailer.    “I’m just going to move and store my stuff.    I’m going to stay here until they tell us to leave,” she said.    “Hopefully, we won’t see much water and then I can move back in. “    It took about 15 minutes for the one 28foot gate to be raised in the middle of the spillway.    It will take several hours before any of the water hits the sparsely populated communities in the area.
      The corps planned to open one or two more gates today in a painstaking process that gives residents and animals a chance to flee.    The water will flow 20 miles south into the Atchafalaya Basin.    From there it will roll on to Morgan City, an oil-and-seafood hub and a community of 12,000, and eventually into the Gulf of Mexico.
      Michael Grubb, whose home is just outside the Morgan City floodwalls, hired a contractor this week to raise his house from 2 feet to 8 feet off the ground. It took a crew of 20 workers roughly17 hours to jack the house up onto wooden blocks; 3 feet of water flooded his home the last time the Morganza Spillway was opened.
      “I wanted to save this house desperately,” said Grubb, 54.    “This has tapped us out. This is our life savings here, but it’s worth every penny.”
      Water from the swollen Atchafalaya River already was creeping into his backyard, but Grubb was confident his home will stay dry.    He has a generator and a boat he plans to use for grocery runs.
      “This is our home,” he said.    “How could we leave our home?”
  
  
• 5/16/2011
  
  Strong earthquake reported in Pacific
      Sydney - A strong earthquake struck off the coast of Papua New Guinea today, local time, but there were no immediate reports of injuries or damage.    The magnitude-6.5 quake struck 76 miles west of Arawa, the capital of Bougainville province, at a depth of 27 miles, the U.S. Geological Survey said.
      The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said there was no threat of a destructive, widespread tsunami and that sea-level gauges in the region showed no unusual wave activity.
  
  
• 5/17/2011
  
  Two towns evacuated over radiation fears
      Tokyo - Japan said Monday it will stabilize and shut down its stricken nuclear power plant in six to nine months, as planned, as residents of two more towns around it evacuated amid concerns about accumulated radiation.
      The government’s timeline for stabilizing the plant was called into question last week after new data showed that the damage to one reactor at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear complex was worse than expected.
      About 50 residents from Kawamata and 64 from Iitate vacated their homes over the weekend.    About 6,700 others are expected to leave by the end of June.
  
  Many eyes watching levees - Leaks sought round-the-clock by Kevin McGill, Associated Press
      NEW ORLEANS — All along the swollen Mississippi River, hundreds of thousands of lives depend on a small army of engineers, deputies and even prison inmates keeping round-the-clock watch at floodwalls and earthen lev-ees.
      They are looking for any droplets that seep through the barriers and any cracks that threaten to turn small leaks into big problems.    The work is hot and sometimes tedious, but without it the flooding that has caused weeks of misery from Illinois to the Mississippi Delta could get much worse.
      “I volunteered for this,” said jail inmate Wayne McClinton, who was helping with the sandbagging effort in northern Louisiana’s Tensas Parish.    “It’s a chance to get out in the air, to do something different. It’s not boring like prison is.”
      To take pressure off levees near Baton Rouge and New Orleans, engineers have opened two major spillways.    Most of the residents have heeded the call to seek higher ground.
      Bernadine Turner, who lives in a mandatory evacuation zone near Krotz Springs, spent a third day Monday moving her things out.    Water is not expected to reach the town about 40 miles west of Baton Rouge for several days, but most residents are taking no chances.
      “There’s no doubt it’s going to come up. We don’t have flood insurance, and most people here don’t.    Man, it would be hard to start all over,” she said.
      Snow melt and rain have sent a relentless torrent down the Mississippi this spring.    On Monday, President Barack Obama flew to Memphis, Tenn., to comfort families affected when the river rose last week to within inches of the record set in 1937.    Some low-lying neighborhoods were inundated, but levees protected much of the rest.
      Downriver in Mississippi and Louisiana, the crews watching floodwalls and levees included workers from the Army Corps of Engineers, various levee districts, county sheriffs, municipal police forces and private security details.    “For the most part, it’s hot and boring until you find something,” said Col. Jeffrey Eckstein, commander of the Vicksburg, Miss., district of the Army Corps.
      Although the job requires 24-hour vigilance, Reynold Minsky, president of a north Louisiana levee district, said there are some places in his mostly rural district of forest and farmland where he will not ask anyone to go after sundown.    “Unless we’ve got a serious situation that we know we’ve found before dark, we don’t ask these people to go into these wooded areas because of the snakes and the alligators,” Minsky said.    “That’s inhumane.”
      In New Orleans, the wharves that form much of the city’s boundary with the river provide one line of de-fense.    If they are topped by flooding, concrete floodwalls and huge metal gates can be closed.
      On Friday, officials with New Orleans’ local levee district gathered around a trickle of water seeping from a gravel railroad bed between the bustling French Quarter and the Mississippi River.
      Gerry Gillen, executive director of the levee district, said it was no cause for alarm.    The water was clear, giving no sign of erosion or damage. It might even have been residual water from a recent rain.
  
  
• 5/18/2011
  
  British say they will cut emissions in half
      London - The British government on Tuesday pledged to cut the country’s carbon emissions in half by 2025 — an ambitious target that could be watered down unless other European countries cut their emissions accordingly.
      Energy Secretary Chris Huhne told Parliament that Britain would reduce the emissions by about 50 per-cent from benchmark emission levels in 1990.
  
  
• 5/21/2011
  
  3 dead, scores more injured in earthquake
      Ankara, turkey - Turkish rescue workers and soldiers scrambled Friday to set up tents to shelter hundreds of people homeless after a 5.9-magnitude earthquake damaged buildings in western Turkey and killed at least three people. No one was reported buried under rubble in of Simav, the quake’s epicenter, but two men died of injuries and an elderly woman died of a heart attack in the town Inegol just after the quake late Thursday. Authorities said about 125 others were hurt.
  
  
• 5/22/2011
  
  Volcano erupts; flight chaos not anticipated
      Reykjavik, Iceland - Iceland’s most active volcano, Grimsvotn, has started erupting and experiencing small earthquakes, scientists said Saturday.
      Grimsvotn last erupted in 2004. Scientists have said this eruption likely will be small and should not lead to the air travel chaos caused in April 2010 by ash from the Eyjafjallajokul volcano.    Still, a no-fly zone was designated for 120 nautical miles surrounding the site.
  
  
• 5/23/2011
  
  Missouri city reeling after deadly tornado - 24 killed in Joplin as twisters hit Midwest by The Springfield (Mo.) News-Leader
      JOPLIN, Mo. — A massive tornado that struck Joplin in southwest Missouri killed at least 24 people Sunday as twisters raked the Midwest, an emergency official said.
      National Weather Service meteorologist Mike Griffin said Joplin suffered “a direct hit?” when the tornado touched down in the center of town, including heavy damage to a hospital.
      Many streets on the south side were described as impassable, littered with downed trees and utility poles.    Emergency vehicles were racing across the city, taking injured residents to hospitals.
      Ryan Nicholls, an emergency management official in nearby Springfield-Greene County, confirmed the death toll along with an unknown number of injuries.
      The storm was part of a series that battered the Midwest with tornado warnings and watches posted from Texas to Michigan.
      To the north, a tornado in Minneapolis damaged scores of homes, left one person dead and injured 29, though a city spokeswoman said most of the injuries were not serious.    In eastern Kansas, meanwhile, a tornado in the town of Reading killed one person and injured five more.
      In Joplin, the tornado cut a swath of destruction several miles long, blacking out power and phone service to much of the area.    The storm blocked roads including Interstate 44, leveled dozens of businesses and homes, and left residents trapped in rubble.
      Jerry Williams, assistant vice president at Missouri Southern State University, said he heard the tornado coming in.
      “I took my wife into a closet under the stairs,” Williams said.    “It sounded like a huge wind.”
      Williams said the tornado blew away the gazebo on his house and a shed and damaged windows.
      “It’s been quite horrific,” Williams said.    “There are just areas that are flattened. Places are gone.    It’s like somebody dropped a bomb or something.”
      A spokeswoman said the west tower of St. John’s Regional Medical Center was hit, causing heavy damage, but no information on injuries or deaths was available yet.
      The hospital was evacuating nearly 100 patients to other hospitals.    Witnesses said windows were blown out on the top floors of the hospital.
      Joplin resident Donald Davis said he drove through the town of 50,000, about 160 miles south of Kansas City, shortly after the tornado hit and saw a damaged high school, churches and apartment complex.    Roofs were blown off two fire stations.
      Davis said Joplin High School had its windows broken out and part of the roof missing.
      An apartment complex was “flattened,” Davis said.    “You just can’t be-lieve it.    There must have been 150 units.    One lady had a bathrobe around her.    Others just had blankets around them.”    Jeff Lehr, a reporter for the Joplin Globe, said he was upstairs in his home when the storm hit but was able to make his way to a basement closet.
      “There was a loud huffing noise, my windows started popping. I had to get downstairs, glass was flying.    I opened a closet and pulled myself into i,” he said.    “Then you could hear everything go.    It tore the roof off my house, everybody’s house. I came outside and there was nothing left.”
      He said people were walking around the streets outside trying to check on neighbors, but in many cases there were no homes to check.
      “There were people wandering the streets, all mud covered,” he said.    “I’m talking to them, asking if they knew where their family is.    Some of them didn’t know, and weren’t sure where they were.”
      “Our house is gone. It’s just gone,” resident Tom Rogers said.    ”We heard the tornado sirens for the second time.    All of a sudden, everything came crashing down on us.”
      Gov. Jay Nixon activated the National Guard and declared a state of emergency.    Nixon said the state and local law enforcement agencies were coordinating rescue and recovery operations.
      Missouri National Guard Maj. Tammy Spicer said more than 100 members of the 35th Engineer Brigade, which has a battalion based in Joplin, were expected to immediately report for duty.
      “This just looks like a horrific event,” Spicer said.
  
  
• 5/24/2011
  
  Tornado toll hits 116; Joplin slowly digs out - Residents look for loved ones in scarred landscape by Alan Scher Zagier and Jim Salter, Associated Press
      JOPLIN, Mo. — Rescue crews dug through piles of splintered houses and crushed cars Monday in a search for victims of a half-milewide tornado that killed at least116 people when it blasted much of this Missouri town off the map and slammed straight into its hospital.
      It was the nation’s deadliest single tornado since a June 1953 tornado in Flint, Mich.
      Authorities feared the toll could rise as the full scope of the destruction comes into view: house after house reduced to slabs, cars crushed like soda cans, shaken residents roaming streets in search of missing family members.    And the danger was by no means over.    Fires from gas leaks burned across town, and more violent weather loomed.    Forecasters said severe weather would probably persist all week. Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma could see tornadoes through today.
      At daybreak, the city’s south side emerged from darkness as a barren, smoky wasteland.    “I’ve never seen such devastation — just block upon block upon block of homes just completely gone,” said former state legislator Gary Burton, who showed up to help at a volunteer center at Missouri Southern State University.    Authorities expected to find more bodies in the rubble in the blue-collar town of 50,000 people about 160 miles south of Kansas City.    An unknown number of people were hurt.    Despite the grim outlook, Gov. Jay Nixon said he was “optimistic that there are still lives out there to be saved.”    Seventeen people had been rescued from the rubble by early Monday night.
      While many residents had 10 to 17 minutes of warning, rain and hail may have drowned out the si-rens.    Larry Bruffy said he heard the first warning but looked out from his garage and saw nothing.    “Five minutes later, the second warning went off,” he said.    “By the time we tried to get under the house, it already went over us.”    Rescue crews Monday had to move gingerly around downed power lines and jagged chunks of debris as they hunted for victims and hoped for survivors.    Fires, gas fumes and unstable buildings posed constant threats.
      National Weather Service Director Jack Hayes said the storm was given a preliminary label as an EF4 — the second-highest rating given to twisters.    The rating is assigned to storms based on the damage they cause.    Hayes said the storm had winds of 190 to 198 mph. At times, it was three-quarters of a mile wide.    Some of the most startling damage was at St. John’s Regional Medical Center, where staff had only moments to hustle their patients into the hallway. Five patients died there.    The storm blew out hundreds of windows and caused damage so extensive that doctors had to abandon the hospital after the twister passed.    Dr. Jim Roscoe said some of his emergency room staff showed up after the tornado with injuries of their own, but they worked through the night anyway.    “I had two pregnant nurses who dove under gurneys,” Roscoe said at a triage center at Joplin’s Memorial Hall entertainment venue. “… It’s a testimony to the human spirit.”
      In the minutes before the twister struck, the hospital warned everyone to move to protected interior areas.    A total of 183 patients were in the building, authorities said.
      Jonathan Elliott,16, of Wichita, Kan., and his grandmother were visiting his grandfather, who had been taken off a ventilator earlier in the day.    When the twister struck, Jonathan said, he didn’t have time to move the older man from his hospital bed and left him behind to go to the stairwell.    When he returned, the room was littered with debris, but his grandfather had suffered just one small scratch on his head.    “I was really worried, but I was really surprised,” Jonathan said.
      At a Fast Trip convenience store, 20 people ran into a cooler as the building began to collapse around them.    They documented their experience with a video that was drawing tens of thousands of views online by Monday afternoon.    The audio was even more terrifying than the images — earsplitting wind, objects getting smashed, wailing children and a woman praying repeatedly.    No one was seriously hurt.
      Around town, dazed survivors searched for missing relatives and tried to salvage clothes, furniture, family photos and financial records from their flattened or badly damaged homes.    Kelley Fritz said her boys, both Eagle Scouts, rushed into the neighborhood after realizing every home was destroyed.    When they returned, she said, “my sons had deceased children in their arms.”
  
  Volcano’s ash cloud drifts beyond Iceland
      Thormar Eller and Henny Hrund head out to check their livestock Monday as an ash cloud from the Grimsvotn volcano hangs over their farms in Iceland Monday.    The ashes are blowing toward Scotland, forcing British Airways, Dutch carrier KLM and Easyjet to suspend some flights, and forcing President Barack Obama to cut short his visit to Ireland.    Still, authorities say they don’t expect the kind of massive grounding of flights that followed last year’s eruption of another volcano, stranding millions of passengers.
  
  Brynjar Gauti /Associated Press
  
  
• 5/25/2011
  
  Joplin hunts for survivors in debris - Deadly tornadoes also strike Okla. by Alan Scher Zagier, Nomaan Merchant and Jim Salter , Associated Press
      JOPLIN, Mo. — Across this devastated city, searchers moved from one enormous debris pile to another Tuesday, racing to respond to any report of a possible survivor.
      Emergency crews drilled through concrete at a ruined Home Depot, making peepholes in the rubble in hopes of finding missing shoppers and employees.    A dog clambered through the remains of a house, sniffing for signs of the woman and infant who lived there.
      The toll rose to at least 122 dead and 750 people hurt. Just nine had been pulled alive from the aftermath.    Searchers fought the clock because anybody still alive after the deadliest single tornado in 60 years was losing precious strength two days after the disaster.    And another round of storms was closing in.
      Meanwhile, tornadoes killed at least five people in Oklahoma Tuesday and at least two died in a Kansas windstorm.    Another tornado touched down in the rural Oklahoma town of Canton.    There were no immediate reports of injuries there.
      For Milissa Burns, hope was fading that her 16-month-old grandson, whose parents were both hos-pitalized after the tornado hit their Joplin home, would be found.
      She showed up Tuesday at a demolished dental office near the child’s home to watch a search team.    At one point, a dog identified possible human remains, prompting searchers to dig frantically, but they came away with nothing.    Burns was weary but composed. Her daughter — the boy’s aunt — sobbed next to her.
      “We’ve already checked out the morgue,” Burns said.    “I’ve called 911 a million times.    I’ve done everything I can do.    He was so light and little.    He could be anywhere.”
  
  ‘Multivortex’ tornado
      Also Tuesday, the National Weather Service announced that the twister that crippled Joplin was an EF-5, the strongest rating assigned to tornadoes, with winds of more than 200 mph.    Scientists said it appeared to be a rare “multivortex” tornado, with two or more small and intense centers of rotation orbiting the larger funnel.    It was the deadliest single twister since the weather service began keeping official records in 1950 and the eighth-deadliest in U.S. history.
      Another top job was testing the city’s tornado sirens to make sure they were operable ahead of another round of potentially violent weather starting Tuesday evening and expected to last into today in some places.    Emergency officials warned jittery residents well in advance of the test.    David Imy, a meteorologist at the federal government’s Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla., said conditions were ripe for severe thunderstorms, including tornadoes, in parts of Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, Kentucky and Tennessee, as well as nearly all of Oklahoma.
      Throughout the search efforts, new reports emerged of clusters of victims: 11 people dead in a nursing home, three bodies found in an Elks Lodge.    Jasper County Emergency Director Keith Stammer said the scope of the destruction was making it difficult to account for people affected by the storm.    He sug-gested that many survivors, with nowhere to go, left for Kansas, Arkansas, Oklahoma or other parts of Missouri.
      “There’s a lot of confusion, a lot of inability for folks to communicate,” he said.    Authorities also announced a curfew from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m., with only resionly dents and emergency workers allowed inside the disaster zone.
  
  Search by networking
      People in the Joplin area and beyond have turned to online social networks to find loved ones or to learn about the plight of survivors.    Multiple Facebook pages created since the tornado are filled with requests for in formation about people who have not been heard from since Sunday.    Some pages in-clude photos of the missing.    Other posts share the news about Joplin residents who are alive and well.
      Several social-networking efforts focused on finding information about Will Norton, a teenager who van-ished on his way home from his high school graduation ceremony.    More than 10,000 people have supported the “Help Find Will Norton” community page on Facebook.
      Family members told The Associated Press that Norton and his father were on the road when the storm hit. Mark Norton urged his son to pull over, but the teen’s Hummer H3 flipped several times, throwing the young man from the vehicle, likely through the sunroof.
      The elder Norton was hospitalized.    Confusion clouded the number of dead and survivors.    A spokesman for Gov. Jay Nixon said 117 bodies had been found, along with 17 survivors pulled from the rubble.    The fire chief said he knew of 116 bodies and seven survivors.
      From the air, the difficulty of the search was apparent.    The tornado damage was “like taking a mower through tall grass.    That’s what it looks like,” said state Sen. Ron Richard of Joplin, who flew over the area with Nixon and Sen. Claire McCaskill.    He described the devastation as “down to the ground.”
      The Home Depot was identifiable only by the prevalence of the store’s signature orange color in the cor-rugated roofing and metal framing that looked almost as if it had been melted.    Jackhammers pounded against heavy concrete slabs that once held up the store.    A day earlier, rescuers found one person alive in the store’s wreckage but also recovered seven bodies under the concrete.
  
  A lucky snag
      Some searches that looked bleak ended in joy.    In what was once a neighborhood overlooking a park, John DeGraff and a friend were picking through the remains of DeGraff’s home when his neighbor, Larry Allen, walked up.    Tears welled in DeGraff’s eyes and he hurried to embrace Allen.
      “Larry, where you been, man?” DeGraff asked.    “We’ve been looking for you.    We’ve been digging through here since Sunday.”
      “God bless you,” Allen said.    He said he tried to get to the basement when the tornado hit, but got his foot caught on a step heading downstairs and waited it out there.    Good thing: The entire upstairs fell into the basement.    Allen was able to walk out and stayed with friends before returning Tuesday to see what was left of his house.
      Like DeGraff’s, it was destroyed.    DeGraff recovered a few record albums.    He smiled when he found a small football, a memento from his days on the 1980 team at Joplin High School.    As DeGraff yelled to other neighbors that Allen was alive and well, another neighbor brought him pictures and other personal items she found for him.    “I didn’t know people cared about me so much,” Allen said.    About a mile to the east, Robin Ross sobbed as she held her son, John, 21.
      For 36 hours, Ross hadn’t heard from her son, who doesn’t have a cellphone.    The morning after the storm, she raced the 12 miles from her Carl Junction home to Joplin and found the home where he was living in ruins.    She couldn’t reach his friends, and drove the neighborhood in search of him.
      Ross said neighbors told her they had seen her son after the storm hit, but didn’t know his location.    Finally, on Tuesday, a friend was able to find the young man and direct his mother to him.    He had climbed out of the wreckage and started helping with cleanup.
      “I’ve been crying since Sunday,” she said.    “And it wasn’t just for my family.    It was for everyone.”
      In Washington, Republicans controlling the House began advancing a $1 billion aid package Tuesday to make sure that disaster relief accounts don’t run dry after massive flooding along the Mississippi River and devastating tornadoes in Missouri and Alabama.    The House Appropriations Committee approved the disaster aid cash along with two spending bills, one funding the Homeland Security Department and the other veterans programs.
  
  BY THE NUMBERS
      Figures about the tornado that hit Joplin, Mo., on Sunday and the 2011 tornado season.
  JOPLIN TORNADO
  
  • People killed: 122.
  • Survivors rescued: 9.
  • Buildings destroyed: An estimated 8,000.
  TORNADO COUNT
  
  • Tornadoes to hit Joplin: 1.
  • U.S. tornadoes this month: More than 100.
  • Average number of tornadoes in May during the past decade: 298.
  • Record for tornadoes in May: 542 in 2003.
  • Tornadoes so far in 2011: Approximately 1,000.
  • Average number of tornadoes in one year during the past decade: 1,274.
  • Most tornadoes in one year: 1,817 in 2004.
  DEATH TOLL
  
  • People killed in U.S.
  • tornadoes for 2011: 490.
  • Highest recorded death toll in a single year: 519 in 1953.
  
  Volcano ash forces more flight cancellations
      London - Ash spewing from an Icelandic volcano is bringing disruption and days of uncertainty to more parts of Europe, as officials in Germany said dozens of flights will be grounded today.    Hundreds of flights were canceled Tuesday as winds blew the cloud of ash from the Grimsvotn volcano over Scotland and other parts of Europe. Experts say that particles in the ash could stall jet engines and sandblast planes’ windows.    Officials in Iceland said the amount of ash being released by the volcano is decreasing.    German authorities said it may be necessary to halt all air traffic coming and going from Berlin’s airports, as well as Hannover, depending on the winds.    In Sweden, 10 domestic flights were canceled Tuesday evening.    Critics have said the cancellations are a massive overreaction and have questioned the severity of the ash threat to planes.
  
  
• 5/26/2011
  
  Scientists link storms to warming - Atmosphere holds more moisture by Renee Schoof, Tribune Washington Bureau
      WASHINGTON — The deadliest tornadoes in decades.    Severe flooding on the Mississippi River.    Drought in Texas and heavy rains in Tennessee.    What’s up with the weather?
      Scientists say there are connections between many of the severe weather events of the past month and global warming.
      “Basically, as we warm the world up, the atmosphere can hold more moisture in it,” said Anne Jefferson, an assistant professor in the geography and Earth science department at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte.
      “Weather patterns that used to be limited to the South move farther north now,” she said.    “Both of those things together will increase the frequency with which we see these big rainstorms, and those are likely to increase flooding in the future.”
      Flooding on the Mississippi has become more frequent and more extensive since about 1950, Jefferson said.    This year’s huge flood was created by snowmelt and rain-on-snow in the upper Mississippi River basin and intense rain in its middle regions.
      “Climatically we have a higher frequency of rain-on-snow events, a real recipe for flooding,” she said.    “Also you’re getting more warm moist air from the Gulf of Mexico farther north up the Mississippi.    It’s both a warming and, more so, the fact that the weather patterns have changed and are projected to continue to change, so the precipitation patterns are changing.”
      All of these changes are part of the general shift in the world’s climate known as global warming — primarily the result of billions of tons of heat-trapping gases released into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels.
  
  
• 5/27/2011
  
  GE: Solar may soon cost less than fossil-fuel power by Bloomberg News
      Solar power may be cheaper than electricity generated by fossil fuels and nuclear reactors within three to five years because of innovations, said Mark M. Little, the global research director for General Electric.
      “If we can get solar at 15 cents a kilowatthour or lower, which I’m hopeful that we will do, you’re going to have a lot of people that are going to want to have solar at home,” Little said in an interview.
      The February 2011 average retail rate per kilowatt-hour for electricity in the contiguous 48 states ranged from 6.5 cents in Wyoming to 16.4 cents in Connecticut, according to Energy Information Administration data released in April.
      The average in Kentucky was 7 cents.
      GE, based in Fairfield, Conn., announced in April that it had boosted the efficiency of thinfilm solar panels to a record 12.8 percent. Improving efficiency, or the amount of sunlight converted to electricity, would reduce the costs without relying on subsidies.
      The thin-film panels will be manufactured at a plant that GE intends to open in 2013.    The company said in April that the factory will have about 400 employees and make enough panels each year to power about 80,000 homes.
      Solar-panel makers from Arizona to Shanghai are expanding factories to add more cost savings that analysts say will sustain the industry’s expansion.    Installations may increase by as much as 50 percent this year, worth about $140 billion, as cheaper panels and thin film make developers less dependent on government subsidies, Bloomberg New Energy Finance forecast.
      The cost of solar cells, the main component in standard panels, has fallen 21 percent this year, and the cost of solar power is now about the same as the rate utilities charge for conventional power in the sunniest parts of California, Italy and Turkey, the London-based research company said.
      Most solar panels use silicon-based photovoltaic cells to transform sunlight into electric-ity.    The thin-film versions, made of glass or other material coated with cadmium telluride or copper indium gallium selenide alloys, account for about 15 percent of the $28 billion in worldwide solar-panel sales.
      First Solar Inc., based in Tempe, Ariz., is the world’s largest producer of thin-film panels, with $2.6 billion in yearly revenue.    Little also said it will take “many, many years” to make a transition to a full smart grid, which would consist of millions of next-generation meters installed in businesses and homes, appliances that adjust their energy use when prices change, and advanced software to help utilities control electricity flows.
      “I think it’s going to be a long time before we can realize the full potential of the smart grid,” he said.    “But it is coming.”    GE this year plans to introduce the Nucleus, a device that will let consumers track their household electricity use with personal computers and smart phones.
      The company also is investing in its appliance and lighting unit, including $432 million for U.S. refrigeration and design centers announced in October. Utilities need to have incentives to install devices that save energy, and Congress needs to provide greater certainty on tax policy surrounding renewable energy, Little said.
  
  
• 5/28/2011
  
  Joplin tornado death toll rises to 132 - First funeral is held for storm victim by Nomaan Merchant, Associated Press
      JOPLIN, Mo. — Friends and family paid tribute to victims of the Joplin tornado on Friday, beginning the grim task of burying the dead as officials said the storm’s death toll had risen to 132.
      As the first funeral began just over the state line in Kansas, city officials said the body count had gone up by six from the previous day.    Meanwhile, the state was working to pare the list of missing people after the deadliest single U.S. twister in more than six decades.
      The original list of 232 missing or unaccounted for residents had dropped to 156 by Friday, Missouri Department of Public Safety deputy director Andrea Spillars said, adding that at least 90 people on the list had been located alive.
      But at least six others were identified as among the dead, and some names were added to the list.    City manager Mark Rohr acknowledged during an afternoon news conference that there may be “significant overlap” between the confirmed dead and the remainder of the list.    Still, search and rescue crews remained undeterred, with 600 volunteers and 50 dog teams out across the city Friday.
      “We’re going to be in a search and rescue mode until we remove the last piece of debris,” Rohr said.    Earlier Friday, hundreds of mourners packed Tennessee Friends Prairie Church in Galena, Kan., for the first funeral of a tornado victim.
      Few mentioned the twister, or even the circumstances under which Adam Dewayne Darnaby died four days short of his 28th birthday.    Instead, they celebrated the life of a devout Christian who loved his wife of less than three years and was a favorite uncle to nine nieces and nephews.
      Darnaby was described as a hunter, former high school football player and avid catfish fisherman who made fast friends.    He watched little television because, in the words of a close friend, “he was too busy living.”     Tallying and identifying the dead and the missing has proved a complex and sometimes confusing task.
      At least 19 bodies have been released to relatives, Spillars said.    Identification has been slow because officials have taken extra precautions since a woman misidentified one victim as her son in the chaotic hours after the tornado hit.    Authorities say their deliberate identification efforts are necessary to avoid more mishaps.    “It is important that we be absolutely accurate in this process,” Spillars said.
  
  
• 5/29/2011
  
  Montana gets rain respite by Stephen Dockery, Associated Press
      HELENA, Mont. — Crews and residents frustrated by a week of major flooding across Montana cleared debris from roadways and some muddied homes Saturday, even as they braced for more heavy rain expected during the Memorial Day weekend.
      A respite in weather that has brought as much as 8 inches of rain in a span of a few days to some areas allowed waters to recede slightly in several flooded communities, allowing emergency crews to fix water-damaged roads, although they said some would not be repaired before the water is expected to rise again.    But the break looked to be brief, with the National Weather Service predicting up to 3 inches of rain from Sunday to Monday, and mete-orologist Keith Meier warned that the moisture would raise floodwaters.    High temperatures and melting snow next week likely would swell rivers for even longer, he said.    “Take a little time to breathe today, figure out what you need to do, but don’t let your guard down,” said Cheri Kilby, disaster and emergency coordinator for Fergus County.
      States of emergency have been declared in 51 Montana counties, towns and American Indian reser-vations, and the governor deployed Montana National Guard soldiers to the Crow Reservation, one of the hardest-hit areas.
      The guardsmen were setting up unarmed security checkpoints on the Crow Reservation on Saturday afternoon to help with the emergency response.    Crow Tribe officials requested National Guard aid earlier in the week after heavy rain put much of the reservation underwater and left residents stranded.
      To the northwest, continued high waters in Roundup were taking a toll.    The small agricultural community seemed to be retaining much of its floodwater, and the Musselshell River was hardly declining, emergency officials said.    Road closings have cut the town off from all directions but the north.
      Jeff Gates, director of disaster and emergency services for Musselshell County, said people are still stranded around the town.    Gates said there is little emergency crews can do but provide people with supplies they need and wait for the water to go down.
      That doesn’t look to be likely for quite a while, he said.    He is concerned about the town running out of freshwater, and residents are being told to conserve as much as they can.    North Dakota Gov. Jack Dalrymple also said Saturday that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has expanded its federal emergency declaration to include seven counties and an Indian reservation fighting rising water on the Missouri River.
  
  NOAA says it won’t list bluefin tuna as protected
      Washington - The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Friday that the world’s most sought-after fish, the Atlantic bluefin tuna, does not warrant protection under the Endangered Species Act.
      The agency made the determination despite concerns that the bluefin fishery in the western Atlantic may have been devastated by the Gulf of Mexico oil spill caused by the BP Deepwater Horizon explosion.    The Gulf is the fish’s only known breeding area.
  
  
• 6/1/2011
  
  Floods hit Plains states by Associated Press
      PIERRE, S.D. — Crews raced approaching floodwaters Tuesday to complete emergency levees aimed at protecting South Dakota’s capital city of Pierre and other towns as the swollen Missouri River rolled downstream from the Northern Plains.
      Meanwhile, the mayor of Minot, N.D., ordered a quarter of the city’s residents — about 10,000 people — to evacuate areas along the flooding Souris River.
      Residents also prepared for flooding along the Missouri River in Nebraska and Iowa, where water has already spilled over the banks in several low-lying areas.
      Several thousand people in Pierre and neighboring Fort Pierre on the west bank have been working day and night to lay sandbags around their homes and move to safety.
      “We’re going to fight this flood with every fiber of our beings,” Gov. Dennis Daugaard said.
  
  
• 6/2/2011
  
  World Bank, cities vow to emit less gas - Promise is made at climate summit by Stan Lehman, Associated Press
      SAO PAULO — The World Bank and 40 cities from around the world joined forces Wednesday with a pledge to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
      The bank reached the agreement with the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, a coalition founded in 2005 with the aim of reducing carbon emissions. Its chairman is New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.
      Bloomberg, World Bank President Robert Zoellick and former President Bill Clinton announced the new partnership during the opening session of the C40 Large Cities Climate Summit.
      All three say the partnership will help cities to finance projects aimed at reducing carbon emissions while also supporting growth.
      “The leaders of C40 Cities — the world’s megacities — hold the future in their hands,” Bloomberg said.    “This unique partnership with the World Bank will help solve many of the problems that cities face in obtaining financing for climate-related projects.”
      According to the World Bank, C40 cities account for 8 percent of the global population, 12 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and 21 percent of the world’s global gross domestic product.
      Zoellick said the agreement will help cities “integrate growth planning with climate-change adaptation and mitigation, with special attention to the vulnerabilities of the urban poor.”
      Clinton said the partnership “will provide essential tools to help cities become more sustainable, grow their economies, create jobs, promote energy independence and ensure a stable future for generations to come.”
  
  At least 4 dead after two tornadoes touch down
      Springfield, Mass. - Four people died Wednesday when at least at least two tornadoes hit western and central portions of the state, Massachusetts’ Gov. Deval Patrick said.    Two died in Westfield, one in West Springfield, and one in Brimfield in the central part of the state.
      The storms did extensive damage in Springfield, the state’s third largest city.    Patrick said the path of damage from the first, more powerful tornado, stretched from Westfield, just west of Springfield, east to the community of Douglas.    He said the second tornado cut a path from West Springfield all the way to Sturbridge in the central part of the state.
      Patrick said there was severe damage in Hampden County, especially to buildings; at least 48,000 homes were without power, and the state opened shelters.    He declared a state of emergency and called up 1,000 National Guardsmen.
  
  Town confirms 134 dead after massive twister hits
      Joplin, MO. - Everyone reported missing since last week’s massive tornado in Joplin has been accounted for, and at least 134 people have been confirmed killed, state officials said Wednesday.
      The Missouri Department of Public Safety said the death toll includes 124 people from an unaccounted- for list; seven immediately taken to funeral homes after the storm; and three who have since died in the hospital from their injuries.
  
  McConnell accuses EPA of war on coal - He blames Democrats for rules he argues kill jobs, hike costs by Mike Wynn, The Courier-Journal
      LEXINGTON, Ky. — Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell accused the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday of declaring war on the coal industry and blamed Democrats for regulations that he said kill jobs and increase energy costs.
      In a speech to the Kentucky Coal Association, McConnell criticized the EPA for changing or reinterpreting long-standing regulations, which he said has threatened the future of some mines and left new projects in limbo.
      The agency’s attempts to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from coal plants amount to a “backdoor” energy tax, he said.
      “What the EPA is doing is outside the scope of its authority and the law, and it represents a fundamental departure from the permitting processes as originally envisioned by Congress,” McConnell said.    “And it’s time for Congress to rein the EPA in.”
      The Kentucky Republican noted that he is a cosponsor of legislation aimed at creating more regulatory certainty for the coal industry and at speeding up the mining permit process.    The measure requires EPA regulators to approve or reject permits within 60 days.
      McConnell said the legislation wouldn’t have an adverse effect on the environment, but critics counter that it would impose unreasonable deadlines on the EPA.    “Of course, the EPA’s real goal here is not to see the Kentucky coal industry comply with its boatload of regulations and red tape,” McConnell said.    “It is to see the Kentucky coal industry driven out of business altogether.”
      Tom FitzGerald, director of the Kentucky Resources Council, disputed the assertion that the EPA is overstepping its mission.
      For decades, he said, the Clean Water Act wasn’t implemented as Congress originally intended, and re-cent changes are requiring the coal industry to fully account for pollution and sediment for the first time.
      While politicians find it fashionable to criticize the EPA, “the truth is that for many years the coal industry has been skating by the edges of complying with these laws and in many cases not complying,” FitzGerald said.
      Elizabeth Crowe, of the Kentucky Environmental Foundation, said many EPA initiatives would not be needed if the coal industry were more concerned about protecting public health.    She cited higher cancer rates, asthma and learning disabilities among the health effects of coal and said Kentucky pays in the form of higher health care costs and lost productivity, in addition to the cost of environmental cleanup.
      “Thank goodness that we have an agency that is taking a closer look,” she said.    “The impact from lax regulations is really being felt today by communities all over Ken-tucky.”    The EPA didn’t respond to a request for comment on McConnell’s remarks.
      In his speech, McConnell also blasted Democrats for creating a “train wreck” of rules and regulations that he said are raising energy prices for consumers and hindering economic expansion as the nation emerges from a major recession.    Those policies will cause outsourcing of energy jobs and make the nation more dependent on foreign oil, he charged.
      “(Democrats) just don’t get it,” he said.    “They have failed to give the American people any realistic solutions … to this crisis of high fuel prices.”
      McConnell added that the U.S. must take advantage of alternative energy sources as part of an “all-of-theabove” approach.    He listed coal, oil shale and natural gas as essential elements of energy production.
      “A real-world strategy like this is the only thing that can succeed, because most Americans still drive their cars to work, and they are not solar- or wind-powered yet,” he said.
      Bill Bissett, the coal association’s president, said the message from McConnell’s talk is that changes affecting energy production will affect the economy as well.
      “The great concern here is that decisions … being made by bureaucrats and not Congress … are going to have devastating implications for people here in Kentucky,” he said.
  
  
• 6/3/2011
  
  Mass. digs out after deadly tornadoes - Storms kill at least 3 and injure 200 by Stephen Singer, Associated Press
      SPRINGFIELD, Mass. — The Rev. Bob Marrone was pained to see the steeple of his 137-year-old church shattered and strewn on the grass in the central Massachusetts town of Monson, yet he knows he’s more fortunate than some of his neighbors who lost their homes after tornadoes tore through the state, killing at least three people and injuring about 200.
      “I can see the plywood of roofs, and see houses where most of the house is gone,” said Marrone, pastor of The First Church of Monson.    “The road that runs up in front of my house … there’s so many trees down, it’s completely impassable.”    Residents of 18 communities in central and western Massachusetts woke to widespread damage Thursday, a day after at least two late-afternoon tornadoes shocked emergency officials with their suddenness and violence and caused the state’s first tornado-related deaths in 16 years.
      U.S. Sens. John Kerry and Scott Brown joined Gov. Deval Patrick on a helicopter tour of the damaged areas, including Springfield, the state’s third-largest city.    Kerry said it looked like a “blast zone” and was confident that federal disaster aid would be made available, particularly because of damage to businesses.    Patrick said it was unbelievable that so much destruction was caused in such a short period of time.    “You have to see it to believe it,” he said after a tour of Monson, a town of fewer than 10,000 residents near the Connecticut border.    “Houses have been lifted up off their foundations and in some cases totally destroyed or moved several feet.”
      Authorities still were calculating how many tornadoes hit the area.    Two people were killed in West Springfield and another in Brimfield, authorities said.    A Springfield death previously blamed on storms was later determined to be from a heart attack and was likely unrelated to the storms, Patrick said Thursday.    Public health officials said about 200 people sought medical treatment for storm-related injuries.
      One of the deaths in West Springfield was a woman who used her body to shield her 15-year-old daughter in a bathtub in their apartment, Patrick said.    The daughter survived.
      The governor declared a state of emergency and called up 1,000 National Guardsmen after the storms, which brought scenes of devastation more familiar in the South and Midwest.
  
  
• 6/5/2011
  
  FIRES PLAGUE ARIZONA - Crews race to protect small enclaves by Associated Press
      TUCSON, Ariz. — Crews in Arizona worked Saturday to protect several small communities from two large wildfires by clearing away brush near homes and planning to set fires aimed at robbing the blazes of forest fuels.
      The Wallow fire near the White Mountain community of Alpine grew to 218 square miles, or more than 140,000 acres, by Saturday morning.
      The fire is the third largest in state history, with smoke from it visible in parts of southern Colorado.    Fire officials said they had zero containment of the fire near the New Mexico-Arizona state line, which has forced an unknown number of people to evacuate.
      Crews were working to protect homes in Alpine and nearby Nutrioso from the fire and blowing embers that could start smaller, spot fires.    The fire had reached Alpine’s outskirts and was more than two miles away from homes in Nutrioso, said Bob Dyson, a spokesman for the team fighting the blaze.
      Authorities warned residents of the town of Greer on Friday night to be ready to leave, but no evacuation order has been issued.    Greer has fewer than 200 permanent residents, but the town and area attract many vacationers.
      The U.S. Forest Service said that four summer rental cabins burned earlier in the fire.
      The fire ranks just behind the state’s two largest wildfires in terms of size.    The largest was the 469,000-acre Rodeo-Chediski in 2002, followed by 2005’s 248,000acre Cave Creek complex fire.
      Meanwhile, crews were trying to protect a church camp and two communities from the Horseshoe Two fire that had burned 140 square miles in far southern Arizona.    It’s the fifth-largest fire in state history.
  
  600 evacuated after volcano erupts
      Santiago, Chile - The Puyehue volcano in southern Chile is erupting, and authorities said Saturday they had evacuated about 600 people living nearby.    There had been no reports of injuries.    The governor of Chile’s Los Rios region said fire could be seen in the volcano’s crater and smoke was billowing into the sky.    Authorities put the area around the volcano on alert Saturday morning after a flurry of earthquakes.    The National Emergency Office said it has recorded an average of 230 tremors an hour.
  
  
• 6/6/2011
  
  3 more die of injuries from tornado; toll at 141
      Joplin, Mo. - Three more people have died from injuries they suffered in the tornado that hit Joplin two weeks ago.    The city said on its website Sunday that the three additional people had died, bringing the total fatality count from the EF-5 tornado to 141.    It did not identify the three new victims.    The massive tornado that hit May 22 demolished about a third of the southwest Missouri city.
  
  
• 6/7/2011
  
  Volcano eruption causes widespread disruption
      Santiago, Chile - An erupting Chilean volcano sent a towering plume of ash across South America on Monday, forcing thousands from their homes, grounding airline flights in southern Argentina and coating ski resorts with a gritty layer of dust instead of snow.
      Explosions echoed across the Andes as toxic gases belched up from a three-mile-long fissure in the Puyehue-Cordon Caulle volcanic complex — a ridge between two craters just west of the Chilean-Argentine border that began erupting Saturday.    By Monday, about 4,000 people had been evacuated.
      Winds blew a six-mile-high cloud of ash to the Atlantic Ocean and even into southern Buenos Aires province, hundreds of miles to the northeast.
  
  
• 6/8/2011
  
  Residents forced to flee as forest fire approaches
      Springerville, Ariz. - Authorities ordered about 2,000 residents of the eastern Arizona town of Eagar to evacuate as a raging forest fire approached.
      Firefighters spent the day working to prepare a defense for Eagar and neighboring Springerville.    Eagar has about 4,000 residents and Springerville another 2,000.    In all, about 7,000 people were ordered to prepare for evacuation in recent days.
      The blaze has already burned 486 square miles of forest since it started May 29.
  
  Storm causes mudslides, floods; death toll at 23
      Port-Au-Prince, Haiti - Heavy rain hammered southern Haiti for a seventh straight day Tuesday, triggering floods and mudslides and causing houses and shanties in the capital to collapse.    The official death toll was 23 but could rise as remnants of the storm lingered.
      Aid groups have warned that the wet weather could worsen a cholera outbreak that has killed more than 5,300 people since October.
  
  
• 6/9/2011
  
  Raging Ariz. fire heads toward key power lines - Blaze could spur rolling blackouts in N.M., Texas by Susan Montoya Bryan and Bob Christie, Associated Press
      SPRINGERVILLE, Ariz. — A raging forest fire in eastern Arizona that has forced thousands from their homes headed Wednesday for a pair of transmission lines that supply electricity to hundreds of thousands of people as far east as Texas.
      The 607-square-mile blaze is expected to reach the power lines as early as Friday.    If the lines are damaged, parts of New Mexico and Texas could face rolling blackouts.    Firefighters who have helped keep the flames away from several towns in eastern Arizona feared that high winds could carry embers that can cause new, smaller spot fires.    Elsewhere in the state, a rural subdivision near Flagstaff is being evacuated because of a series of small fires that authorities are calling suspicious.
      Coconino National Forest officials say the Hill Fire is the combination of seven to nine fires that sprang up simultaneously Wednesday afternoon in the Turkey Hills area.    Authorities say the fires span a combined 50 acres but haven’t merged.    There are no immediate reports of injuries, but forest officials say one home has burned.
      The eastern Arizona blaze has blackened about 389,000 acres and destroyed 11 buildings, primarily in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest.    No serious injuries have been reported.    Fire crews worked furiously to protect the towns of Eagar and Springerville on Tuesday, and it appeared to pay off.    They created barriers between the towns and the fire and burned out combustible material, such as brush and trees.
      “It’s looking good to us. It did what the team said it would do when it came over the hill toward town,” Apache County Sheriff’s Office Chief Deputy Brannon Eagar said.
      About half of the 4,000 residents who call Eagar home were forced to leave Tuesday as the fire licked the ridges surrounding the area.    Those in neighboring Springerville worried as they awaited word of whether they, too, would have to flee.
      On Wednesday afternoon, authorities ordered more evacuations as the wildfire pushed closer to Eagar and Springerville.
      The fire prompted El Paso Electric to issue warnings of possible power interruptions for its customers in southern New Mexico and West Texas.
      Texas-based El Paso Electric uses two high-voltage lines to bring electricity from the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station west of Phoenix to the two states.    Losing the lines would cut off about 40 percent of the utility’s supply, possibly triggering rolling blackouts among its 372,000 customers.
      Officials in Catron County, N.M., told residents of Luna to be prepared to leave if winds push the blaze into western New Mexico.
  
  
• 6/10/2011
  
  Fire crews rescue Arizona town - Progress slow in battling conflagration by Susan Montoya Bryan and Bob Christie , Associated Press
      SPRINGERVILLE, Ariz. — Fire crews working feverishly overnight managed to protect most of a mountain resort town threatened by a massive wildfire in eastern Arizona, but some homes were lost, officials said Thursday.
      Fire information officer Suzanne Flory said overnight operations went well, particularly in the community of Greer, where the blaze had made a significant run.
      “Firefighters had a good stand and were able to protect the main part of town, but structures were lost,” Flory said.
      At least a half-dozen houses or cabins burned as the fire moved through the east side of Greer, said Jim Whittington, another spokesman.
      On Thursday, crews remained in the picturesque valley protecting hundreds of homes and lodges.    Winds were expected to blow more toward the east instead of the northeast, which could chal-lenge efforts to contain that flank of the fire, which was closing in on the New Mexico line.
      An air tanker and helicopters were to be joined by a DC-10 that can lay a line of retardant 100 yards wide and a mile and a half long to beef up lines around the resort community, which remained in danger.
      “I just thank God I haven’t heard of any injuries, and thank God they were able to stay in there and do what they can to protect Greer — it’s such a beautiful area,” said Allan Johnson, who owns Molly Butler Lodge.
      Based on better mapping, federal officials released updated figures on the massive blaze that began May 29 and has forced several communities to evacuate.
      The fire has scorched 525 square miles, mostly in ponderosa pine forest, down from the 607 square miles reported Wednesday. But it remains the second-largest fire in Arizona history.
      Fires officials said there appears to be no immediate threat to power lines carrying electricity from Arizona to New Mexico and west Texas.    But a fiber-optic line could be damaged, cutting phone, cell phone and Internet service to the area around the fire.
      In New Mexico, many residents in the community of Luna said they chose to stay even after being told to prepare to flee.    Many mowed or watered lawns and removed debris, while crews bulldozed lines and set backfires to build a border of fire protection.
      Crews also were concentrating on Nutrioso, where the fire was active Wednesday.    Flory said they should be helped by less wind.
      A spot fire at the edge of the larger blaze prompted the few residents left in Springerville and neighboring Eagar to flee.    That caused officials to worry about the prospect of the fire hooking around a burned-out area and racing toward town.
      Law enforcement officers went house-to-house in Springerville looking for remaining residents.
      The blaze destroyed 11 buildings, primarily in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest, before the losses in Greer. No serious injuries have been reported.
      The blaze was sparked by what authorities believe was an unattended campfire.
  
  
• 6/11/2011
  
  Massive Ariz. wildfire expected to enter N.M. - Crews make progress before high winds return by Susan Montoya Bryan and Bob Christie , Associated Press
      SPRINGERVILLE, Ariz. — A massive wildfire in eastern Arizona that has claimed more than 30 homes and forced nearly 10,000 people to evacuate is likely to spread into New Mexico soon, threatening more towns and possibly endangering two major power lines that send electricity from Arizona to West Texas.    The fire has burned 639 square miles of forest, an increase of 114 square miles from a day earlier, officials said Friday.
      Lighter winds Thursday and Friday helped the 3,000 firefighters on the lines make progress, but critical conditions remain, said Jim Whittington, a spokesman for the teams battling the blaze.    High winds are expected to return with a vengeance today.    “We have until then to get as much work as we can done and get to the point where we can sit back and watch the winds come and do what we have to then,” Whittington said.
      Fire crews plan to try to strengthen what lines they’ve been able to establish and continue burning out forested areas in front of the main fire to try to stop its advance.    It was officially only 5 percent contained Friday, but the actual figure is likely higher, Whittington said.
      The two Arizona-Texas power lines are still in the path of the fire, although Whittington said he was less concerned about them Friday.    El Paso Electric has warned its 372,000 customers that they may face rolling blackouts if the lines are cut.
      The blaze in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest has destroyed 31 homes or cabins, including 22 in the picturesque mountain community of Greer, Whittington said.    Two dozen outbuildings and a truck were also lost and five homes damaged in Greer when the fire moved in Wednesday night.
      A DC-10 tanker made three retardant drops near the community Thursday, and officials hope that by today the threat will be much less.    Nearly 10,000 people have been evacuated from the towns of Springerville and Eager on the edge of the forest and several mountain communities in the forest itself.
      “I can’t even speculate on when we can let people back in, but I can tell you we’re not going to let people back in until we can be sure they will be safe and don’t have to leave again,” Whittington said.
      Much of the spread toward New Mexico has actually been from fires started by firefighters trying to burn out fuels ahead of the blaze so it can be stopped, Whittington said.    That technique allows the fires to be controlled and less hot. But there is little doubt it will cross the border, he said.    “This fire is eventually going to get there, so we want something to check it when it does,” he said.
  
  
• 6/12/2011
  
  Arizona fire spreads; air alert issued - Giant blaze crosses into New Mexico by Associated Press
      SPRINGERVILLE, Ariz. — An eyestinging, throat-burning haze of smoke spewing from a gigantic wild-fire in eastern Arizona is beginning to stretch as far east as central New Mexico, prompting health officials to warn residents as far away as Albuquerque about potential respiratory hazards.
      The 672-square-mile blaze was no longer just an Arizona problem on Saturday as firefighters moved to counter spot fires sprouting up across the state line and lighting their own fires to beat it back.
      The forest fire remained largely uncontained, and officials worried that the return of gusty southwesterly winds could once again threaten small mountain communities that had been largely saved just a few days ago.
      Containment regressed slightly to just 5 percent, on the northeastern edge of the fire.    Levels of tiny, sooty particles from the smoke in eastern Arizona were nearly 20 times the federal health standard on Saturday.    That was down from roughly 40 times higher a day earlier, but it was all at the mercy of the everchanging winds.    Today could get even worse, said Mark Shaffer of the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality.    The microscopic particles, about 1/28 the width of a human hair, can get lodged in the lungs and cause serious health problems, both immediate and long term, Shaffer said.
      “Larger particles, you breathe in and you cough and it tends to get rid of it,” he said, adding that the tiny particles get “very, very deep into your system and are very difficult to expel.”
      Shaffer said the forecast for today was “pretty scary.”
      “It’s looking very unsettled, and they’re predicting winds out of the southeast to the northeast and heavy impact along Interstate 40. … It’s very problematic for both states.”
      New Mexico officials were continuously monitoring air quality and are advising residents from the Arizona border to Albuquerque to pay close attention to conditions.    “The people we’re most concerned about are obviously those with chronic health conditions, but when air quality gets this bad, it can actually have negative effects on everybody,” said Chris Minnick, a spokesman for the New Mexico Department of Health.
      “Just because you can’t see the fire doesn’t mean there isn’t an effect from the smoke blowing into the state,” he said.    Guarding the picturesque mountain town of Greer, where 22 homes and cabins were destroyed earlier in the week, firefighter Matt Howell, 28, described the difficulty of working in such smoky, choking conditions.
      “You get in there, and it’s hard to breathe,” he said.    “You start coughing, can’t get that good nice breath of air.”    More than 30 homes have been destroyed since the fire began May 29.    Thousands of residents have fled communities.
  
  
• 6/13/2011
  
  Fire evacuation order lifted for some - Arizona firefighters’ optimism increases by Brian Skoloff , Associated Press
      SPRINGERVILLE, Ariz. — Firefighters on Sunday expressed the first real sense of hope that they were making progress in their battle against a huge eastern Arizona wildfire burning since May, as officials began allowing roughly 7,000 residents to return home to two towns that had been threatened by the blaze.
      “We’ve been praying every day to come home,” Valarina Walker said while chatting with other re-turning locals outside a convenience store in Springerville.    The bed of her red pickup truck was overflowing with boxes of photo albums and family heirlooms.    “Just took what couldn’t be replaced, left the rest behind,” Walker said, crying.    “I’m just so happy and excited to be home.    We thank God for those firefighters.”
      Fire crews remained in Springerville and the nearby town of Eagar, guarding against flare-ups, but Apache County Sheriff’s Cmdr. Webb Hogle said residents could return home because the blaze was “no longer a threat to the citizens.”    About 2,700 other people who live in several resort communities in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest remained under an evacuation order.
      On the road into downtown Springerville, a working-class town nestled near the forest edge, a flashing sign read “We missed you, welcome home.”    “I just cried when I drove past that sign,” said Jane Finch, who had just returned to Eagar and had a tearful reunion with her husband, who stayed behind to keep the Circle K open for firefighters.    “It’s so good to be home and see all the people we missed.”
      Firefighters stopped short of jubilation Sunday morning but said they were finally gaining ground against the entire 693-square-mile inferno that was running along the New Mexico state line, even as the winds picked up considerably and containment remained at just 6 percent.    Fire is burning in New Mexico, but it was started intentionally by crews trying to burn out fuel in front of the approaching blaze.    “We were not going to let the fire dictate to us when it crossed the line,” said Jerry Kelly, a fire information officer working on the eastern front of the fire.    “We were going to make the decision when and where that happened.”
      About 30 homes and cabins have been destroyed since the fire began May 29.    Officials said about 4,300 people were working to bring the fire under control, and the blaze had so far cost about $27 million to fight.    Officials were still warning residents in the reopened mountain towns, and as far away as Albu-querque and Santa Fe, of severe air quality issues from the smoke.    Firefighters are battling another major wildfire in far southeastern Arizona, also near the New Mexico line.    The so-called Horseshoe Two blaze burned through 211 square miles or 135,000 acres of brush and timber since it started in early May.
  
  Volcano still a threat; more flights affected
      Santiago, Chile - Chilean officials ordered most residents already evacuated from homes near an erupting volcano to stay in shelters and with loved ones Sunday because of the threat of deadly landslides.
      Ash spread across the Pacific Ocean, prompting authorities to suspend flights in Australia and New Zealand.    The Cordon Caulle volcano’s activity had declined, but there was still a threat of deadly landslides and rocks and ash thrown from the volcano, Chile’s National Geology and Mines Service said in a statement.
      About 4,000 Chileans have been evacuated since the volcano began erupting June 4.
      Thousands of passengers in Australia and New Zealand were affected Sunday as the ash cloud approached. Australia’s national carrier, Qantas Airways, grounded flights within the country and in New Zealand.
      National carrier Air New Zealand didn’t cancel or delay any flights but adjusted flight routes and altitudes. Several airports in the southern Argentine region of Patagonia remained closed.
  
  
• 6/16/2011
  
  Missouri River rises relentlessly - Despite small dips, flood outlook is unchanged by Josh Funk and Grant Schulte, Associated Press
      HAMBURG, Iowa — Construction crews put the final touches Wednesday on a makeshift levee standing between a small Iowa town and the advance of Missouri River floodwater, while communities downstream took advantage of a temporary dip in water levels to bolster their own strained defenses.
      Water that breached the primary river levee just south of the Missouri-Iowa border on Monday had advanced to within 500 yards of the temporary floodwall guarding Hamburg, five miles to the northeast, and was expected to reach the structure by today, said Robert Michaels, the Army Corps of Engineers official who has overseen construction of the new levee.
      Any hopes, however slight, that the breaches might alleviate the long-term flooding threat for communities downstream were short-lived, as river levels that dipped slightly from the release of pressure began rising again Wednesday.
      The river has been rising for weeks as the corps released increasing amounts of water from its dams upstream to clear out heavy spring rain and snowmelt.    Releases at Gavins Point Dam in South Dakota hit the maximum planned amount of150,000 cubic feet of water per second Tuesday, and the corps wasn’t planning to reduce the amount it’s releasing from its dams until August at the earliest.
      Parts of Montana, North Dakota and South Dakota already have been flooded, and towns and cities farther south were still bracing for the worst.    The frantic pace of work that went into building the new levee guarding Hamburg slowed somewhat Wednesday, and most of those living in the threatened parts of town had cleared out.    Fire Chief Dan Sturm said crews planned to cover the levee with plastic before the water arrived.    River towns and cities in Nebraska, Iowa and Missouri continued bolstering their own flood defenses Wednesday, probing for any potential weakness.    “If there are weak spots, they will be shown very soon,” National Weather Service hydrologist Dave Pearson said.    Officials predict that the river downstream of the six dams will remain 5 to 7 feet above flood stage at most places in Nebraska and Iowa, and swell as much as 10 feet above flood stage in Missouri.
  
  Wallow wildfire becomes largest in state history
      SPRINGERVILLE, ARIZ. - A single campfire likely sparked what’s now the largest blaze in Arizona history, and authorities said Wednesday they have questioned two “persons of interest” as the massive wildfire and two others threaten separate corners of New Mexico.
      But investigators declined to call those questioned in the Wallow Fire suspects.
      The blaze in eastern Arizona’s Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest continued its cross-border threat to Luna, N.M., Wednesday as it grew to 478,452 acres, or about 750 square miles, fire officials said.    Of that, 4,911 acres were in New Mexico and 473,541 in Arizona, making it the largest in state history.    The blaze has forced nearly 10,000 people to evacuate.
  
  
• 6/17/2011
  
  High winds threaten fire lines - Crews battle blazes in parts of New Mexico, Arizona by Susan Montoya Bryan and Bob Christie, Associated Press
      ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Increasingly fierce winds Thursday tested firefighters protecting clusters of homes, a national park, watersheds and other areas from wildfires in the Southwest, including the largest blaze in Arizona history.    One fire at the Coronado National Forest in southern Arizona had burned or damaged at least 40 homes and 10 other structures over 14 square miles, or 9,500 acres.    It also destroyed a chapel, the Arizona Daily Star reported.    At peak burning time on Thursday afternoon, the fire is “probably going to look like a bomb went off,” fire information officer Dale Thompson said.
      The next three days will be tough because of the winds, he said. The blaze is 17 percent contained.    Elsewhere, smoke from a wildfire on the Colorado-New Mexico border lifted, allowing officials to reopen part of heavily traveled Interstate 25.
      Winds and searing temperatures also were moving into New Mexico, where firefighters battling a blaze that surrounded Carlsbad Caverns National Park had it 70 percent contained.    No smoke was visible Thursday morning, and firefighters were confident they had corralled the blaze and protected the park’s visitors center and employee housing.    The fire began Monday and charred about 30,500 acres of desert scrub, forcing the park to close for three days.
      The largest wildfire in Arizona history, meanwhile, grew again to 760 square miles, or 487,016 acres, as of Thursday morning, according to the U.S. Forest Service.    It remained 29 percent contained.
  
  Levees hold as Missouri River flooding progresses
      HAMBURG, IOWA - The surge of water released from dams holding back the rain swollen upper Missouri River reached deeper into Nebraska and Iowa on Thursday, headed swiftly toward Missouri and a soggy summer.
      Almost all the levees on the way have held strong.    There’ve been no significant injuries or deaths.    Now comes the weeks of fretting over whether levees in several states will continue to hold until the river starts to drop sometime this fall.
  
  
• 6/20/2011
  
  Winds whip up more fears in Ariz. and N.M. wildfires by Bob Christie and Walter Berry, Associated Press
      PHOENIX — Crews battled a pair of wildfires Sunday in the face of extremely high winds that officials feared could drive flames toward small towns in Arizona and New Mexico as firefighters tried to protect threatened homes.
      The massive Wallow fire that has been burning in eastern Arizona for three weeks breached a containment line along Highway 180 on Saturday and the homes of about 200 Luna residents remained under an evacuation or-der, with forecasts of 40- to 50-mph wind gusts renewing fire threats for the community.
      Despite the evacuation order, about half of Luna’s residents remained in town.    They have been told to stay off the roads so they don’t get in the way of fire crews, Catron County Undersheriff Ian Fletcher said.
      “If the fire comes back around or things change where they have to get out, we still have an egress point, so we will still escort them out of town,” Fletcher said.    “We’re expected high winds this afternoon.    We’re preparing for the worst and hoping for the best.”
      The Wallow fire burning up much of Apache Sitgreaves National Forest in Arizona is the largest of several wildfires burning in spots across the southwestern United States.
      Evacuation orders for Luna came on the same day that some other residents displaced by the fire that began May 29 were allowed to return home.     Residents of Alpine, Ariz., were allowed to return to their homes Saturday morning after being forced out by the Wallow fire for more than two weeks, but residents of the resort town of Greer still remained evacuated.
      The Wallow blaze has consumed nearly 800 square miles, a little more than 511,000 acres, and more than 3,500 firefighters were trying to stop its advance.    It is larger than a 2002 fire that burned 732 square miles and destroyed 491 buildings that had been the largest in state history.    Despite its size, the latest fire has destroyed just 32 homes and four rental cabins.    Containment rose to 44 percent Sunday.
      In southern Arizona, a wildfire south of Sierra Vista jumped containment lines, prompting authorities to order new evacuations.    Meanwhile, the remaining evacuations from a fire burning on both sides of the New Mexico-Colorado border were lifted Saturday morning for residents of communities outside Raton,N.M.
  
  
• 6/25/2011
  
  Residents flee flooding in North Dakota cities by Dave Kolpack, Associated Press
      MINOT, N.D. — The full weight of the Souris River hit Minot Friday, swamping an estimated 2,500 homes as it rose nearly 4 feet in less than a day and overwhelmed the levees.    City officials said they expected more than 4,000 homes to be flooded by day’s end.    More than a quarter of the city’s 40,000 residents evacuated earlier this week.
      Fed by heavy rains upstream and dam releases that have accelerated in recent days, the Souris surged past a 130-year-old record Friday and kept going.    The river was nearly 5 feet above major flood stage Friday afternoon and was expected to crest over the weekend after reaching more than 8 1/ 2 feet beyond major flood stage.    The predicted crest was a foot lower than initially thought, but that was little consolation in Minot.    “It’s emotionally draining for all of us,” Mayor Curt Zimbelman said.    As they had the past two days, emergency officials focused on protecting water and sewer systems to avoid the need for more evacuations.    Sandbags had been stacked as high as possible around the sewer plant.
      U.S. Sen. John Hoeven estimated more than 5,000 homes in the valley would eventually have water damage, including those in Minot and Burlington, where officials gave up sandbagging Thursday.    Deputy auditor Cindy Bader estimated Friday that more than half of the Burlington’s 1,000 residents had left to escape the rising Souris.    Some homes in Burlington’s evacuation zone had water deep in their first floors. In one neighborhood, the tops of two traffic signs barely peeked above the brown water, which reached just beneath the eaves of two nearby houses.
  
  Missouri flooding
      Residents in several northwestern Missouri communities collected the last of their belongings Friday as flooding inundated bottomland in Atchison County, and many of the area’s roughly 250 residents were fleeing after a levee failed the previous night.
      Officials said the levee breach was about three miles north of a bridge crossing the Missouri River and appeared to be about 300 yards wide. Phelps City was flooded, and water was entering nearby Watson and Langdon.
  
  China, Taiwan warn public, brace for potential typhoon
      Beijing - China alerted Shanghai and four coastal provinces Friday evening that a tropical storm is expected to become the season’s first typhoon to strike China.
      China is already struggling with disastrous seasonal flooding that’s put scores of reservoirs near their limits.    The Civil Affairs Ministry ordered Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Shandong and Fujian provinces to monitor Tropical Storm Meari and issue timely warnings to the public.
      Taiwan also warned its residents torrential rain could hit the eastern and southern parts of the island today.    As of Friday evening, Meari was 260 miles southeast of Taipei and was expected to move north or northwest at about 15 mph toward the East China Sea.
  
  
• 6/27/2011
  
  The heat is on - Sea level rising faster than previously thought because of global warming by Randolph E. Schmid, Associated Press
      Sea level has been rising significantly over the past century of global warming, according to a study that offers the most detailed look yet at the changes in ocean levels during the last 2,100 years.
      The researchers found that since the late 19th century — as the world became industrialized — sea level has risen more than 2 millimeters per year, on average. That’s a bit less than one-tenth of an inch, but it adds up over time.
      It will lead to land loss, flooding and saltwater invading bodies of fresh water, said lead researcher Benjamin Horton, whose team examined sediment from North Carolina’s Outer Banks.    He directs the Sea Level Research Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania.
      The predicted effects he cites aren’t new and are predicted by many climate scientists.    But outside experts say the research verifies increasing sea level rise compared to previous centuries.
      Kenneth Miller, chairman of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Rutgers University, called the new report significant.    “This is a very important contribution because it firmly establishes that the rise in sea level in the 20th century is unprecedented for the recent geologic past,” said Miller, who was not part of the research team.    Miller said he recently advised New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie that the state needs to plan for a sea level rise of about 3 feet by the end of the century.    Horton said rising temperatures are the reason behind the higher sea level.
      Looking back in history, the researchers found that sea level was relatively stable from 100 B.C. to A.D. 950.    Then, during a warm climate period beginning in the 11th century, sea level rose by about half a millimeter per year for 400 years.    That was followed by a second period of stable sea level associated with a cooler period, known as the Little Ice Age, which persisted until the late 19th century.
      Rising sea levels are among the hazards that concern environmentalists and governments with in-creasing global temperatures caused by “greenhouse” gases like carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels like coal and oil over the last century or so.
  
  Melting ice
      Although melting icebergs floating on the sea won’t change sea level, there are millions of tons of ice piled up on land in Greenland, ONLINE See the report at www.pnas.org.
      Antarctica and elsewhere. Melting that ice would have a major impact by raising ocean levels.    The result could include flooding in highly populated coastal cities and greater storm damage in oceanfront communities.
      While the new study does not predict the future, Horton pointed out that it does show “there is a very close link between sea level and temperature.    So for the 21st century when temperatures will rise, so will sea level.”
      Two of his co-authors calculated in an earlier paper that sea level could rise by between 30 and 75 inches by the end of this century.    And it might even rise faster than that, Martin Vermeer of Aalto Uni-versity in Finland and Stefan Rahmstorf of Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact reported in 2009.
      “Accurate estimates of past sealevel variability provide a context for such projections,” co-author Andrew Kemp of Yale University’s Climate and Energy Institute said.
  
  Sediment cores
      Horton’s team studied sediment cores from salt marshes at Sand Point and Tump Point on the North Carolina coast to develop their calculations of sea-level change over the two millennia.    They analyzed microfossils in the cores and the age of the cores was estimated using radiocarbon dating and other methods.
      For the years since tide gauges have been installed, those findings closely track the results from the study, the researchers noted.
      While Horton’s report is the first to produce a continuous record of the past 2,000 years, “other studies show similar changes, especially concerning the acceleration in sea level rise in the 20th century,” Miller said.
  
  
• 6/28/2011
  
  Residents flee wildfire; nuclear material called safe
      Los Alamos, N. M. - Thousands of residents calmly fled the town that’s home to the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory as a rapidly growing wildfire approached Monday.
      The blaze, which began Sunday, had destroyed 30 structures south of Los Alamos.    Lab officials said radioactive material stored at various locations on the lab property was safe from the flames.
  
  
• 6/29/2011
  
  Fire approaches N.M. nuclear lab - Officials say little chance it will reach waste drums by Associated Press
      LOS ALAMOS, N.M. — A wildfire advanced on the Los Alamos nuclear laboratory and thousands of outdoor drums of plutonium-contaminated waste Tuesday as authorities stepped up efforts to protect the site and monitor the air for radiation.
      Officials at the nation’s premier nuclear weapons lab gave assurances that dangerous materials were safely stored and capable of withstanding flames from the 93-square-mile fire, which as of midday was as close as 50 feet from the grounds.
      A small patch of land at the laboratory caught fire Monday before firefighters quickly put it out.    Teams spent the day removing brush and low-hanging tree limbs from the lab’s perimeter.
      “We are throwing absolutely everything at this that we got,” Democratic Sen. Tom Udall of New Mexico said in Los Alamos.
      The fire has forced the evacuation of the entire city of Los Alamos, population 11,000, cast giant plumes of smoke over the region and raised fears among nuclear watchdogs that it will reach as many as 30,000 55-gallon drums of plutonium-contaminated waste.    Lab officials said there was very little risk of the fire reaching the drums of lowlevel nuclear waste, since the flames would have to jump through canyons first.    Officials also stood ready to coat the drums with fire-resistant foam.
      Los Alamos employs about 15,000 people and covers more than 36 square miles, including about 2,000 buildings at nearly four dozen sites.    The streets of Los Alamos were empty Tuesday with the exception of emergency vehicles and National Guard Humvees.    Some residents decided to wait out the fire, including Mark Smith, a chemical engineer at Los Alamos.    He said he was not worried about flames reaching the lab’s sensitive materials.
      “The risk of exposure is so small,” he said.    “I wouldn’t sit here and inhale plutonium. I may be crazy, but I’m not dumb.”
  
  
• 7/22/2011
  
  Sierra Club anti-coal campaign gets funding boost - Bloomberg gift expands efforts by James Bruggers, The Courier-Journal
      New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s philanthropic organization has pledged $50 million to a Si-erra Club campaign that’s working to cut coal production by a third and phase out older coal-fired power plants, replacing them with cleaner energy sources.
      Sierra Club officials said Thursday that the money will help the California based environmental group expand its Beyond Coal campaign to fight climate change and coal pollution to 45 states over four years — up from the current15, which already includes Kentucky.
      It likely will allow the campaign to hire its first staff for Indiana, where the group has been engaged in a battle with other environmentalists over the construction of a Duke Energy coal gasification plant near Edwardsport in southeast Indiana, said Ohio-based Sierra Club representative Nachy Kanfer.
      Hoosiers also can expect to see more paid media advertising and perhaps legal challenges, he said.    “It’s a game-change,” he said.
      Duke Energy spokesman Lew Middleton said the plant is already 90 percent completed and uses new technology that greatly reduces emissions.    He said the Sierra Club is welcome to participate in the public process, but “our goal is to finish the plant and get it into commission by September 2012, and that is what we are going to do.”
      Sierra Club officials expressed their gratitude to Bloomberg and said they’d put the money to good use.
      “This partnership will help the Sierra Club to work with communities nationwide as they tell one coal plant after another that inflicting asthma and other diseases on their children is unacceptable and that they will not accept coal pollution in their neighborhoods,” said Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune.
      The group’s annual operating budget is about $80 million, according to 2009 tax filings.
      Across the country, the Sierra Club plans to double its Beyond Coal campaign staff to 200 from 100; seek to increase membership to 2.4 million from 1.4 million; and cut coal production by 30 percent by 2020.
      “While it may seem to be an inexpensive energy source, the impact (of coal) on our environment and the impact on public health is significant,” Bloomberg said in a written statement.    “Coal is a self-inflicted public health risk, polluting the air we breathe, adding mercury to our water, and the leading cause of climate disruption.”    But Indiana Chamber of Commerce President Kevin Brinegar questioned whether Bloomberg was misinformed about science and the environment, saying Indiana water and air quality is as good as it’s been in 30 years.
      Going after coal only threatens both Indiana’s and Kentucky’s manufacturing bases, which rely on relatively inexpensive electricity from coal, he said.    Both states are more than 90 percent dependent on coal for electricity.    Kentucky is the third-biggest coal-producing state; Indiana, the seventh.
      The Sierra Club asserts that southeast Indiana is already saturated with coal fired generators.
      States such as Indiana and Kentucky need to diversify their energy mix to avoid steep price shocks that will come with pending but necessary environment and health regulations, and growing international anti-coal pressure, said Lauren McGrath, a Kentucky-based Sierra Club organizer.
      She said she is one of two Beyond Coal representatives employed in Kentucky, and that it’s too early to say what additional resources the group will deploy in the state.    But she said that by working with its members and allies, the Sierra Club will continue to oppose new coal plants in Kentucky, fight new strip mines in Eastern Kentucky and work to shut down the state’s oldest power plants.    “We want to see elected officials and businesses commit to retooling their workforce to leverage new jobs in energy efficiency and renewable,” McGrath said.
      The Republican candidate for Kentucky governor — state Senate President David Williams — sees the issue differently.
      “Only when Broadway goes dark will these East Coast liberals learn the importance of our coal supply,” Williams said in a written statement.    “As governor I will resist with every mechanism at my disposal the national liberal establishment’s war on coal and defend Kentucky jobs every single day.”    Kerri Richardson, spokeswoman for Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear, said Thursday morning that she’d seek a comment on the Bloomberg donation.    Late in the afternoon, she referred the matter to Beshear campaign manager Bill Hyers, who did not return email and phone messages.
      Beshear, who has sued the Environmental Protection Agency over coal-mining restrictions and in Janu-ary called on the agency to “get off our backs,” has been sympathetic in the past to concerns about global warming.    In his 2007 campaign against Republican Ernie Fletcher, for example, Beshear acknowledged that humans are playing a role in global warming by burning fossil fuels.
      “I know that global warming is a real threat to Kentucky, to our nation and to the world as a whole,” he said at the time.    Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, a Republican, had no comment, a press aide said.    The Kentucky coal industry braced Thursday for more battles with environmentalists.
      “We will respond to (the Sierra Club) aggressively and make sure the public knows these kinds of changes in electricity production will have profoundly negative effects on the country’s economy,” said Bill Bissett, executive director of the Kentucky Coal Association.
      Across the nation, the Sierra Club campaign says it has stopped 153 new coalfired power plants from being built since it was launched in 2002.
      Among them was the planned Smith plant in Clark County, which East Kentucky Power canceled last year, McGrath said.    The coop largely blamed the economy and weak demand for power, but its spokesman Nick Comer acknowledged at the time that pressure from environmental groups played a role.    The power supplier has agreed to work with environmentalists, including the Sierra Club, on efficiency and renewable energy alternatives.
      Locally, the Beyond Coal campaign has organized neighborhood opposition to an expansion of a coal combustion waste landfill at the aging LG&E Cane Run power plant in western Louisville.    LG&E officials have said they may close the plant in five years because of tighter federal environmental regulations.
      “Clearly (the Bloomberg gift) is going to give Sierra Club chapters across the United States a stronger voice,” said Chip Keeling, LG&E spokesman. He declined to say whether that was a good thing or not.
      “We chose coal because it is the least cost,” he said.    “We follow what our policymakers say.”    Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer welcomed the news of the Bloomberg gift, said his spokesman, Chris Poynter.
      “The grant by Bloomberg is admirable and elevates the discussion about the future of energy in America,” Poynter said.
  
  
• 7/28/2011
  
  Government, auto industry strike deal on fuel efficiency by Juliet Eilperin, The Washington Post
      WASHINGTON — The Obama administration and major automakers have reached a deal to raise fuel efficiency standards for cars and light trucks between 2017 and 2025.    The deal resolves contentious negotiations over how to cut vehicles’ greenhouse gas emissions.    The agreement would require U.S. vehicle fleets to average 54.5 miles per gallon or 163 grams per mile of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2025.    That represents a 50 percent cut in greenhouse gases and a 40 percent reduction in fuel consumption compared with today’s vehicles, according to sources briefed on the matter.
      While the proposal falls short of the 62-mpg standard that environmental and public health groups had lobbied for, it represents a significant step in federal curbs on tailpipe pollution.
      It would require a 5 percent annual improvement rate for cars between 2017 and 2025.
      Light trucks would be required to have a 3.5 percent yearly efficiency improvement between 2017 and 2021, rising to 5 percent between 2022 and 2025, according to the sources, who asked not to be named because the details have not been announced publicly.
      The compromise would build upon a landmark accord President Barack Obama forged in 2009 with automakers, environmentalists, unions and California officials, who are allowed to set their own vehicle emission standards un-der the Clean Air Act.    California was the first state to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from cars and light trucks.    More than a dozen states have since adopted those restrictions, sparking a legal battle between U.S. automakers and California.
      The White House press office issued a statement Wednesday saying the president would unveil details of the program Friday.    “This program, which builds on the historic agreement achieved by this administration for Model Years 2012-2016, will result in significant cost savings for consumers at the pump, dramatically reduce oil consumption, cut pollution and create jobs,” the statement said.
      That first national program for vehicle greenhouse gas emissions required that by 2016, cars and light trucks must average 31.4 mpg and 250 grams per mile of carbon dioxide equivalent. In 2010, the U.S. car and light-truck fleet averaged 28.3 mpg and 314 grams per mile.
      But the battle over the second round of standards was hard fought.    Environmentalists, California and union officials pressed for deep cuts, while auto manufacturers maintained it was hard to predict what fuel efficiency gains would be possible more than a decade from now.    When an agreement was in doubt, California threatened to set its own, stricter fuel efficiency requirement.
      Stanley Young, spokesman for the California Air Resources Board, wrote in an e-mail Wednesday, “While the details are still under development between California and our federal partners, we feel this is overall a strong program that achieves real-world reductions and includes incentives to drive technology.”
  
  
• 7/30/2011
  
  New mileage standards aim to cut fuel use, pollution by Associated Press
      President Barack Obama and automakers ushered in the largest cut in fuel consumption since the 1970s on Friday with a deal that will save drivers money at the pump and dramatically cut heattrapping gases coming from tailpipes.
      The agreement pledges to double overall fuel economy to 54.5 mpg by 2025, bringing underthe- hood changes to autos starting in model year 2017 and introduce more electric and hybrid technology to pickup trucks.
      “This agreement on fuel standards represents the single most important step we have taken as a nation to reduce our dependence on foreign oil,” Obama said, sharing the stage with top executives of 11 major automakers and a top automobile workers union official.    “Just as cars will go further on a gallon of gas, our economy will go further on a barrel of oil.”
      When achieved, the 54.5 mpg target will reduce U.S. oil consumption from vehicles by 40 percent and halve the amount of greenhouse gas pollution from exhaust.    It builds on a 2009 deal between the Obama administration and automakers, which committed cars and trucks to averaging 35.5 mpg by model year 2016.
      The changes will save $8,000 in fuel costs over the life of a vehicle purchased in 2025, compared with a 2010 model, a White House analysis said.    The changes also are likely to push up the cost of a new vehicle, but just how much is unclear.
      The mileage target announced Friday isn’t exactly what consumers will see in their future cars.    A formula that gives credits to manufacturers for electric cars, the use of low-emission air-condi-tioning refrigerant and technology that shuts down engines at traffic lights means actual fuel economy is likely to be closer to 40 mpg.
      The deal was less than environmentalists and public health advocates wanted but more than desired by General Motors, Ford and Chrysler.
      For Obama, who watched his campaign promise to limit global warming pollution die when Republicans retook control of the House, the compromise provides a way around political roadblocks and a down payment on climate change.
      The deal also provides an answer to critics who say the president has not done enough to address high gasoline prices.    It promises to reduce demand at a time when Republicans in Congress have criticized Obama for not opening up more areas to oil and gas exploration after the massive Gulf oil spill last year.    Some environmentalists lauded the agreement Friday, but said that manufacturers owed taxpayers a bigger deal after bailing them out.    “An auto industry that owes its survival to taxpayer bailouts ungratefully flouted the public’s demand for fuel efficiency and less pollution,” said Dan Becker, director of the Safe Climate Campaign.
      By the time the new standards take effect, the government expects gas-electric hybrids to make up about half the lineup of new vehicles, with electric vehicles making up about 10 percent of the fleet.
  
  
• 8/7/2011
  
  10,000th rescued sea lion released - Calif. center also does research by Jason Dearen, Associated Press
      POINT REYES NATIONAL SEASHORE, Calif. — Two juvenile California sea lions paused for a moment at the edge of the sea, each raising their whiskered faces toward the silvery water before sliding in to freedom.
      For the Marine Mammal Center crew standing behind the rehabilitated pinnipeds on Thursday, it was a significant day: rescued sea lion No. 10,000, nicknamed Milestone, and 10,001, Zodiac Girl, had been nursed back to health and sent back to the wild.
      “There’s always some attachment.    There’s always some animal that captures your heart,” said Shelbi Stoudt, the center staffer who organizes the regular releases.    “It’s a bittersweet feeling because you’re sending them back home but you also don’t get to see them anymore.”
      Since it opened its doors 36 years ago in the Marin Headlands just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, the nonprofit marine mammal hospital has become famous for nursing sick marine critters back to health — but its biggest contribution perhaps has been its role in collecting and storing thousands of tissue and other samples from the animals it rescues along 600 miles of California coast.    The center’s mix of laboratory science, marine zoo and educational outreach has led to dozens of published scientific papers and helped push understanding of effects of toxic algae, disease and the effect of climate change on these coastal denizens.
      Only about half of the animals the center takes in survive to be released. Still, many of the more than 17,000 marine mammals — including entangled whales, otters and elephant seals — the center has aided or taken in have contributed samples that will help further research that can aid threatened and endangered species around the world.
      Indeed, many of the animals nursed back to health are not facing imminent extinction — there are 200,000 California sea lions in the wild — but their maladies and their genetic makeup are similar to other species in peril.
      California sea lions share genetic traits with Steller sea lions, which are a threatened species.    The center’s researchers say collecting and banking scientific samples from many of the thou-sands of sea lions the center has treated contributes to efforts to save Stellers.    Same goes for elephant seals, which share traits with the endangered Hawaiian monk seals.
      Milestone and Zodiac Girl had leptospirosis, a bacterial infection that attacks the kidneys and can be fatal.
  
  
• 8/9/2011
  
  Texas drought will harm wildlife habitat for years - Damage ripples through ecosystems by Ramit Plushnick-Masti, Associated Press
      CANADIAN, Texas — In a muddy pile of sand where a pond once flowed in the Texas Panhandle, dead fish, their flesh already decayed and feasted on by maggots, lie with their mouths open.    Nearby, deer munch on the equivalent of vegetative junk food and wild turkeys nibble on red harvester ants — certainly not their first choice for lunch.
      As the state struggles with the worst one-year drought in its history, entire ecosystems, from the smallest insects to the largest predators, are struggling for survival.    The foundations of their habitats — rivers, springs, creeks, streams and lakes — have turned into dry sand, wet mud, trickling springs or, in the best case, large puddles.
      “It has a compound effect on a multitude of species and organisms and habitat types because of the way that it’s chained and linked together,” said Jeff Bonner, a wildlife biologist with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department.
      Since January, Texas has gotten only about 6 inches of rain, compared to a norm of about 13 inches, making it the most severe oneyear drought on record.    Last week, the U.S. Climate Prediction Center said the La Nina weather pattern blamed for the lack of rain might be back soon, and if that happens, the dry spell would al-most certainly extend into 2012.
      The conditions, which have extended into parts of the Plains, including Oklahoma and Kansas, have been made worse by week after week of triple-digit temperatures that have caused reservoirs to evaporate, crops to wither and wildlife to die.
      Already, some rivers and lakes are at lows not seen since the1950s — the decade when Texas suffered its worst drought in recorded history.    And in some cases, bodies of water are at their lowest points ever, said Joseph Capesius, chief of the Austin field unit for the U.S. Geological Survey.
      Of the state’s 3,700 streams, 15 major rivers and more than 200 reservoirs at least seven reservoirs are effectively empty and more than half of the streams and rivers are at or below normal flow rates.
      The drought will most immediately cause fish to die, and such kills have already happened in parts of the state, including not far from the Canadian River, a normally flowing river in the Panhandle that in some places is barely a puddle fed by a drought-taxed spring.    In West Texas, O.C. Fisher Lake has been so depleted that fish have died from a lack of oxygen and bacteria has turned the remaining water red.    Without water, animals struggle with thirst. Few plants grow.
      Without plants, there are fewer insects.    No insects result in low seed production. nbsp;   The animals that rely on seeds and plants for nutrition — from birds to deer and antelope — have low reproduction.    Predators that rely on those animals as a food source remain hungry as well, and they reproduce less.
      “So there’s a domino effect that goes out in however many more branches than you can actually ever keep count of,” Bonner said.
      The impact on species also could last for years after the drought officially ends.    For example, quail normally nest in grass grown a year earlier, but because of the drought, there has been almost no grass growth this year.    That means many quail won’t be able to nest next year.
      With deer, the true impact may not be revealed for six years, when the low reproduction rates caused by the drought will leave an age gap between older bucks and younger deer.
  
  
• 8/20/2011
  
  Three die as flooding submerges vehicles
      Pittsburgh - Three people died in a flash flood after heavy rains submerged cars in Pittsburgh, officials said Friday evening.
      Vehicles were submerged on Washington Boulevard, which runs parallel to the Allegheny River in the city’s     Highland Park neighborhood, after thunderstorms dropped up to 3 inches of rain in an hour, the National Weather Service reported.
  
  Clouds of dust have left city choking
      Phoenix - A dust cloud has swallowed Phoenix at sundown three times this summer, covering the city with grit and baffling even longtime residents who can’t remember seeing so many dramatic “haboobs” during a monsoon season.
      A 1,000-feet-high wall of dust traveled at least 50 miles into metro Phoenix and neighboring Pinal County on Thursday evening.    It created dangerous driving conditions and caused some airline flights to be delayed.
      The storm, also known by the Arabic word haboob, also coated anything left outside in a thin layer of fine dirt and left some people who walked outside for a minute or two with grit between their teeth.
  
  
• 8/24/2011
  
  Quake rocks, shocks millions - In East Coast cities, panicked workers pour out of buildings by Bob Lewis, Associated Press
      MINERAL, Va. — Tens of millions of people from Georgia to Canada — and as far west as Kentucky and Indiana — were jolted Tuesday by the strongest earthquake to strike the East Coast since World War II.    Three weeks before the10th anniversary of Sept. 11, office workers poured out of New York sky-scrapers and the Pentagon, relieved it was nothing more sinister than an act of nature.
      There were no known deaths or serious injuries, but cracks appeared in the National Cathedral and three capstones broke off its tower.    Windows shattered and grocery stores were wrecked in Virginia, where the quake was centered.    The White House and Capitol were partly evacuated.
      The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake registered magnitude 5.8. By West Coast standards, that is mild.    But the East Coast is not accustomed to earthquakes at all, and this one unsettled some of the nation’s biggest population centers.
      In New York and Washington, people said their thoughts were of an explosion or terrorist attack.    In some cases, workers in Washington mentioned the tremors in phone calls to colleagues in New York, and seconds later, the shaking reached there, too.
      “We thought it was a bomb at first because everyone has 9/2011 on the brain and that it’s so close to September and the 10th anniversary,” said Cathy McDonald, who works in an IRS office in downtown Washington.
          Hundreds of people spilled out of the federal courthouse blocks from ground zero, workers in the Empire State Building rushed into the streets, some having descended dozens of flights of stairs.    “I thought we’d been hit by an airplane,” said worker Marty Wiesner.
      Adrian Ollivierre, an accountant who was in his office on the 60th floor when the shaking began, said: “I thought I was having maybe a heart attack, and I saw everybody running.    I think what it is, the paranoia that happens from 9/2011, and that’s why I’m still out here — because, I’m sorry, I’m not playing with my life.”
      The quake was felt as far north as Toronto, as far west as Indiana and Kentucky, and as far south as Atlanta and Savannah, Ga.    It was also felt on Martha’s Vineyard, where President Barack Obama is vacationing and was getting ready to tee off at a local golf course.    The White House said there were no reports of major damage to the nation’s infrastructure, including airports and nuclear facilities.
      Two nuclear reactors at the North Anna Power Station in Virginia were automatically taken off line by safety systems, said Roger Hannah, a spokesman for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.    The plant is in the same county as the quake’s epicenter, about 80 miles southwest of Washington and 40 miles northwest of Richmond.
      The Park Service closed all monuments and memorials on the National Mall, and ceiling tiles fell at Reagan National Airport outside Washington.    Many nonessential workers in Washington were sent home for the day.    The Capitol was reopened by late afternoon for people to retrieve their belongings.
      At the Pentagon, a low rumbling built until the building itself was shaking, and people ran into the corridors of the complex.    The shaking continued, to shouts of “Evacuate! Evacuate!”    The main damage to the building, the largest single workspace for the federal government, came from a broken water pipe.
      The National Cathedral said it had sustained “significant damage,” with three capstones, each shaped like a fleur-de-lis, breaking off the main tower.    Cracks appeared in the flying buttresses around the apse at the cathedral’s east end, the oldest part of the building.
      “Everyone here is safe,” the cathedral said on its official Twitter feed.    “Please pray for the Cathedral as there has been some damage.”
      Around Mineral, Va., a small town close to the epicenter, people milled around in their lawns, on sidewalks and parking lots, still rattled and leery of re-entering buildings.    All over town, masonry was crumpled, and there were stores with shelf contents strewn on the floor.    Several display windows at businesses in the tiny heart of downtown were broken and lay in jagged shards.
      The Geological Survey put the quake in its yellow alert category, meaning there was potential for local damage but relatively little economic damage.
  
  Hurricane Irene has U.S. coast on alert by Curt Anderson, Associated Press
      MIAMI — Officials and residents from Florida to the Carolinas stocked up on supplies, dusted off evacuation plans and readied for Hurricane Irene on Tuesday.    The first hurricane to threaten the U.S. in three years churned over tropical waters Tuesday after cutting a path through the Caribbean.    Federal officials said the storm could flood streets and knock down power lines as far north as New England.
      Irene lost some of its punch Tuesday afternoon and was downgraded to a Category 1 hurricane as it lashed the Turks and Caicos Islands, but the storm remains likely to regain strength and become a major hurricane before making a U.S. landfall.
      The hurricane has raked the Caribbean and could cause serious problems along the entire Eastern Seaboard, Federal Emergency Management Agency administrator Craig Fugate said Tuesday during a conference call with reporters.    Fugate urged people not to become complacent, even though the forecast is still uncertain and the storm may be days from hitting the U.S.    “We need to remind people, hurricanes are not just a Southern thing.    This could be the Mid-Atlantic and the northeast coast,” Fugate said.    “We’ve got a lot of time for people to get ready, but we don’t have forever.”
      Officials on North Carolina’s Ocracoke Island were taking no chances.    Tourists were ordered to evacuate today, while residents were told to be off the island by Thursday, said Tommy Hutcherson, who serves on the local board that issues such orders.    The barrier island is accessible only by boat.    It is16 miles long and mostly undeveloped, with a town at the southern tip.
  
  
• 8/25/2011
  
  EARTHQUAKE - East Coast has little seismic experience by Ben Nuckols, Associated Press
      WASHINGTON — There was a crack in the Washington Monument, and capstones were broken at the Washington National Cathedral.    In the District of Columbia suburbs, some people stayed in shelters because of structural concerns at their apartment buildings.
      A day after the East Coast’s strongest earthquake in 67 years, inspectors assessed the damage and found that most problems were minor.    But the shaking raised questions about whether this part of the country, with its older architecture and inexperience with seismic activity, is prepared for a truly powerful quake.
      The 5.8 magnitude quake felt from Georgia north to Canada prompted swift inspections of many structures Wednesday, including bridges and nuclear plants.    An accurate damage estimate could take weeks, if not longer.    And many people will not be covered by insurance.
      In a small Virginia city near the epicenter, the entire downtown business district was closed. School was canceled for two weeks to give engineers time to check out cracks in several buildings.
      At the 555-foot Washington Monument, crews found a 4-inch crack late Tuesday in the side of the monument section at the top of the obelisk where it begins narrowing to a point.    The damage was discovered during a visual inspection by helicopter.    It cannot be seen from the ground.    The monument, the tallest structure in the nation’s capital, was to remain closed indefinite-ly.    It has never been damaged by a natural disaster, said Bill Line, a National Park Service spokes-man.
      At the National Cathedral, spokesman Richard Weinberg said the building’s overall structure remains sound and damage was limited to “decorative elements.”    But the building will remain closed as a precaution, forcing officials to seek a new site to dedicate the memorial honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
  
  EAST COAST DISTRESS: BY LAND AND BY SEA - Irene has entire shore on alert - Hurricane strengthens through Bahamas by Martha Waggoner , Associated Press
      HATTERAS, N.C. — Hurricane Irene could hit anywhere from North Carolina to New York this weekend, leaving officials in the path of uncertainty to make a delicate decision.    Should they tell tourists to leave during one of the last weeks of the multibillion- dollar summer season?
      Most were in a wait-and-see mode, holding out to get every dime before the storm’s path crystalizes. North Carolina’s governor told reporters not to scare people away.
      “You will never endanger your tourists, but you also don’t want to over inflate the sense of urgency about the storm.    And so let’s just hang on,” North Carolina Gov. Beverly Perdue said Wednesday.    At the same time,she warned to “prepare for the worst.”
      In the Bahamas, tourists cut their vacations short and caught the last flights out before the airport was closed.    Those who remained behind with locals prepared for a rough night of violent winds and a dangerous storm surge that threatened to punish the low-lying chain of islands.    Irene has already hit Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, causing landslides and flooding homes.    One woman was killed.
      On the Outer Banks of North Carolina, some tourists heeded evacuation orders for a tiny barrier island as Irene strengthened to a Category 3 storm, with winds of 120 mph.    At 8 p.m. the storm was about185 miles southeast of Nassau in the Bahamas, some 800 miles south of Cape Hatteras.
      “We jam-packed as much fun as we could into the remainder of Tuesday,” said Jessica Stanton Tice of Charleston, W.Va. She left Ocracoke Island on an early morning ferry with her husband and toddler.    “We’re still going to give North Carolina our vacation business, but we’re going to Asheville,” she said.
      Officials said Irene could cause floods, power outages or worse as far north as Maine, even if the eye of the storm stays offshore.    Hurricane-force winds are expected 50 miles from the center of the storm, and low-lying areas from New Jersey to Maine are in serious danger of flooding.
      Predicting the path can be tricky, but the National Hurricane Center uses computer models to come up with a “cone of uncertainty,” a three-day forecast that has become remarkably accurate in recent years.    Forecasters are still about a day away from the cone reaching the East Coast, and a system currently over the Great Lakes will play a large role in determining whether Irene is pushed farther to the east.
      In New England, some beachgoers started second-guessing vacation plans.    Steven Miller, who runs a charter sport fishing company in Rhode Island, said he hasn’t received any cancellations, but no one has been calling to schedule trips in the next few days, either.
  
  
• 8/26/2011
  
  Irene storms toward coast - ‘Nightmare’ likely to hit large cities after N.C. by Associated Press
      BUXTON, N.C. — A monstrous Hurricane Irene tightened its aim on the Eastern Seaboard on Thursday, threatening 65 million people along a shore-hugging path from North Carolina to New England.    One of the nation’s top experts called it his “nightmare” scenario.
      The Category 3 storm with winds of115 mph —the threshold for a major hurricane —would be the strongest to strike the East Coast in seven years, and people were getting out of the way.    Late Thursday night, forecasters at the National Hurricane Center took South Carolina out of the hurricane warning and said Irene is aiming its fury at North Carolina.    The entire coast of that state is under a warning, and watches extend all the way to New Jersey.    Tens of thousands fled North Carolina beach towns, farmers pulled up their crops, and the Navy ordered ships to sea so they could endure the punishing wind and waves in open water.
      All eyes were on Irene’s projected path, which showed it bringing misery to every city along the I-95 corridor, including Washington, New York and Boston. The former chief of the National Hurricane Center called it one of his three worst possible situations.
      “One of my greatest nightmares was having a major hurricane go up the whole Northeast Coast,” said Max Mayfield, the center’s retired director.    He said the damage probably will climb into billions of dollars.    The head of FEMA said damages could exceed most previous storms because so many people live along the East Coast and property values are high.    “We’ve got a lot more people that are potentially in the path of this storm,” Craig Fugate said.
      The governors of North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New York and New Jersey declared emergencies to free up resources, and authorities all the way to Maine urged residents in low-lying areas to gather supplies and learn the way to a safe location.    With heavy rain and storm surge predicted for the nation’s capital, organizers postponed Sunday’s dedication of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial on the National Mall.
  
  
• 8/27/2011
  
  HURRICANE IRENE ZEROS IN ON COAST - 2 million people urged to flee by Michael Biesecker, Associated Press
      MOREHEAD CITY, N.C. — Tropical storm-force winds from Hurricane Irene began lashing the U.S. East Coast with rain Friday with the potential to cause billions of dollars in damage along a densely populated arc that included Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and Boston.
      At least 65 million people could be affected, and 2 million were told to move to safer places.    A hurricane warning was in effect from North Carolina all the way to Massachusetts — including for New York City, where more than a quarter-million people were ordered to evacuate ahead of Irene’s approach.    It was the first hurricane warning issued for New York City in more than two decades.
      Officials declared emergencies, called up hundreds of National Guard troops, shut down public transit systems and begged hundreds of thousands of people to obey evacuation orders.    Airlines canceled more than 2,000 weekend flights.
      The National Hurricane Center said the storm is unlikely to get stronger and may weaken before reach-ing land.    It said Irene could weaken to a tropical storm before reaching the northern region of New England but that even below hurricane strength, it would be powerful.
      As the storm’s outermost bands of wind and rain began to lash islands off the coast of the southern state of North Carolina, authorities in points farther north begged people to get out of harm’s way.    The hurricane lost some strength but still packed 100 mph winds, and officials in the Northeast, not used to tropical weather, feared it could wreak devastation.
      Speaking from Martha’s Vineyard Island where he was vacationing, President Barack Obama said all indications point to the storm being a historic hurricane.    “Don’t wait.    Don’t delay,” said Obama, who decided to cut short his summer vacation by a day and return to Washington.    “I cannot stress this highly enough: If you are in the projected path of this hurricane, you have to take precautions now.”
      Senior hurricane specialist Richard Pasch of the National Hurricane Center said there were signs the hurricane may have weakened slightly, but strong winds continued to extend 100 miles from its center.    The latest forecasts showed Irene crashing into the North Carolina coastline today, then churning up the Eastern Seaboard and drenching areas from Virginia to New York City before a weakened storm reaches New England.    Rain and tropical stormforce winds of at least 39 mph already were pelting North and South Carolina as Irene trudged north, snap-ping power lines and flooding streets.    Thousands already were without power. In Charleston, South Carolina, several people had to be rescued after a tree fell on their car, trapping them.    The East Coast, home to some of the country’s most densely populated cities and costliest waterfront real estate, was expected to suffer a multibillion-dollar disaster, experts forecast.
      In the Carolinas, swells and waves up to 9 feet were reported along the Outer Banks and thousands had already lost power as the fringes of the storm began raking the shore.    The center of the storm was still about 265 miles south-southwest of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, and moving to the north at13 mph.
      In Washington, Irene dashed hopes of dedicating a 30-foot sculpture to Martin Luther King Jr. on Sunday on the National Mall.    While a direct strike on the nation’s capital appeared slim, organizers said the forecasts of wind and heavy rain made it too dangerous to summon a throng they expected to number up to 250,000.
      Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers were told Thursday to pack a bag and be prepared to move elsewhere.    Gov. Andrew Cuomo said public transportation in New York City would shut down around noon today, and major bridges also could shut down if conditions become too windy.
      The nation’s biggest city has not seen a hurricane in decades, and a hurricane warning hasn’t been issued there since Hurricane Gloria hit in1985 as a Category 2 storm, said Ashley Sears, a National Weather Service meteorologist.    Even if the winds aren’t strong enough to damage buildings in a metropolis made largely of brick, concrete and steel, a lot of New York’s subways and other infrastructure are underground, making them subject to flooding.    New York’s two airports are close to the water and could be inundated, as could densely packed neighborhoods, if the storm pushes ocean water into the city’s waterways, officials said.
  
  
• 8/28/2011
  
  IRENE STORMS ASHORE - Hurricane knocks out power in march up East Coast by Samantha Gross, Associated Press
      MIAMI — Weaker but still menacing, Hurricane Irene knocked out power and piers in North Carolina, clobbered Virginia with wind, and churned up the coast Saturday to confront cities more accustomed to snowstorms than tropical storms.
      New York City emptied its streets and subways and waited with an eerie quiet.
      With most of its transportation machinery shut down, the Eastern Seaboard spent the day nervously watching the storm’s march across a swath of the nation inhabited by 65 million people.    The hurricane spanned 500 miles, its outer reaches stretching from the Carolinas to Cape Cod, and it packed wind gusts of 115 mph.    About 1.9 million homes and businesses were without power.    Although it was too early to assess the full threat, Irene was blamed for at least six deaths.
      The hurricane stirred up 7-foot waves, and forecast ers warned of storm-surge danger on the coasts of Virginia and Delaware, along the Jersey Shore, and in New York Harbor and Long Island Sound.    In the Northeast, drenched by rain this summer, the ground is already saturated, raising the risk of flooding.
  
  Storming ashore
      Irene made its official landfall just after first light near Cape Lookout, N.C., at the southern end of the Outer Banks, the ribbon of land that bows out into the Atlantic Ocean.    Shorefront hotels and houses were lashed with waves.    Two piers were destroyed, and at least one hospital was forced to run on generator power.    “Things are banging against the house,” Leon Reasor said as he rode out the storm in the town of Buxton.    “I hope it doesn’t get worse, but I know it will.    I just hate hurricanes.”
      By evening, the storm had weakened to sustained winds of 80 mph, down from 100 mph Friday.    That made it a Category 1, the least threatening on a 1-to-5 scale, and barely stronger than a tropical storm.    Its center was almost exactly where North Carolina meets Virginia at the Atlantic, and it was picking up speed, moving at 16 mph — up from 13 mph — as it reemerged over the Atlantic.    After the Outer Banks, the storm strafed Virginia with rain and strong wind.    It covered the Hampton Roads region, which is thick with inlets and rivers and floods easily, and chugged north toward Chesapeake Bay.    Shaped like a massive inverted comma, the storm had a thick northern flank that covered all of Delaware, almost all of Maryland and the eastern half of Virginia.
  
  Turning deadly
      The deaths included two children, an 11-year-old boy in Virginia killed when a tree crashed through his roof and a North Carolina child who died in a crash at an intersection where traffic lights were out.
      In addition, a North Carolina man was killed by a flying tree limb, a passenger died when a tree fell on a car in Virginia, and a surfer in Florida was killed in heavy waves.    It was the first hurricane to make landfall in the continental U.S. since 2008, and it came almost six years to the day after Katrina ravaged New Or-leans.    Experts guessed that no other hurricane in American history had threatened as many people.    At least 2.3 million were under orders to move to somewhere safer, although it was unclear how many obeyed or, in some cases, how they could.    Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told 6,500 troops from all branches of the military to get ready to pitch in on relief work, and President Barack Obama visited the Federal Emer-gency Management Agency’s command center in Washington and offered moral support.    “It’s going to be a long 72 hours,” he said, “and obviously a lot of families are going to be affected.”
  
  Halting Big Apple
      In New York, authorities began the herculean job of bringing the city to a halt.    The subway began shutting down at noon, the first time the system was closed because of a natural disaster.    It was expected to take as long as eight hours for all the trains to complete their runs and be taken out of service.
      On Wall Street, sandbags were placed around subway grates near the East River because of fear of flooding.    Tarps were placed over other grates.    Construction stopped throughout the city, and workers at the site of the World Trade Center dismantled a crane and secured equipment.
      Although there were plenty of cabs on the street, the city was far quieter than on an average Satur-day.    In some of the busiest parts of Manhattan, it was possible to cross a major avenue without looking, and the waters of New York Harbor, which might normally be churning from boat traffic, were quiet before the storm.
      The biggest utility, Consolidated Edison, considered cutting off power to 6,500 customers in lower Manhattan because it would make the eventual repairs easier.    Mayor Michael Bloomberg also warned New Yorkers that elevators in public housing would be shut down, and elevators in some high-rises would quit working so people don’t get trapped if the power goes out.    “The time to leave is right now,” Bloomberg said at an outdoor news conference at Coney Island, his shirt soaked from rain.
      A day earlier, the city ordered evacuations for lowlying areas, including Battery Park City at the south-ern edge of Manhattan, Coney Island with its famous amusement park and the beachfront Rockaways in Queens.
      The five main New York-area airports — La Guardia, John F. Kennedy and Newark, plus two smaller ones — waved in their last arriving flights around noon.    Flights from Louisville International Airport to New York airports were seeing delays Saturday, said Trish Burke, a spokeswoman for the Louisville Regional Airport Authority, who warned flights could be canceled if airports in other cities closed.
      The Giants and Jets postponed their preseason NFL game, the Mets postponed two baseball games, and Broadway theaters were dark.
      New York has seen only a handful of hurricanes in the past 200 years.    The Northeast is much more used to snowstorms — including the blizzard last December, when Bloomberg was criticized for a slow response.    For all the concern, there were early signs that the storm might not be as bad as feared.    Some forecasts had it making landfall as a Category 3 storm and perhaps reaching New York as a Category 2.    “Isabel got 10 inches from coming in the house, and this one ain’t no Isabel,” said Chuck Owen of Poquoson, Va., who has never abandoned his house to heed an evacuation order.    He was referring to Hurricane Isabel, which chugged through in 2003.
      Still, Owen put his pickup truck on a small pyramid of cinder blocks to protect it from the storm tide from the saltwater marshes between Poquoson and Chesapeake Bay.
  
  Stopping travel
      Airlines said 9,000 flights were canceled, including 3,000 on Saturday.    Airlines declined to say how many passengers would be affected, but it could easily be millions because so many flights make connections on the East Coast.    There were more than 10,000 cancellations during the blizzard last winter.    American Airlines spokeswoman Andrea Huguely said it wasn’t clear when flights would resume out of New York.
      “The one thing about a hurricane is that you can prepare for it and you just have to adapt your plan based on how the storm travels,” she said.    “It’s basically an educated guessing game.”
      Greyhound suspended bus service between Richmond, Va., and Boston.    Am-trak canceled trains in the Northeast for today.    The power losses covered more than 1.5 million homes and businesses and were heavily concentrated in Virginia and North Carolina. Dominion Resources reported almost 600,000 customers without power and Progress Energy 260,000, with much of the outages in Wilmington and Wrightsville Beach, N.C.
      Irene roared across the Caribbean earlier this week, offering a devastating preview for the U.S. — power outages, dangerous floods and high winds that caused millions of dollars in damage.
  
  
• 8/29/2011
  
  IRENE - BLOWS THROUGH - Hurricane spawns flooding, widespread power outages; New York spared brunt by Samantha Gross, Associated Press
      NEW YORK — Stripped of hurricane rank, Tropical Storm Irene spent the last of its fury Sunday, leaving treacherous flooding and millions without power — but an unfazed New York and relief all along the East Coast that it was nothing like the nightmare authorities feared.
      Slowly, residents began surveying the damage, up to $7 billion by one private es-timate.    For many, the danger had not passed: Rivers and creeks turned into raging torrents tumbling with limbs and parts of buildings in northern New England and upstate New York.    “This is not over,” President Barack Obama said from the Rose Garden.
      Flooding was widespread in Vermont, where parts of Brattleboro, Bennington and several other communities, were submerged.    One woman was swept away and feared drowned in the Deerfield Riv-er.    At least 21 people died in the storm, most of them when trees crashed through roofs or onto cars.    Meanwhile, the nation’s most populous region looked to a new week and the arduous process of getting back to normal.
      New York lifted its evacuation order for 370,000 people and said it hoped to have its subway, shut down for the first time by a natural disaster, rolling again Monday, though maybe not in time for the morning commute.    Philadelphia restarted its trains and buses.
      “All in all,” New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said, “we are in pretty good shape.”    The main New York power company, Consolidated Edison, didn’t have to go through with a plan to cut electricity to lower Manhattan to protect its equipment.    Engineers had worried that salty seawater would damage the wiring.    And two pillars of the neighborhood came through the storm just fine: The New York Stock Exchange said it would be open for business on Monday, and the Sept. 11 memorial at the World Trade Center site didn’t lose a single tree.
      The center of Irene passed over Central Park at midmorning with the storm packing 65 mph winds.    By evening, with its giant figure-six shape brushing over New England and drifting east, it was down to 50 mph.    It was expected to drop below tropical storm strength — 39 mph — before midnight, and was to drift into Canada later Sunday or early Monday.    “Just another storm,” said Scott Beller, who was at a Lowe’s hardware store in the Long Island hamlet of Centereach, looking for a generator because his power was out.    The Northeast was spared the urban nightmare some had worried about — crippled infrastructure, stranded people and windows blown out of skyscrapers.    Early assessments showed “it wasn’t as bad as we thought it would be,” New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said. Later in the day, the extent of the damage became clearer.    Flood waters were rising across New Jersey, closing side streets and major highways including the New Jersey Turnpike and Interstate 295.    In Essex County, authorities used a five-ton truck to ferry people away from their homes as the Passaic River neared its expected crest Sunday night.
      Twenty homes on Long Island Sound in Connecticut were destroyed by churning surf.    The torrential rain chased hundreds of people in upstate New York from their homes and washed out 137 miles of the state’s main highway.    In Massachusetts, the National Guard had to help people evacuate.    The ski resort town of Wilmington, Vt., was flooded, but nobody could get to it because both state roads leading there were underwater.    “This is the worst I’ve ever seen in Vermont,” said Mike O’Neil, the state emergency management director.
      Rivers roared in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. In the Hudson Valley town of New Paltz, N.Y., so many people were gathering to watch a rising river that authorities banned alcohol sales and ordered people inside.    And in Rhode Island, which has a geography thick with bays, inlets and shoreline, authorities were worried about coastal flooding at evening high tide.    The storm system knocked out power for 4 million people along the Eastern Seaboard.    Power companies were picking through uprooted trees and reconnecting lines in the South and had restored electricity to hundreds of thousands of people by Sunday afternoon.
  
  
• 8/30/2011
  
  IRENE’S FURY - FLOODING: Vermont and upstate New York inundated. DEATHS: Toll rises to 40 in storm-battered states. DAMAGE: Early estimates set at $7 billion to $10 billion. by Wilson Ring, Associated Press
      MONTPELIER, Vt. — The full measure of Hurricane Irene’s fury came into focus Monday as the death toll jumped to 40, New England towns battled epic floods and millions faced the dispiriting prospect of several days without electricity.
      From North Carolina to Maine, communities cleaned up and took stock of the uneven and hard-to-pre-dict costs of a storm that spared the nation’s largest city a nightmare scenario, only to deliver a historic wallop to towns well inland.    In New York City, where people had braced for a disaster- movie scene of water swirling around skyscrapers, the subways and buses were up and running again in time for the Mondaymorning commute.    And to the surprise of many New Yorkers, things went pretty smoothly.
      But in New England, landlocked Vermont contended with what its governor called the worst flooding in a century.    Streams also raged out of control in upstate New York.    In many cases, the moment of maximum danger arrived well after the storm had passed, as rainwater made its way into rivers and streams and turned them into torrents.    Irene dumped up to 11 inches of rain on Vermont and more than 13 in parts of New York.
      “We were expecting heavy rains,” said Bobbi-Jean Jeun of Clarksville, a hamlet near Albany, N.Y.    “We were expecting flooding.    We weren’t expecting devastation.    It looks like somebody set a bomb off.”    Meanwhile, the 11-state death toll, which had stood at 21 as of Sunday night, rose sharply as bodies were pulled from the floodwater and people were electrocuted by downed power lines.
      The tally of Irene’s destruction mounted, too.    An apparently vacant home exploded in an evacuated, flooded area in Pompton Lakes, N.J., early Monday, and firefighters had to battle the flames from a boat. In the Albany, N.Y., suburb of Guilderland, police rescued two people Monday after their car was swept away.    Rescuers found them three hours later, clinging to trees along the swollen creek.
      “It’s going to take time to recover from a storm of this magnitude,” President Barack Obama warned as he promised the government would do everything in its power to help people get back on their feet.
  
  Recovery begins
      For many people, the aftermath could prove more painful than the storm itself.
      In North Carolina, where Irene blew ashore along the Outer Banks on Saturday before heading for New York and New England, 1,000 people were still in emergency shelters, awaiting word on their homes.    At the same time, nearly 5 million homes and businesses in a dozen states were still without electricity, and utilities warned it might be a week or more before some people got their power back.    “Once the refrigerator gets warm, my insulin goes bad.    I could go into diabetic shock.    It’s kind of scary be-cause we don’t know how long it’s going to be out for,” said Patricia Dillon, a partially paralyzed resident of a home for the disabled in Milford, Conn., where the electricity was out and a generator failed.    Her voice cracking, she added, “I’m very tired, stressed out, aggravated, scared.”
      Russ Furlong of Barrington, R.I., remembered the two weeks he went without power after Hurricane Bob 20 years ago.    “Hopefully, we won’t have to wait that long this time,” he said.    “Last night we had candles.    It was romantic. It was fun.    But that feeling doesn’t last too long.”
  
  Travel disrupted
      Up and down the Eastern Seaboard, commuters and vacationers found their travel plans scrambled.    Airlines warned it would be days before the thousands of passengers stranded by Irene find their way home.    Some Amtrak service in the Northeast was suspended.    Commuter trains between New Jersey and New York City were not running.    Trains between the city and its northern suburbs were also disrupted.
      Kris and Jennifer Sylvester of Brooklyn sat on a bench in the town center in Woodstock, N.Y., with lug-gage at their feet and their daughters, aged 4 and 9, holding signs reading, “Need a Ride 2 NYC” and “Help Us, No Bus, No Train.”    They rode Amtrak out for a long weekend in the country, but were unable to get home.
      “We’re hoping for anything,” Jennifer Sylvester said.
  
  Widespread impact
      In Vermont, the state’s emergency management headquarters stood empty, evacuated because of river flooding from Irene’s heavy rains.     Rescuers used a boat and bucket loaders to pluck seven people from a swamped mobile home park in Lyndonville.    In upstate New York, authorities were closely watching major dams holding back drinking water reservoirs.
      Throughout the region, hundreds of roads were impassable because of flooding or fallen trees, and some bridges had simply given way, including a 156year-old hand-hewn, wooden, covered bridge across Schoharie Creek in Blenheim, N.Y.    In all, more than a dozen towns in Vermont and at least three in New York remained cut off by flooded roads and bridges.    Still, there were glimmers of good news. In Pennsylvania, the Dela-ware River largely remained in its banks, cresting several feet lower than feared.    The forecast for flooding on the Mohawk River in New York also eased at Schenectady, N.Y., where officials had worried that high water might threaten the city’s drinking water and sewage treatment plant.
      Early estimates put Irene’s damage at $7 billion to $10 billion, much smaller than the impact of monster storms such as Hurricane Katrina, which did more than $100 billion in damage.    Irene’s effects are small compared to the overall U.S. economy, which produces about $14 trillion of goods and services every year.
      While hard-hit regions, such as the North Carolina coast, will suffer from lost tourism, rebuilding homes, repairing cars, and fixing streets and bridges should provide a small boost to economy, experts said.
  
  Lessons learned
      Many people were surprised by the destruction that Hurricane Irene wrought in communities far inland.    But National Weather Service records show that 59 percent of the deaths attributed to hurri-canes since the 1970s have been from freshwater flooding.    As for why the flooding was so bad this time, Shaun Tanner, a meteorologist with the forecasting service Weather Underground, noted that August had been unusually wet, and Irene’s sheer size meant huge amounts of rain were dumped over a very large area.    “More attention should have been paid to the torrential rain that Irene was going to dump, not only on coastal areas but also in-land.    That was clear several days ahead of time,” Tanner said.
  
  DEATHS
      Irene, as a hurricane and a tropical storm, has led to the deaths of at least 40 people in 11 states:
  
  • Connecticut: 2
  • Delaware: 2
  • Florida: 2
  • Maryland: 1
  • Massachusetts: 1
  • New Jersey: 6
  • New York: 8
  • N. Carolina: 6
  • Pennsylvania: 5
  • Vermont: 3
  • Virginia: 4
  
  OUTAGES
  Total customers who lost power: 7.93 million
  Still without power: 4.68 million
  States affected: 13 (South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Rhode Island, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine).
  Utilities affected: 27.
  
  
• 8/31/2011
  
  Disaster aid battle brews in Congress by Andrew Taylor, Associated Press
      WASHINGTON — A battle between the tea party-driven House and the Democratic-controlled Senate is threatening to slow money to the government’s main disaster aid account.
      It’s so low that rebuilding projects from previous disasters like Hurricane Katrina and the Joplin, Mo., tornado have been put on hold to help victims of Hurricane Irene and future disasters.    The Federal Emergency Management Agency has less than $800 million in its disaster coffers.    A debate over whether to cut federal spending to pay for tornado and hurricane aid seems likely to delay legislation to provide the billions of dollars needed to replenish FEMA’s disaster aid in the coming budget year.
      House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., said the House will require offsetting spending cuts.    Key Senate Democrats said they’ll oppose that.    Of $130 billion provided in FEMA disaster funds over the past two decades, some $110 billion has been provided as emergency funding in addition to the annual budget.
      Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the Senate’s No. 2 Democrat, said Tuesday the number and cost of disasters have grown over the past few years and it’s unrealistic to require offsetting spending cuts.    “If (Cantor) believes that we can nip and tuck at the rest of the federal budget and somehow take care of disasters, he’s totally out of touch with reality,” Durbin said.
      Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La. — her state is still rebuilding six years after Hurricane Katrina — said she will take advantage of a provision in the recently passed budget deal that permits Congress to pass several billion dollars in additional FEMA disaster aid without budget cuts elsewhere.
  
  Airlifts help towns in Vt. - Food, water flown to residents cut off by Irene’s wrath by John Curran, Associated Press
      MONTPELIER, Vt. — National Guard helicopters rushed food and water Tuesday to a dozen Vermont towns cut off by flooding from the rainy remnants of Hurricane Irene in a deluge that took inland areas of New England and upstate New York by surprise with its ferocity.
      Vermont Emergency Management spokesman Mark Bosma said the helicopters would bring relief to people in a string of small towns where roads and bridges were washed out: Cavendish, Granville, Hancock, Killington-Men-don, Marlboro, Pittsfield, Plymouth, Rochester, Stockbridge, Strafford, Stratton and Wardsboro.
      Officials also used heavyduty National Guard vehicles to reach communities where roads may be passable.    In a disaster that caught many communities off guard, Irene dumped up to 11 inches of rain on Vermont over the weekend and turned placid mountain streams into roaring brown torrents that smashed buildings and ripped homes from their foundations.    At least three people died in Vermont.
      Small towns in upstate New York — especially in the Catskills and the Adirondacks — were also besieged by flood water.    All together, the storm has been blamed for at least 44 deaths in 12 states.    More than 2.5 million people from North Carolina to Maine were still without electricity Tuesday, three days after the hurricane churned up the Eastern Seaboard.    While all eyes were on the coast as Irene swirled northward, some of the worst destruction took place well inland, away from the storm’s most punishing winds.
      In landlocked Vermont, Gov. Peter Shumlin called it the worst flooding in a centu-ry.    About 260 roads in Vermont were closed because of storm damage, along with about 30 highway bridges.    The flood water took giant bites out of the asphalt in some places.    “We always had that truism that said, ‘Yup, yah can’t get there from here.’    In fact, that’s come to pass down here,” said Newfane, Vt., Town Clerk Gloria Cristelli.    Relief supplies arrived at Vermont’s National Guard headquarters early Tuesday in a convoy of 30 trucks from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
      When Irene unleashed its wrath on Newfane, Martin and Sue Saylor were among the lucky ones.    All they lost was the road to their hillside home, and their utilities.    Rivers of rainwater coursed down their hill.    Just below their home deep in the woods, the Rock River rose up out of its banks, too, claiming another road.
      “Stranded, nowhere to go,” said Martin Saylor, 57, standing by the Rock River on Monday, waiting for his brother to bring in supplies.    “I just don’t know what to do.”
  
  
• 9/1/2011
  
  Texas wildfires keep on coming by Associated Press
      POSSUM KINGDOM LAKE, Texas — Kathy Lanpher was showing a property to a client when she heard the gutwrenching news: A wildfire like the one that burned her home four months ago was threatening her new home.
      She raced back to her condo, grabbed a few belongings and, hearing that flames had cut off the road to safety, headed to the marina, where she and dozens of frightened neighbors eventually made it to safety by boat.
      The wildfire that started Tuesday in the Possum Kingdom Lake area — one of several in drought-stricken Texas and Oklahoma — had destroyed more than three dozen homes and scorched some 6,200 acres as of Wednesday.
      It has a long way to go before reaching the destruction of the two-week spring blaze that destroyed 160 homes in the community, but the late-summer blaze suggests Texas is dealing with its third yearlong wildfire season since 2005 — and its most severe.
      “It’s gotten to the point where normal rain events will have little positive impact on the drought and consequently the fire danger.    It’s going to take … a weather pattern change,” Texas Forest Service specialist Tom Spencer said.
      Texas is enduring its most severe drought since the 1950s, with bone-dry conditions made worse by weeks of triple- digit temperatures in many areas    Blazes have destroyed more than 5,470 square miles since mid-November, the typical start of the wildfire season.
      After battling what turned out to be seven of the 10 largest wildfires in state history this spring, firefighters didn’t catch a break this summer.    Usually the wildfire season wanes in the spring because of rain, greener vegetation and higher humidity.    But the normally wettest months, April through June, were anything but this year because of the La Nina weather condition that causes below-normal rainfall.
  
  Ky. regulators defend coal companies’ fines by James Bruggers, The Courier-Journal
      FRANKFORT, Ky. — Kentucky environmental regulators were forced to explain in Franklin Circuit Court on     Wednesday how they came up with fines of $670,000 for two coal companies instead of $720 million as calculated by environmental groups.
      The Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet had originally sought a combined $1.25 million but agreed to lower that after negotiations with the companies, Jeff Cummins, who oversees enforcement for the cabinet, said in his testimony.
      “I looked at a breakdown of the types of penalties and used my experience and judgment and facts as I understood them,” he told Judge Phillip Shepherd.
      Cummins said he did not believe the companies saved much money by commiting what cabinet officials largely described as administrative or paperwork violations.    A coalition of environmentalists who first alerted the state to the alleged violations has insisted that regulators were soft on the companies, and Wednesday they got their day in court.
      After bringing thousands of alleged water pollution violations by the companies to the attention of the Energy Cabinet last year, they were allowed to participate in the court case originally brought by the state as an enforcement action.    The trial pits groups such as Appalachian Voices, Kentuckians For The Commonwealth and Waterkeeper Alliance against the cabinet and the two coal companies.
      Last December, International Coal Group, now part of Arch Coal, agreed to pay $350,000 for violations at 64 mining operations in eight Eastern Kentucky counties.    Frasure Creek Mining agreed to pay $310,000 in fines covering violations involving 39 operations in six Eastern Kentucky counties.
      In her opening statement, the environmentalists’ attorney, Mary Comer, said the agreement was not fair, reasonable or in the public interest.    The groups have argued the penalties were too lenient for what they had found, including instances of the company saying he needed some of those details to determine if the penalties excess releases of pollution.
      Shepherd questioned R. Bruce Scott, the commissioner of the Kentucky Department of Environmental Protection, asserting the “whole integrity of enforcement process” relies on accurate discharge data as reported by the nies repeatedly copying and pasting the same water quality discharge data for mines in 2009 and 2010.    The case lifted some of the veils that typically surround legal action against violators of laws like the Clean Water Act, despite objections by the Energy Cabinet that the environmental groups’ court involvement would set a precedent that would lead to “chaos” in court.
      Information about how the state determines environmental penalties “will be used by defendants (against the state) in every court proceeding from here to doomsday,” said Mary Stephens, an Energy Cabinet attorney.
      But Shepherd, who once led the cabinet, rejected almost all her objections, were appropriate.    “I understand your protection of the cabinet’s deliberative process,” Shepherd told Stephens.    “But the more the court understands the process, it probably helps your case — and that there was a logical basis.”
      During testimony, state officials acknowledged that they did not know the number of pollution dis-charge pipes used by the companies and that they don’t always count each violation when assessing fines.    Another issue that came up is whether the cabinet downplayed the severity of the alleged vio-lations, deeming them to be just administrative mistakes instead of actual companies.    State officials suspected there might be actual pollution violations, but the agency needed more evidence before it acted, Scott said.    It has subsequently found that evidence, and last week, he said, the state brought new en-forcement cases against the two companies, alleging pollution violations.
  
  
• 9/2/2011
  
  Crews still working to contain wildfire
      POSSUM KINGDOM LAKE, TEXAS - Crews battling a wildfire that destroyed dozens of homes in a North Texas lakeside vacation community doused flare-ups on Thursday, hoping to keep the blaze from threatening more neighborhoods.
      The blaze that started Tuesday in the Possum Kingdom Lake area was about 50 percent contained on Thursday, authorities said.    The fire in the lakeside community 75 miles west of Fort Worth has destroyed at least 40 homes.
  
  
• 9/3/2011
  
  Small wave ends tsunami warning
      Amchorage, Alaska - A 6.8-magnitude earthquake in the Pacific Ocean prompted a brief tsunami warning early Friday for Alaska’s Aleutian Islands.
      The warning was canceled after only a small wave was recorded in Atka, an island community of 61 residents about 1,200 miles southwest of Anchorage.    The quake struck about 2:55 a.m. AKDT.    There were no reports of injury.
  
  
• 9/4/2011
  
  Nature loaded the dice against U.S. this year - Weather extremes were deadly, costly by Seth Borenstein, Associated Press
      WASHINGTON — Nature is pummeling the nation this year with extremes.    Triple-digit heat and devastating drought.    Deadly tornadoes.    Massive river flooding.    A billion-dollar blizzard.    Hurricane-caused flooding in Vermont.
      If what’s falling from the sky isn’t enough, the ground shook in places that normally seem stable: Colorado and the entire East Coast.    On Friday, a strong quake triggered brief tsunami warnings in Alaska.    Arizona and New Mexico have broken records for wildfires.
      Weather losses top $35 billion, and that’s not counting Hurricane Irene, according to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration.    There have been more than 700 U.S. disaster and weather deaths, most from spring tornadoes.
      Last year was the deadliest in a generation globally, but the United States mostly was spared.    This year, while there have been devastating events such as the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, Australia’s flooding and a drought in Africa, it’s our turn to get smacked.    Re-peatedly.    “I’m hoping for a break. … I’m not used to seeing all these extremes all at once in one year,” said Jeff Masters, a meteorologist who runs Weather Underground, a service that tracks strange and extreme weather.
      The U.S. has had a record 10 weather catastrophes costing more than a billion dollars: five separate tornado outbreaks, two different major river floods in the Upper Midwest and the Mississippi River, drought in the Southwest and a blizzard that crippled the Midwest and Northeast, and Hurricane Irene.    What’s happening is mostly due to random chance or bad luck, experts say.    But many say global warming increases the odds of getting a bad roll of the dice.
      There are still four months to go, including September, the busiest month of the hurricane season.    The insurance company Munich Re calculated there were 98 natural disasters in the first six months, about double the average of the 1990s.
      Add to that oppressive and unrelenting heat. Tens of thousands of daily weather records have been broken or tied and nearly 1,000 all-time records set, with most of them heat or rain related:
  
  • In July, Oklahoma set a record for hottest month ever.
  • Fairbanks, Ala., hit a record 97 degrees on July 11.
  • Houston had a record 24 days in August over 100 degrees.
  • Newark, N.J., set a record with 108 degrees.
  
      One of the most troubling extremes was the record-high nighttime temperatures, said Tom Karl of NOAA.    That shows the country wasn’t cooling off at night, which both the human body and crops need.
  
  Tropical storm stalls, soaks Gulf by Mary Foster , Associated Press
      JEAN LAFITTE, La — Heavy rain and strong wind gusts from Tropical Storm Lee knocked out power to thousands in south Louisiana and Mississippi on Saturday and caused evacuations in bayou towns.
      In New Orleans, sporadic downpours caused street flooding in low-lying areas early Saturday, but pumps were sucking up the water and sending it into Lake Pontchartrain.    Lee’s surge had not penetrat-ed levees along the coast, said National Weather Service forecaster Robert Ricks.    The sluggish storm stalled just before making landfall and threatened to dump more than a foot of rain across the northern Gulf Coast and into the Southeast in coming days.    No injuries were reported, and there were only scattered reports of water entering lowlying homes and businesses.
      In the bayou town of Jean Lafitte, water was a foot deep under the house of Eva Alexie, 76, whose home is raised about eight feet off the flat ground.    “I should be used to this,” said Alexie, a storm veteran who lost a home to Hurricane Ike in 2008.    “… I just thank God it won’t be getting in my house this time.”
      The National Weather Service reported two-day rain totals approaching 9 inches in parts of south Louisiana and more than 5 inches near the Mississippi coast.    Forecasts said rain totals along the coast could reach 10 to 15 inches, or even 20 inches in isolated spots.    More than 30,000 people were without power Saturday afternoon.
      About 235 oil and gas production platforms and 23 drilling rigs were evacuated due to Lee.    About 60 percent of the current oil production in the Gulf and almost 55 percent of the natural gas production has been shut in, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement said.
  
  U.S. sending N. Korea help after flooding
      Washington - The U.S. has sent a cargo plane of emergency supplies to North Korea as part of the impoverished country’s flood relief effort.
      The plane is carrying blankets, soap and hygiene kits, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said.    It will arrive in Pyongyang this weekend.    The U.S. has said it will provide $900,000 in aid to North Korea through U.S. charities.
  
  
• 9/5/2011
  
  Tropical Storm Lee spawns flood fears - Slow soaker spins off twisters in Miss., Ala. by Mary Foster , Associated Press
      SAUCIER, Miss. — Tropical Storm Lee dumped more than a foot of rain in New Orleans and spun off tornadoes elsewhere Sunday as its center came ashore in a slow crawl north that raised fears of inland flash flooding in the Deep South and beyond.
      Areas of Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi near the coast reported scattered wind damage and flooding, but evacuations appeared to be in the hundreds rather than the thousands and New Orleans’ levees were doing their job six years after Hurricane Katrina.
      National Hurricane Center specialist Robbie Berg said Lee’s flash-flood threat could be more severe as the rain moves from the flatter Gulf region into the rugged Appalachians.
      Closer to the Gulf, the water is “just going to sit there a couple of days,” he said.    “Up in the Appalachians, you get more threat of flash floods — so that’s very similar to some of the stuff we saw in Vermont.”    Vermont is still cleaning up and digging out dozens of communities that were damaged and isolated last week when heavy rain from Tropical Storm Irene quickly flooded mountain rivers.
      No deaths had been directly attributed to Tropical Storm Lee, although a body boarder in Galveston, Texas, drowned after being pulled out to sea in heavy surf churned up by Lee.    A man in Mississippi suffered non-lifethreatening injuries when authorities said he was hit by lightning that traveled through a phone line.
      The vast, soggy system spent hours during the weekend hovering in the northernmost Gulf of Mexico before its center finally crossed into Louisiana west of New Orleans, pelting a wide swath of coastline.    At 5 p.m. EDT, the National Hurricane Center said Lee had maximum sustained winds of 45 mph. Its center was about 110 miles west-northwest of New Orleans, moving north-northeast at 5 mph.    Some of the damage on the Gulf Coast, where tropical storms are an almost yearly event, appeared to come from spinoff tornadoes that touched down in southern Mississippi and Alabama.
      Dena Hickman said her home in Saucier, Miss., was damaged overnight by what she believes was a tornado.    It happened too fast for her to get her 12-year-old daughter, who uses a wheelchair, out of her bed.    “I laid on top of her to try to protect her,” she said.
  
  Hurricane Katia grows
      The National Hurricane Center in Miami said Hurricane Katia has strengthened to a Category 2 storm in the open Atlantic.    There are still no watches and warnings in effect, and it’s too soon to know if the storm will threaten land.
  
  
• 9/6/2011
  
  Wildfire destroys nearly 500 homes
      BASTROP, TEXAS - A roaring wildfire raced unchecked Monday through farms and ranches in Central Texas, destroying nearly 500 homes during a rapid advance fanned by howling winds from the remnants of Tropical Storm Lee.
      At least 5,000 people were forced from their homes in Bastrop County about 25 miles east of Austin, many of them fearing the worst while spending the night in emergency shelters.    Huge clouds of smoke soared into the sky and hung over downtown Bastrop, a town of about 6,000 people along the Colorado River.    The blaze consumed as much as 25,000 acres along a line that stretched for about 16 miles, Texas Forest Service officials said.
  
  
• 9/7/2011
  
  Texas wildfires’ toll at 4, homes ravaged by Michael Graczyk, Associated Press
      BASTROP, Texas — One of the most devastating wildfire outbreaks in Texas history left more than1,000 homes in ruins Tuesday and stretched the state’s firefighting ranks to the limit, confronting Gov. Rick Perry with a major disaster at home just as the GOP presidential contest heats up.
      More than 180 fires have erupted in the past week across the rain-starved state, and nearly 600 of the homes destroyed since then were lost in one catastrophic blaze in and around Bastrop, near Austin, that raged out of control Tuesday for a third day.    Whipped into an inferno by Tropical Storm Lee’s winds over the weekend, the blaze burned more than 45 square miles, forced the evacuation of thousands and killed at least two people, bringing the overall death toll from the outbreak to at least four.    “We lost everything,” said Willie Clements, whose twostory colonial home in a housing development near Bastrop was reduced to a heap of metal roofing and ash.    A picket fence was melted.    Some goats and turkeys survived, but about 20 chickens and ducks were burned to death in a coop that went up in flames.
      On Tuesday, Clements and his family took a picture of themselves in front of a windmill adorned with a charred red, white and blue sign that proclaimed, “United We Stand.”    “This is the beginning of our new family album,” the 51-year-old Clements said.
      Perry cut short a presidential campaign trip to South Carolina to deal with the crisis.    On Tuesday, he toured a blackened area near Bastrop, about 25 miles from Austin, and later deployed the state’s elite search team to the area to look for more possible victims.
      The unit, Texas Task Force 1, was sent to New York following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
      The governor would not say whether he would take part in this evening’s Republican presidential debate in California, explaining that he was “substantially more concerned about making sure Texans are being taken care of.”    But campaign spokesman Mark Miner said in an email later in the day that Perry planned to be there.
      Perry, a tea-party favorite who has made a career out of railing against government spending, said he expects federal assistance with the wildfires, and he complained that red tape was keeping bulldozers and other heavy equipment at the Army’s Fort Hood, 75 miles from Bastrop, from being putting to use.    Fort Hood was battling its own fire, a 3,700-acre blaze.
      White House spokesman Jay Carney said the Obama administration has approved seven federal grants to Texas to help with the latest outbreak, and “we will continue to work closely with the state and local emergency man-agement officials as their efforts to contain these fires.”
      About 1,200 firefighters battled the blazes, including members of local departments from around the state and crews from such places as Utah, California, Arizona and Oregon, many of them arriving after Texas put out a call for help.    More firefighters will join the battle once they have been registered and sent where they are needed.
  
  Storm’s remnants help some, hurt others
      Chattanooga, Tenn. - Disorganized yet deadly, leftovers from Tropical Storm Lee spread farther inland Tuesday, soaking much of the East Coast.    Areas still drying out from Irene were hit with more rain while farmers in the Southeast welcomed the downpours.
      Lee spawned tornadoes, flooded roads and homes, uprooted trees, and knocked out power to hundreds of thousands.    Winds from the storm had fanned wildfires in Louisiana and Texas.    The soggy ground meant even modest winds were toppling trees onto homes and cars.    A falling tree killed a Chattanooga woman who was moving her car, police said.
  
  
• 9/8/2011
  
  Central Texas wildfire destroys 800 homes - Firefighters gain ground; team searches for victims by April Castro, Associated Press
      BASTROP, Texas — Firefighters gained ground Wednesday against one of the most destructive wildfires in Texas history even as the number of homes lost reached an estimated 800, and an elite search team set out to find any victims in the smoking ruins.    Gov. Rick Perry, meanwhile, resumed his presidential campaign after rushing home over the weekend to deal with the crisis, traveling to California to meet his Republican rivals Wednesday night in his first nationally televised debate.
      The blaze has left at least two people dead — their bodies were found Tuesday.    It has blackened about 45 square miles around Bastrop and cast a haze over Austin, 25 miles to the east, where the air smelled strongly of pine and cedar.    Firefighters reported that the flames were at least 30 percent contained after burning uncontrolled for three days.    They credited an easing of the winds from Tropical Storm Lee that had caused the fire to explode over the weekend.    Nevertheless, the number of homes reported destroyed rose from about 600 the day before.
      The wildfire is the most catastrophic of more than 170 blazes that have erupted in the past week across the Lone Star State, where the countryside is perilously dry because of one of the most severe droughts on record in Texas.    In addition to the two victims in the Bastrop fire, the outbreak is blamed for two deaths elsewhere.    Texas Task Force 1, a search team that was sent to New York after the 9/2011 attacks and to New Orleans aftermath Hurricane Katrina, set out in the Bastrop area, using dogs trained to sniff out bodies.    Mike Fisher, the Bastrop County Emergency Operations Agency’s incident commander, said he didn’t know if there were any more dead, but “if there are bodies out there, that team is going to find them.”
      Several thousand people evacuated ahead of the fire, but only about 2,500 registered with the county.    Across the state, about1,200 firefighters battled the blazes, including crews from as far away as California and Oregon.    The outbreak has made this the state’s costliest wildfire season on record, with $216 million in firefighting expenses since late 2010.    The crisis is unfolding months after Perry signed a budget that cut funding to the Texas Forest Service by one-third.    Yet the agency insisted that being $35 million lighter hasn’t left the state less equipped to fight the latest fires.    Under the new budget, which went into effect last week, no Forest Service firefighters were laid off, and the bulk of cutbacks will be felt by volunteer fire departments that were denied money for new trucks, said Robbie Dewitt, the agency’s finance officer.
  
  Fuel surcharge urged on shipping
      AMSTERDAM - U.N. climate negotiators should consider a fuel surcharge on international shipping to partly finance a $100 billion annual pledge to help developing countries meet the challenges of global warming, according to a proposal by environmental groups.
      Oxfam and the World Wildlife Fund suggested a levy of $25 per ton on fuels that drive the global mer-chant marine, which transports 90 percent of world trade and contributes about 3 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.    A surcharge at that level would add 0.2 percent to shipping costs, or $2 on every $1,000, the report said, but would raise at least $25 billion a year.
  
  
• 9/9/2011
  
  Lee soaks Northeast; 100,000 told to leave by Michael Rubinkam, Associated Press
      WILKES-BARRE, Pa. — The remnants of Tropical Storm Lee poured water on top of the already saturated Northeast on Thursday, closing off inland cities and interstates as about 100,000 people in three states were ordered to flee the Susquehanna River’s worst flooding in nearly 40 years.
      Most of the evacuations were ordered in and around Wilkes-Barre, where the levee system is just high enough to hold back the river if it crests at the predicted level.    Even if the levees hold, 800 to 900 un-protected homes were in danger.    If they fail, thousands of buildings could be lost.    Up to 75,000 residents were ordered to leave.    The mayor told them to pack food, clothes and medicine and plan for a three-day evacuation.
      “This is a scary situation,” said Stephen Bekanich, Luzerne County’s emergency management director.    He said officials were confident the levees would work but were seeking volunteers to lay sand-bags on both sides of the river.    The river was projected to crest overnight at 41feet — the same height as the levee system.    In Hummelstown, another Pennsylvania community on the river, Donna MacLeod had to be rescued from her home.
      “I’m heartsick,” she said.    “I know I lost two cars and everything that was in my basement and everything that was on the first floor.    But I have my life and I have my dog, so that’s good.”
      Upriver in Binghamton, N.Y., a city of about 45,000, the Susquehanna coursed into the streets and climbed halfway up lampposts at a downtown plaza.    Buses and then boats were used to evacuate resi-dents, and National Guard helicopters were on standby.
      Road closures effectively sealed Binghamton off to outside traffic as emergency responders scrambled to evacuate holdouts who didn’t heed warnings to leave.
      “It’s going to get worse,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo said, warning people to leave when they get the order.    Some 20,000 evacuations were ordered for the Binghamton area, and another 6,000 to 10,000 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania’s capital.
      Up to 9 inches of rain fell in parts of Pennsylvania, and a similar amount fell in Bing-hamton.    Rivers and streams passed or approached flood stage from Maryland to Massachusetts, and experts said more flooding was coming.
      The storm compounded the misery for some people still trying to bounce back from Hurricane Irene.
      Some of the areas hardest hit by the August storm, such as Vermont, avoided the brunt of the latest bad weather.
      Commuters and other travelers sought detours as highways and other roads were flooded out, including sections of New York’s Interstate 88, which follows the Susquehanna’s path.    In eastern Pennsylvania, where hundreds of roads were closed, floods and a rock slide partially closed the Schuylkill Expressway, a major artery into Philadelphia.    Amtrak passenger service on New York’s east-west corridor was canceled, as were classes at many colleges and schools across the Northeast.
  
  Texas takes on fire in air - Firefighters look to deal big blow by Christopher Sherman, Associated Press
      BASTROP, Texas — Firefighters rushed Thursday to prepare their biggest weapon for an aerial assault of a massive wildfire that has raged for days, incinerating nearly 1,400 homes and miles of parched land in Central Texas.    Crews made steady progress against the massive Bastrop County fire and surrounded its biggest flames as they finalized plans to deploy a converted DC-10 jetliner today capable of dropping 12,000 gallons of retardant on the blaze and smoldering hotspots across some 45 square miles.    Concern lingered, how-ever, about wind sparking flare-ups or fanning flames outside the area that had been surrounded by containment lines.    “I still think we turned a corner, a lot of progress is being made,” said Bastrop County Sheriff Terry Pickering.
      The DC-10 — nation’s biggest firefighting jet — is just one strategy being the community unfamiliar with massive wildfires is employing to finally get control of the blaze.    It’s been the most catastrophic of nearly 180 wildfires the forest service says erupted across Texas this week in an outbreak that’s left nearly 1,700 homes statewide in charred ruins, killed four people and forced thousands of people to evacuate.
      Federal forest service officials contacted 10 Tanker Air Carrier, LLC, of Victorville, Calif., which leases the DC-10 to the U.S. Forest Service and states as needed, and asked that the company “ferry it as quickly as possible” to Texas, said CEO Rick Hatton.
      The massive plane arrived Wednesday in Austin, about 25 miles west of the blaze, but couldn’t be used until today because authorities needed time to assemble the equipment and prepare the retardant, forest service spokeswoman Holly Huffman said.
      Hatton said because Austin is not a tanker base and doesn’t have retardantloading abilities, a mobile unit needed to be brought in to prepare the plane, accounting for some of the delay getting the tanker in the air.    In California, which previously had an exclusive contract with 10 Tanker Air Carrier for a DC-10, there are two locations where the state can load and re-load the tankers with retardant, allowing faster deployment, said Julie Hutchinson, a battalion chief for California Department of Forestry & Fire Protection.    “I think we’ll be (in Texas) for a number of days,” Hatton said.    “We’ll be able to do a lot of good because the fires are very close.    So we’ll fly multiple missions on the Bastrop area, I presume.”
      Officials on Thursday allowed some of the 5,000 evacuated area residents to return to neighborhoods untouched by fire and no longer considered threatened, but authorities declined to specify exactly how many were being al-lowed to go back.    The move, however, wasn’t enough to console weary evacuees still unable to check on homes in burned areas.    One man shouted “when are you going to let us in?”    While another asked the sheriff how his home would be protected while he was shut out, but neighbors 100 yards away were let in.
  
  
• 9/10/2011
  
  Record flooding starting to recede
      BLOOMSBURG, PA. - The Susquehanna River began receding Friday in Pennsylvania and New York after swamping thousands of homes and businesses in some of the highest flooding on record.    But most of the 100,000 people forced to leave could do little more than worry as they waited for the all-clear.
      “I haven’t even been able to get close to it to see what’s left.    I don’t know what we’re going to do,” said Carolyn White, 68, of West Pittston, Pa.
      In many places, the river broke records set nearly 40 years ago after Hurricane Agnes.
  
  Crews make headway against wildfire
      BASTROP, TEXAS - Firefighters are tamping down hotspots and holding back flames from a wildfire that has burned for days across Central Texas, incinerating nearly 1,400 homes and tens of thousands of acres of drought-parched land, officials said Friday.
      Crews had closed in on the fire in and around Bastrop, about 25 miles east of Austin, and no new homes were reported destroyed overnight.
  
  
• 9/11/2011
  
  Texas blazes taking toll - Season busy for firefighters by Andrew DeMillo, Associated Press
      BASTROP, Texas — The flames of the massive wildfire that had swallowed nearly 1,400 homes in Central Texas had been tamed, but Webster Fire Chief Patrick Shipp and his crew — veterans of a fire season pushing his team to the limit — know the danger doesn’t end there.    Carrying a 40-pound safety pack and protective clothing covering nearly every inch of skin, Shipp and his team hunt down hot spot after hot spot in the Bastrop area, where one of the most destructive wildfires in the state’s history has burned for a week.    Heavy ash paints a bleak, almost monochrome landscape.    It’s hard to breathe.    Every 10 minutes or so, Shipp squirts Visine in his eyes to ease the sting.    “Every step you take is like a dust storm all around you, it’s pretty surreal,” Shipp said.    It’s a familiar environment for Shipp and hundreds of other firefighters who have spent the past several months battling blazes across the state, and there’s little sign of relief.    Shipp has been deployed two other times from his home 160 miles away from Bastrop, and he knows the fight won’t end anytime soon.
      “We’ll probably leave here and go somewhere else,” Shipp said.
      Texas is suffering its worst wildfire outbreak in state history.    The Bastrop- area fire has been the largest of nearly 190 wildfires the Texas Forest Service says erupted this week, leaving nearly 1,700 homes statewide in charred ruins, killing four people and forcing thousands of people to evacuate.
      The forecast for the months ahead offers little optimism.    A La Nina weather pattern is setting up across the region that will likely sustain the dry, windy conditions that are so crucial to sparking and sustaining dangerous fires like the one near Bastrop.
      Since Texas’ fire season began in December, local and state firefighters have responded to more than 20,900 wildfires that have consumed about 3.6 million acres — about the size of the state of Connecticut. Shipp is among fire-fighters from around the state who are battling the blaze through the Texas Intrastate Fire Mutual Aid System— aTexas Forest Service program that uses local departments to help in major blazes and other emergencies.    They’re working alongside teams of federal and local firefighters against the Bastrop fire, which officials say is about 40 percent contained.
      Hundreds of firefighters from Texas and nationwide have been sleeping and resting at Camp Swift, a National Guard post near the blaze, with fire engines from cities around the state crowding a field as they returned from Thursday’s shift.    By Thursday night, firefighters said the largest flames had been tamed and they were now focusing on putting out hot spots and ensuring homes were safe for resident to return.    As they rested at the camp and prepared themselves for another long day ahead, firefighters acknowledged the weariness of chasing blaze after blaze.    “It wears you down, but it’s what we do,” said Jim Rodgers, chief of Northeast Fire and Rescue in Humble, Texas, who was working alongside Shipp.
      Shipp said the fire’s intensity the first day was unlike anything else he had seen.    “We would mark a place on the map and say, ‘We’re not going to let the fire get there,’ but when the fire would get there, it would jump over us,” he said.    “We would have to retreat to the next road and finally made our last stand before we got beat again.”    Since the start of the year, Shipp and his crew have battled wildfires in West Texas in the spring and in Midway earlier this summer.
  
  
• 9/12/2011
  
  Fire destroys more than 1,500 homes
      BASTROP, TEXAS - The number of homes destroyed by a Texas wildfire has risen to 1,554 and is ex-pected to further increase as firefighters enter more areas where the blaze has been extinguished, officials said Sunday; 17 people remain unaccounted for.    Wild winds whipped up by Tropical Storm Lee last week helped to spark more than 190 wildfires statewide.    The worst of the fires burned more than 34,000 acres in this area 30 miles southeast of Austin.
      Officials told some100 residents Sunday that people would start going back into the scorched areas today.    A detailed plan will allow residents to slowly enter the evacuated areas over the coming week.
  
  
• 9/16/2011
  
  Arctic sea ice melting to near-record lows - Some predict it may be ice free by 2050 by Julie Cart, Los Angeles Times
      LOS ANGELES — A blistering summer melted Arctic sea ice to near-record lows, a trajectory scientists say could reduce ice coverage in the polar region to its lowest since satellite measurements were first taken in 1979.
      That was the grim assessment delivered Thursday by the National Climatic Data Center — which also calculated that global temperatures last month made it the eighth-warmest August on record, part of a general warming trend.
      The ice melt in August was the second most extensive, and with a few more weeks left of melting, it’s possible that the record lows of 2007 could be matched, said Jake Crouch, a climate scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
      Measurements show Arctic ice covering 1.67 million square miles, well below the average minimum of 2.59 million.    Scientists monitor the summer ice melt to gauge the effects of human- caused climate change.    Some computer models predict the Arctic could be ice-free by midcentury.
      Thursday’s report also underscored increasingly wild weather patterns.    The U.S. experienced weather-related disasters that caused $10 billion in damage during 2011, another record.    With the hurricane season underway, that number could rise, Crouch said.
      Federal forecasters also predicted a return to La Nina conditions, bringing slightly drier and warmer weather to much of the country.    Heat and aridity records were beaten across the United States this summer, where every state except North Dakota and Vermont reported at least one day of 100-degree readings.    August was the nation’s second- hottest on record.    Texas was the hardest hit, beset by prolonged drought, wildfires and excessive heat.    In the panhandle town of Wichita Falls, 88 of 92 days of summer exceeded 100 degrees.
      Texas state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon has said preliminary estimates for the economic effect of the drought on the state’s agriculture and livestock industry is $5.2 billion, and the cost of the fires is nearly $2 billion.
      There’s been little relief. An average of 10 inches of rain has fallen across the state in the past 11 months, Nielsen-Gammon said.    If Texas does not receive 3 inches of rain in the next two weeks, 2011 will go in the record books as the state’s driest.
      Measurements show Arctic ice covering 1.67 million square miles, well below the average minimum of 2.59 million.
  
  More than $2 billion needed for flood fixes
      KANSAS CITY< MO. - The Army Corps of Engineers estimates that it will cost more than $2 billion to repair the damage to the nation’s levees, dams and riverbanks caused by this year’s excessive flooding, a sum that dwarfs the $150 million it has to make such repairs and that doesn’t account for damage from Hurricane Irene or Tropical Storm Lee.
      Floods that raged down U.S. rivers this year have strained dams, eroded riverbanks, filled harbors with silt and ripped football field-sized holes in some earthen levees protecting farmland and small towns.    The damage estimate, confirmed Thursday by corps officials, promises to be more significant than with a typical flood in which high water recedes quickly.
  
  
• 9/17/2011
  
  Texas fish roundup driven by drought
      FORT WORTH, TEXAS - Wading through a muddy river bed to reach shallow pools of water, wildlife biologists scooped up hundreds of minnows Friday in one of the first rescues of fish threatened by the state’s worst drought in decades.
      The scientists collected smalleye shiners and sharpnose shiners from the Brazos River — about 2,300 on Thursday and 800 Friday.    The fish, which are found only in the Brazos and nowhere else in the world, are candidates to be listed as threatened or endangered under the federal Endangered Species Act.    They will be taken to a state fish hatchery but returned to the river when the drought eases.
  
  
• 9/19/2011
  
  Earthquake kills at least 16 in India, Nepal
      GAUHATI, INDIA - A strong earthquake shook northeastern India and Nepal on Sunday night, killing at least 16 people, damaging buildings and sending lawmakers in Nepal’s capital running into the streets.
      The quake, with a preliminary magnitude of 6.9, struck at 6:10 p.m. local time and was felt across northern and eastern India, including in the capital of New Delhi.    It triggered at least two aftershocks of magnitude 6.1 and 5.3, Indian seismology official R.S. Dattatreyan said.
  
  
• 9/20/2011
  
  Aid groups helping Pakistan flood victims
      BADIN, PAKISTAN - Flood victims camped out near inundated fields and crowded hospitals on Monday as authorities and international aid groups struggled to respond to Pakistan’s second major bout of flooding in just over a year.
      Monsoon rains since early August have killed more than 220 people, damaged or destroyed some 665,000 homes and displaced more than 1.8 million people in the southern Sindh province, according to the government and the United Nations, which made an emergency appeal for funding.
  
  
• 9/25/2011
  
  ANALYSIS America’s ‘allergy’ to global warming - Research has found it’s no longer debatable, so why all the doubters?     EDITOR’S NOTE: An Associated Press journalist draws on decades of climate reporting to offer a retrospective on global warming and the urge to deny it.    By Charles J. Hanley, Associated Press
      NEW YORK — Tucked between treatises on algae and prehistoric turquoise beads, the study on page 460 of a long-ago issue of the U.S. journal Science drew little attention.
      “I don’t think there were any newspaper articles about it or anything like that,” the author recalls.    But the headline on the 1975 report was bold: “Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?” And this article that coined the term may have been the last time a mention of “global warming” didn’t set off an instant outcry of denial.
      In the paper, Columbia University geoscientist Wally Broecker calculated how much carbon dioxide would accumulate in the atmosphere in the coming 35 years, and how temperatures consequently would rise.    His numbers have proved almost dead-on correct.    Meanwhile, other evi-dence poured in over those decades, showing the “greenhouse effect” is happening.    Yet resistance to the idea in the U.S. appears to have hardened.    What’s going on?    “The desire to disbelieve deepens as the scale of the threat grows,” concludes economist-ethicist Clive Hamilton.
      He and others who track what they call “denialism” find that its nature is changing in America.    Polls find a widening Republican- Democratic gap on climate.    Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry accuses climate scientists of lying for money.
      Broecker observes this deepening of the desire to disbelieve.    “Opposition by the Republicans has gotten stronger and stronger,” the “grandfather of climate science” said in an interview.    “But, of course, the push by the Democrats has become stronger and stronger, and as it has become a more important issue, it has become more polarized.”
      The solution: “Eventually it’ll become damned clear that the Earth is warming and the warming is beyond anything we have experienced in millions of years, and people will have to admit …”    He stopped and laughed.    “Well, I suppose they could say God is burning us up.”
      The basic physics of manmade global warming has been clear for more than a century, since re-searchers proved that carbon dioxide traps heat.    Others later showed CO2 was building up in the atmosphere from the burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels.    Weather stations then filled in the rest: Temperatures were rising.    The reluctance to rein in carbon emissions revealed itself early on.
      In the 1980s, as scientists studied Greenland’s buried ice for clues to past climate, upgraded their computer models peering into the future, and improved global temperature analyses, the fossil-fuel industries were mobilizing for a campaign to question the science.    By1988, NASA climatologist James Hansen appeared before a Senate committee and warned that global warming had begun, an announcement later confirmed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.N.sponsored network of hundreds of international scientists.
      But when Hansen was called back to testify in 1989, the White House of President George H.W. Bush edited the scientist’s remarks to water down his conclusions, and Hansen declined to appear.    That was the year U.S. oil and coal interests formed the Global Climate Coalition to combat efforts to shift economies away from their products.    In 1997, two years after the IPCC declared the “balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate,” the world’s nations gathered in Kyoto, Japan, to try to do something about it.
      “The statement that we’ll have continued warming with an increase in CO2 is opinion, not fact,” oil executive William F. O’Keefe of the Global Climate Coalition insisted to reporters in Kyoto.
      But a document emerged years later showing that the industry coalition’s own scientific team had quietly advised that the basic science of global warming was indisputable.    Kyoto’s final agreement called for limited rollbacks in greenhouse emissions.    The U.S. didn’t join in that.    And by 2000, the CO2 built up in the atmosphere to 369 parts per million — just 4 ppm less than Broecker predicted — compared with 280 ppm before the industrial revolution.
      Global temperatures rose as well, by 1.1 degrees F in the 20th century.    The decade 2000-2009 was the warmest on record, and 2010 and 2005 were the warmest years on record.
      Monitors found nights were warming faster than days, and winters more than summers, and the upper atmosphere was cooling while the lower atmosphere warmed — all clear signals of greenhouse warming, not some other factor.
      The impact has been widespread.    A study this August reported that hundreds of species are retreating toward the poles, egrets showing up in southern England, American robins in Eskimo villages.    Some, such as polar bears, have nowhere to go.    Largescale extinctions are feared.
      The heat is also cutting wheat yields and nurturing beetles that destroy northern forests.
      From the Rockies to the Himalayas, glaciers are shrinking, sending more water into the world’s seas.    Because of accelerated melt in Greenland and elsewhere, the eight-nation Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program expects ocean levels to rise 35 to 63 inches by 2100, threatening all coastlines.
      And the Arctic Ocean’s summer ice cap has shrunk by half and is expected to, in essence, vanish by 2030 or 2040, the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center reported Sept. 15.    Christiana Figueres, Costa Rican head of the U.N.’s post-Kyoto climate negotiations, finds the apparent allergy to climate change “very, very per-plexing.”
      Hamilton sought to explain why in his 2010 book, “Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change.”    In an interview, he said climate denial has “become a marker of cultural identity in the ‘angry’ parts of the United States.”    “Climate denial has been incorporated in the broader movement of right-wing populism,” he said.    An in-depth study of a decade of Gallup polling finds statistical backing for that analysis.    On the question of whether they believed the effects of global warming were already happening, the percentage of selfidentified Republicans or conservatives answering “yes” plummeted from almost 50 percent in 2007-2008 to 30 percent or less in 2010.    Meanwhile, liberals and Democrats remained at 70 percent or more, according to the study in this spring’s Sociological Quarterly.
      A Pew Research Center poll last October found a similar left-right gap.
  
  
• 9/27/2011
  
  Deadly flooding
      Lucknow, India - Monsoon rains destroyed mud huts and flooded swaths of northern and eastern India, killing at least 48 people in recent days and leaving hundreds of thousands marooned by raging waters, officials said Monday.
      Those stranded took shelter atop trees, hills and rooftops in the eastern states of Orissa and Bihar and the northern state of Uttar Pradesh.    Rescue helicopters dropped food in hard-to-reach areas, while hundreds of boats ferried the stranded to safety. But the rains were holding up rescue efforts.
  
  
• 9/29/2011
  
  Report: EPA cut steps in study - It fudged on ruling for climate change by Dina Cappiello, Associated Press
      WASHINGTON — The Obama administration cut corners before concluding that climatechange pollution can endanger human health, a key finding underpinning costly new regulations, an internal government watchdog said Wednesday.
      Regulators and the White House disagreed with the finding — and the report itself did not question the science behind the administration’s conclusions.
      Still, the decision by the Environmental Protection Agency’s inspector general is sure to encourage industry lawyers, global warming doubters in Congress and elsewhere and Republicans targeting the agency for what they view as an onslaught of jobkilling environmental regulations.
      The report said that the EPA should have followed a more extensive review process for a technical paper supporting its determination that greenhouse gases pose dangers to human health and welfare, a finding that ultimately compelled it to issue controversial and expensive regulations to control greenhouse gases for the first time.
      “While it may be debatable what impact, if any, this had on EPA’s finding, it is clear that EPA did not follow all the required steps,” Inspector General Arthur A. Elkins, Jr. said in a statement Wednesday.
      The EPA and White House said that the greenhouse gas document did not require more independent scrutiny because the scientific evidence it was based on already had been thoroughly reviewed.
      The agency did have the document vetted by 12 experts — although one of those worked for EPA.
      “The report importantly does not question or even address the science used or the conclusions reached,” the EPA said in a statement.
      The environmental agency said that its work “followed all appropriate guidance,” a conclusion that was supported by the White House budget official who wrote the peer review guidelines in 2005.
      EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has said repeatedly that her conclusions were based on the underlying science, not the agency’s summary of it.
  
  
• 9/30/2011
  
  Arctic ice shelves shrank in summer
      Toronto - Two ice shelves that existed before Canada was settled by Europeans diminished significantly this summer, one nearly disappearing altogether, Canadian scientists say in newly published research.    The loss is important in returning the Canadian Arctic to conditions that date back thousands of years, scientists say.    Floating icebergs that have broken free as a result pose a risk to offshore oil facilities and potentially to shipping lanes.    The breaking apart of the ice shelves also reduces the environment that supports microbial life and changes the look of Canada’s coastline.    The northern coast of Ellesmere Island contains Canada’s last remaining ice shelves, with an estimated area of 402 square miles, researchers say.
  
  
• 10/9/2011
  
  Official: Floods threaten Bangkok by Associated Press
      BANGKOK — Thailand’s prime minister warns that rising floods which have wreaked havoc across the nation are now threatening the capital, Bangkok, as the death toll from the worst monsoon rains in decades rose Saturday to 253.    Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra said the floods — which severed rail links with the north, shut dozens of highways and swamped ancient Buddhist temples in Ayutthaya — have hit crisis levels.
      Bangkok has been spared serious damage, but many fear it may be inundated as floods flow from submerged northern rice fields toward the Gulf of Thailand.    That critical runoff is likely to be impeded by high ocean tides in mid-October; Tropical Storm Nalgae is also forecast to bring new rain.
  
  
• 10/17/2011
  
  Death toll rises to 66 in flooding, landslides
      San Salvador, El Salvador - Central American authorities said Sunday that at least 66 people had died in six days of heavy rains that caused landslides, floods and bridge failures throughout the region.
      Officials ordered evacuations as the rain was expected to continue.    El Salvador’s director of civil protection, Jorge Melendez, said in a news conference that at least 24 people had died in the country, most of them buried in their houses by landslides.
  
  
• 10/19/2011
  
  Chu defends science of climate change
      PARIS — The U.S. energy secretary says the debate about climate change reminds him of the old argument that smoking isn’t bad for you.
      Steven Chu also urged greater investment in clean energy as he spoke Tuesday in Paris to an International Energy Agency meeting of energy ministers and industry leaders.
      Chu criticized attempts to “muddy the waters” on climate change science, saying the evidence is growing more compelling.
  
  
• 10/24/2011
  
  Scores die in Turkey earthquake - Toll likely to rise; damage extensive by Suzan Fraser, Associated Press
      ANKARA, Turkey — Cries of horror filled the air as a 7.2magnitude earthquake hit eastern Turkey on Sunday, killing at least 138 people and collapsing buildings.
      The death toll was expected to rise as rescuers sifted through the rubble and reached outlying villages.    Tens of thousands fled into the streets running, screaming or trying to reach relatives on cellphones as apartment and office buildings cracked or collapsed.    As the extent of the damage became clear, survivors dug in with shovels or even their bare hands, trying to rescue the trapped and the injured.
      “There are many people under the rubble,” Veysel Keser, the mayor of the district of Celebibag, told NTV.    “People are in agony.    We can hear their screams for help.”
      Celebibag is near the hardest- hit area, Ercis, an eastern city of 75,000 close to the Iranian border and on one of Turkey’s most earthquake-prone zones.    The bustling city of Van, about 55 miles south of Ecris, also had substantial damage.    Highways in the area caved in.
      The quake hit at 1:41 p.m. local time, the U.S. Geological Survey said.
      Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said at least 93 people were killed in Van, 45 others died in Ercis and about 350 were injured.    Several people were still trapped under rubble, he said, without citing any estimates.    Erdogan said rescue work would continue through the night.
      Up to 80 buildings collapsed in Ercis, including a dormitory, and 10 buildings collapsed in Van, the Turkish Red Crescent said.    The sheer number of collapsed buildings prompted fears the death toll could rise substantially.
      U.S. scientists recorded more than 100 aftershocks in eastern Turkey within 10 hours of the quake, including one with a magnitude of 6.0.    Authorities advised people to stay away from damaged homes, warning they could collapse in the aftershocks.
      Residents in Van and Ercis lit campfires, preparing to spend the night outdoors while the Red Crescent began setting up tents in a stadium.    Others sought shelter with relatives in nearby villages.
      Rescue efforts went deep into the night under generator-powered flood lights.    Workers tied steel rods around large concrete slabs in Van, then lifted them with heavy machinery.
      Residents sobbed outside the ruins of one flattened eight-story building, hoping that missing relatives would be found.    Witnesses said eight people were pulled from the rubble, but frequent aftershocks hampered search efforts.    By late evening, some joy emerged as a ninth, a teenage girl, was pulled out alive.    Erdogan urged residents to stay away from damaged buildings and promised assistance to all survivors.    “We won’t leave anyone to fend for themselves in the cold of winter,” he said.    Around 1,275 rescue teams from 38 provinces were being sent to the region, officials said, and troops were also assisting search-and-rescue efforts.
      In Ercis, heavy machinery halted and people were ordered to keep silent as rescuers tried to listen for possible survivors inside a seven-story building housing 28 families, NTV reported.
      Some inmates escaped a prison in Van after one of its walls collapsed.    TRT television said around 150 inmates had fled, but a prison official said the number was much smaller and many later returned.    Nazmi Gur, a legislator from Van, said his nephew’s funeral ceremony was cut short because of the quake and he rushed back to help.    “We managed to rescue a few people but I saw at least five bodies,” Gur said.    “It was such a powerful temblor. It lasted for such a long time,”    “But now we have no electricity, there is no heating, everyone is outside in the cold,” he added.    Authorities had no information yet on remote villages but the provincial governor was touring the region by helicopter and the government sent in tents, field kitchens and blankets.
      The earthquake also shook buildings in neighboring Armenia and Iran.    In the Armenian capital of Yerevan, 100 miles from Ercis, people rushed into the streets in fear but no damage or injuries were reported.    Armenia was the site of an earthquake in 1988 that killed 25,000 people.
      Sunday’s quake caused panic in several Iranian towns close to the Turkish border and caused cracks in buildings in the city of Chaldoran, Iranian state TV reported.    Leaders around the world conveyed their condolences and offered assistance.
      “We stand shoulder to shoulder with our Turkish ally in this difficult time, and are ready to assist,” President Barack Obama said. Israeli President Shimon Peres telephoned Turkish President Abdullah Gul to offer assistance.
      “Israel shares in your sorrow,” Peres said in a statement.
  
  
• 10/25/2011
  
  Turks dig to find quake victims - Death toll rises to at least 279 by Suzan Fraser, Associated Press
      ERCIS, Turkey — Distraught Turkish families mourned outside a mosque or sought to identify loved ones among rows of bodies Monday as rescue workers scoured debris for survivors of a 7.2-magnitude earthquake that killed at least 279 people.
      Rescue teams with generator- powered floodlights worked into the night in the worst-hit city of Ercis, where running water and electricity were cut by the quake that rocked eastern Turkey on Sunday.    Unnerved by more than 200 aftershocks, many residents slept outside their homes, making campfires to ward off the cold.    Aid organizations rushed to erect tents for the homeless.    Victims were trapped in mounds of concrete, twisted steel and construction debris after more than 100 buildings in two cities and mud-brick homes in nearby villages pancaked or partially collapsed.    About 80 multistory buildings collapsed in Ercis, a city of 75,000 close to the Iranian border that lies in one of Turkey’s most earthquake-prone zones.
      Cranes and other heavy equipment lifted slabs of concrete, allowing residents to dig for the missing with shovels.    Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc said the quake killed 279 people and injured 1,300.    Search-and-rescue efforts could end as early as today.    Authorities said 10 of the dead were students learning about the Quran at a religious school that collapsed.    Grieving families cried outside an Ercis mosque.
      “My nephew, his wife and their child, all three dead.    May God protect us from this kind of grief,” resident Kursat Lap said.
      Bodies were still being pulled from the rubble late Monday.    Dozens were placed in body bags or covered by blankets, laid in rows so people could search for missing relatives.    “It’s my grandson’s wife.    She was stuck underneath rubble,” said Mehmet Emin Umac.    Several other men carried a child’s body wrapped in a white cloth as weeping family members followed behind.
      Still, there were some joyful moments.    Yalcin Akay was dug out from a collapsed six-story building with a leg injury after he called an emergency line on his cell phone and told the operator where he was.    Three others, including two children, were rescued from the same building 20 hours after the quake struck.
      Abdurrahman Antakyali, 20, was brought out of a crumbled Internet cafe after an 8-hour joint rescue effort by Turkish and Azerbaijani teams.    His father and brother wept with joy as he emerged.
      The larger city of Van, about 55 miles south of Ercis, also sustained substantial damage.
  
  
• 10/26/2011
  
  Infant found alive in Turkish quake rubble - Death toll climbs to 459; survivors fight over aid by Suzan Fraser, Associated Press
      ERCIS, Turkey — After 48 hours, a miracle emerged from a narrow slit in the rubble of a Turkish apartment building: a 2-week-old baby girl, half-naked but still breathing.
      Stoic rescue workers erupted in cheers and applause at her arrival, and later for her mother’s and grandmother’s rescues — a ray of uplifting news on otherwise grim day.
      The bad news just kept coming Tuesday: The death toll from Sunday’s 7.2-magnitude earthquake climbed to at least 459, desperate survivors fought over aid and blocked aid shipments, and a powerful aftershock ignited widespread panic that turned into a prison riot.
      With thousands of quake survivors facing a third night in the open in near-freezing temperatures, Turkey said it would accept international aid offers, even from Israel, with which it has had strained relations as of late.
      The dramatic operation to save three generations in one family was all the more remarkable because the infant, Azra Karaduman, was later declared healthy after being flown to a hospital in Ankara, the Turkish capital.
      “Bringing them out is such happiness,” said rescuer Oytun Gulpinar.
      Television footage showed rescuer Kadir Direk in an orange jumpsuit wriggling into a pile of broken concrete and warped metal — what was left of a five-story apartment building — and then wriggling out with tiny Azra, clad only in a Tshirt.    “Praise be!” someone shouted.    “Get out of the way!” another person yelled as the aid team cleared a path to a waiting ambulance.
      In a separate rescue, 10year-old Serhat Gur was pulled from the rubble of another building after being trapped for 54 hours, but he died later at a hospital, state-run TRT television reported.    The pockets of jubilation were tempered by many more discoveries of bodies in the worst-hit town of Ercis and other communities in eastern Turkey devastated by Sunday’s earthquake.    Some 2,000 buildings collapsed, but the fact that the tremor hit in daytime when many people were out of their homes averted an even worse disaster.
      Over 500 aftershocks have since rattled the area, according to Turkey’s Kandilli seismology center.    A strong one on Tuesday sent residents rushing into the streets in panic while sparking a riot by prisoners in Van, 55 miles south of Ercis.    The U.S. Geological Survey put that temblor at a magnitude of 5.7.
      Some prisoners in Van demanded to be let out while others set bedding on fire, the private Dogan news agency reported.    The revolt then spread inside the 1,000-bed prison and security forces surrounded it to keep more inmates from escaping.
      Turkish military vehicles shot water cannon at crowds in the streets of Van to try to calm the situation.    There was still no power or running water in the region, and desperate people stopped aid trucks even before they entered Ercis, grabbing tents and other supplies.    Kanal D television showed people fighting over tents and blankets.
      Aid workers said they were able to find emergency housing for only about half the thousands of people who needed it.    Turkey decided to accept offers of assistance after its emergency management au-thorities concluded that thousands of survivors would need prefabricated homes to get through the winter in the mountainous region, a Turkish foreign ministry official said.
  
  
• 10/27/2011
  
  Quake toll mounts in Turkey - Loss of families shatters survivors by Suzan Fraser, Associated Press
      ERCIS, Turkey — Murat Sonmez’s mother, wife and four daughters were crushed to death in their home by Turkey’s 7.2-magnitude earthquake Sunday, leaving him so distraught he found it difficult to speak.
      While media coverage has centered on tales of against-the- odds rescues, including a 2week-old baby girl who was pulled alive from the rubble, most stories of the trapped have ended the way that Sonmez knows, with death and unfathomable pain for those left behind.
      “God gave them, God took them away. … I can’t describe my pain,” he said as he stood by a leveled four-story apartment building.
      Elsewhere in Ercis, the town hit hardest by the quake, two teachers and a university student were rescued from ruined buildings Wednesday, but searchers said hopes of finding anyone else alive were rapidly fading.    At least 461 people nationwide died in the quake.
      Excavators with heavy equipment began clearing debris from some collapsed buildings in Ercis after searchers removed bodies and determined there were no other survivors.    More than 1,350 people were injured.
      Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said 63 teachers were among the dead and he alleged that shoddy construction contributed to the high casualty toll.    He compared the alleged negligence of some officials and builders to murder because they ignored safety standards.    “Despite all previous disas-ters, we see that the appeals were not heeded,” Erdogan said.
      Erdogan acknowledged problems in sending aid for thousands who were left homeless, but said close to 20,000 tents have since been sent to the quake zone.
      Turkey has said it will accept prefabricated homes and containers from other countries to house survivors, many of whom have slept in the open in near-freezing temperatures for three nights.
      Hundreds of angry people in Ercis and nearby villages on Wednesday protested what they say was a lack of coordination of aid distribution outside the office of the local governor, complaining that they were not able to receive tents yet.
      A senior police official with a loudspeaker tried to calm the crowd as dozens of Turkish soldiers and policemen blocked entrances of the governor’s office.
      The head of the Turkish Red Crescent organization, Ahmet Lutfi Akar, said 17 trucks were looted before aid could be distributed.
      Health officials said they had detected an increase in diarrhea, especially among the children, and urged survivors to drink bottled water until authorities can determine whether the tap water may be contaminated.
      Turkey said it would accept international aid offers, even from Israel, with which it has had strained relations. Israel offered assistance despite a rift between the two countries over last year’s Israeli raid on a Gaza- bound flotilla that killed eight Turkish activists and a Turkish-American one.
  
  Thousands flee flood-surrounded Bangkok by Associated Press
      BANGKOK — Tens of thousands of Bangkok residents jammed bus stations and roads Wednesday to flee Thailand’s flood threatened capital as the city’s governor ordered evacuations in two swamped city districts.
      Floods bearing down on the metropolis have killed 373 people nationwide since July and caused bil-lions of dollars in damage.
      Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra’s government repeatedly vowed to protect the capital, which has mostly escaped unscathed.    But official assessments turned grim in recent days, and everywhere people are preparing for flooding that seems all but inevitable.    Gov. Sukhumbhand Paribatra said residents of two already partially submerged districts should leave for shelters.
      Authorities also were forced to move inmates, many on death row, from three prisons.
  
  
• 10/28/2011
  
  Flooding swamps Italian villages by Associated Press
      AULLA, Italy — Soldiers and civilian rescue workers battled knee-deep mud Thursday as they searched for survivors after flash floods and mudslides inundated picturesque villages around coastal areas of Liguria and Tuscany.
      Coast guard cutters were called in following reports that some of the missing may have been swept into the sea by the storm.    At least nine people died and six others are missing.
      Many towns are still isolated nearly 48 hours after the storms hit.    A military officer told Sky Italia that 500 soldiers were brought in to help in the search operation and to clear roads and bridges.
      Villages like Aulla in Tuscany, where two people are confirmed dead and one is listed as missing, were covered by mud that swept into homes and stores.
      “In an hour, the work of 10 years was lost,” the Rev. Giovanni Perrini said as he inspected his parish church and nearby museum filled with mud.
      “Everything was coming down,” said Luigi Ribes, a resident of Mulazzo, one of the hard-hit towns.    “I was seeing stones, trees, and every possible thing pass by.”
  
  
• 10/29/2011
  
  6.9 earthquake injures at least 20
      LIMA, PERU A magnitude-6.9 earthquake centered off Peru’s central coast sent people running panicked into the streets Friday in cities heavily damaged by a killer quake four years earlier. At least 20 were injured.
      People who lost loved ones and homes in the earlier quake were shaken, some breaking into tears.    The Aug. 15, 2007, quake killed 596 people and destroyed the town of Pisco.
      Friday’s considerably less violent quake was in Lima, a city of 8.5 million.    The U.S. Geological Survey said it was centered 31 miles south-southwest of Ica, a provincial capital of about 200,00 people which suffered widespread damage in the 2007 quake. It was at a depth of 21.7 miles.
  
  
• 10/30/2011
  
  Early snow hits East Coast - Over 2 million lose electricity by Genaro C. Armas, Associated Press
      A powerful and unusually early nor’easter dumped wet, heavy snow Saturday from the mid-Atlantic to New England, toppling leafy trees and power lines to knock out power to more than 2 million homes and businesses.
      Communities inland were getting hit hardest, with eastern Pennsylvania serving as the bull’s-eye for the storm.    West Milford, N.J., about 45 miles northwest of New York City, had received 15.5 inches of snow by Saturday night.    Some places got more than half a foot of snow, and towns near the Maryland-Pennsylvania border saw 10 inches fall.
      New York City’s Central Park set a record for both the date and the month of October with 1.3 inches of snow.
      More than 2.3 million customers lost power from Maryland through Massachusetts, and utilities were bringing in crews from other states to help restore it.    More than half a million were without power in Pennsylvania, Connecticut and New Jersey, including Gov. Chris Christie, who declared a state of emergency.
      Throughout the region, officials had warned that the early storm would bring sticky snow on the heels of the week’s warmer weather and could create dangerous conditions.    At least three deaths have been blamed on the storm.    The storm was expected to worsen as it swept north.    The heaviest snowfall was forecast today for the Massachusetts Berkshires, the Litchfield Hills in northwestern Connecticut, southwestern New Hampshire and the southern Green Mountains.    Wind gusts of up to 55 mph were predicted, especially along coastal areas.
      The storm disrupted travel along the Eastern Seaboard. Several airports had hours-long delays Sat-urday, including Philadelphia’s and two that serve New York City, Newark Liberty and Kennedy.    Amtrak suspended service between Philadelphia and Harrisburg, Pa.
      Residents were urged to avoid travel altogether.    Speed limits were reduced on bridges between New Jersey and Pennsylvania.    A few roads closed because of accidents and downed trees and power lines, and more were expected, said Sean Brown, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation.    Some said that even though they knew a storm was coming, the severity caught them by surprise.
      “This is absolutely a lot more snow than I expected to see today.    I can’t believe it’s not even Halloween and it’s snowing already,” Carole Shepherd of Washington Township, N.J., said after shoveling her driveway.
      The storm came on a busy weekend for many, with trick-or-treaters going door-to-door, hunting season opening in some states and a full slate of college and pro football scheduled.
  
  
• 10/31/2011
  
  Skeptic now agrees that global warming is real - Study doesn’t address cause of rising temps by Seth Borenstein, Associated Press
      WASHINGTON — A prominent physicist and skeptic of global warming spent two years trying to find out if mainstream climate scientists were wrong.    In the end, he determined they were right: Temperatures are rising rapidly.
      The study of the world’s surface temperatures by Richard Muller was partially funded by a foundation connected to skeptics of global warming.    He pursued long-held skeptic theories in analyzing the data.
      Yet he found that the land is 1.6 degrees warmer than in the 1950s.    Those numbers from Muller, who works at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, match those by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA.
      He said he went even further back, studying readings from Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jeffer-son.    His ultimate finding of a warming world, to be presented at a conference today, is no different from what mainstream climate scientists have been saying for decades.
      Why everyone is paying attention is who is behind the study.
      One-quarter of the $600,000 to do the research came from the Charles Koch Foundation, whose founder is a major funder of skeptic groups and the conservative tea party movement.    The Koch brothers, Charles and David, run a large, privately held company involved in oil and other industries, producing sizable greenhouse gas emissions.
      Muller’s research team carefully examined two chief criticisms by skeptics.    One is that weather stations are unreliable; the other is that cities, which create heat islands, were skewing the temperature analysis.
      “The skeptics raised valid points and everybody should have been a skeptic two years ago,” Muller said.    “And now we have confidence that the temperature rise that had previously been reported had been done without bias.”
      There is no reason now to be a skeptic about steadily increasing temperatures, Muller wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages, a place friendly to climate-change skeptics.    Muller didn’t address the cause of global warming in his research.    The overwhelming majority of climate scientists say it’s man-made from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil.
      Nor did his study look at ocean warming, future warming and how much of a threat to mankind climate change might be.    Still, Muller said it makes sense to reduce the carbon dioxide created by fossil fuels.
      “Greenhouse gases could have a disastrous impact on the world,” he said. Still, he contends that threat isn’t as proven as the Nobel Prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says it is.
      Today, Muller will take his results to a conference in Santa Fe, N.M., expected to include many prominent skeptics and mainstream scientists.
  
  POWER OUT FOR MILLIONS BIG OCTOBER SNOW - Untimely storm plays nasty trick, surprising Northeast by Michael Melia, Associated Press
      SOUTH WINDSOR, Conn. — When winter’s white mixes with autumn’s orange and gold, nature gets ugly.    A freak October nor’easter knocked out power to more than 3 million in the Northeast on Sunday largely because leaves still on the trees caught more snow, overloading branches that snapped and wreaked havoc.    Close to 2 feet of snow fell in some areas over the weekend, and it was particularly wet and heavy, making the storm even more damaging.
      “You just have absolute tree carnage with this heavy snow just straining the branches,” said National Weather Service spokesman Chris Vaccaro.
      From Maryland to Maine, officials said it would take days to restore electricity, though the snow ended Sunday.    The storm smashed record snowfall totals for October and worsened as it moved north.    Communities in western Massachusetts were among the hardest hit.    Snowfall totals topped 27 inches in Plainfield, and nearby Windsor had 26 inches by early Sunday.
      It was blamed for at least 11 deaths, and states of emergency were declared in New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts and parts of New York.
      Roads, rails and airline flights were knocked out. Passengers on at least three JetBlue planes and one American Airlines plane say they were stranded on the tarmac at Bradley International Airport near Hartford, Conn., for seven hours or more after being diverted from New York-area airports Saturday.    And while children across the region were thrilled to see snow so early, it also complicated many of their Halloween plans.
      Sharon Martovich, of Southbury, Conn., said she hoped the power will be back on in time for her husband’s Halloween tradition of playing “Young Frankenstein” on a giant screen in front of their house.    But no matter what, she said, they will make sure the eight or so children who live in the neigh-borhood don’t miss out on trick-or-treating.    More than 800,000 power customers were without electricity in Connecticut alone — shattering the record set just two months ago by Hurricane Irene. Massachusetts had more than 600,000 outages; so did New Jersey — including Gov. Chris Christie’s house. Parts of Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, New York, Maine, Maryland and Vermont also were without power.    “It’s going to be a more difficult situation than we experienced in Irene,” Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said.    “We are expecting extensive and long-term power outages.”
      Thirty-two shelters were open around the state, and Malloy asked volunteer fire departments to allow people in for warmth and showers.    At least four hospitals were relying on generators for power.
      Around Newtown in western Connecticut, trees were so laden with snow on some back roads that the branches touched the pavement.    Every few minutes, a snap filled the air as one broke and tumbled down.    Plowed roads became impassible because the trees were falling so fast.
      One of the few businesses open in the area was a Big Y grocery store that had a generator.    Customers loaded up on supplies, heard news updates over the intercom, charged up cellphones, and waited for a suddenly hard-to-get cup of coffee — in a line 30 people deep and growing.
      Many of the areas hit by the storm had also been hit by Irene. In New Jersey’s Hamilton Township, Tom Jacobsen recalled heavy spring flooding and an especially severe winter before that.    “I’m starting to think we really ticked off Mother Nature somehow, because we’ve been getting spanked by her for about a year now,” he said at a convenience store.
      There usually isn’t enough cold air in the region to support a nor’easter this time of year, but an area of high pressure over southeastern Canada funneled cold air south into the United States, said Vaccaro, of the weather service.    That cold air combined with moisture from North Carolina’s coast to produce unseasonable weather.
  
  
• 11/2/2011
  
  Report sees more extreme weather
      WASHINGTON - For a world already weary of weather catastrophes, the latest warning from top climate scientists paints a grim future — more floods, more heat waves, more droughts and greater costs to deal with them.
      A draft summary of an international scientific report says the extremes caused by global warming could eventually grow so severe that some locations become “increasingly marginal as places to live.”    The report from the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change marks a change in climate science, from focusing on subtle shifts in average temperatures to concentrating on the harder-to-analyze freak events that grab headlines, hurt economies and kill people.
      “The extremes are a really noticeable aspect of climate change,” said Jerry Meehl, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.    “I think people realize that the extremes are where we are going to see a lot of the impacts of climate change.”
  
  
• 11/4/2011
  
  GLOBAL WARMING GASES TAKE BIGGEST JUMP - Figures for 2010 mean levels higher than ‘worst-case scenario’ by Seth Borenstein, Associated Press
      WASHINGTON — The global output of heat-trapping carbon dioxide jumped by the biggest amount on record, the U.S. Department of Energy calculated, a sign of how feeble the world’s efforts are at slowing manmade global warming.
      The new figures for 2010 mean that levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst-case scenario outlined by climate experts just four years ago.
      “The more we talk about the need to control emissions, the more they are growing,” said John Reilly, codirector of MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change.
      The world pumped about564 million more tons of carbon into the air in 2010 than it did in 2009.    That’s an increase of 6 percent.    That amount of extra pollution eclipses the individual emissions of all but three countries — China, the United States and India, the world’s top producers of greenhouse gases.
      It is a “monster” increase that is unheard of, said Gregg Marland, a professor of geology at Appalachian State University, who has helped calculate Department of Energy figures in the past.
      Extra pollution in China and the U.S. account for more than half the increase in emissions last year, Marland said.
      “It’s a big jump,” said Tom Boden, director of the Energy Department’s Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center at Oak Ridge National Lab.    “From an emissions standpoint, the global financial crisis seems to be over.”
      Boden said that in 2010 people were traveling, and manufacturing was back up worldwide, spurring the use of fossil fuels, the chief contributor to man-made climate change.
      India and China are huge users of coal.    Burning coal is the biggest carbon source worldwide and emissions from that jumped nearly 8 percent in 2010.
      The world is slowly using more coal and less natural gas when it should be doing just the opposite because of climate change, Marland said.
      In 2007 when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its last large report on global warming, it used different scenarios for carbon dioxide pollution and said the rate of warming would be based on the rate of pollution.    Boden said the latest figures put global emissions higher than the worst-case projections from the climate panel.
      Those forecast global temperatures rising between 4 and 11 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century with the best estimate at 7.5 degrees.
  
  
• 11/6/2011
  
  Quake, aftershock shake central U.S.
      OKLAHOMA CITY - A moderate earthquake early Saturday in central Oklahoma knocked pictures off walls and woke people as it shook an area that stretched into Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri and Texas.
      The U.S. Geological Survey said on its website Saturday that a 4.7 magnitude earthquake struck at 2:12 a.m., with an epicenter about six miles north of Prague in Lincoln County.    That’s about 50 miles east of Oklahoma City and 75 miles southwest of Tulsa.    A 3.4 magnitude aftershock was reported at 2:27 a.m. from the same location, as well as a 2.7 magnitude aftershock at 2:44 a.m.
  
  
• 11/7/2011
  
  5.6 quake buckles road, rattles nerves in Okla. - Temblor is strongest on record in Sooner State by Justin Juozapavicius, Associated Press
      SPARKS, Okla. — Oklahoma residents more accustomed to tornadoes than earthquakes were shaken by weekend temblors that cracked buildings, buckled a highway and rattled nerves.    One quake late Saturday was the state’s strongest on record and jolted a college football stadium 50 miles from the epicenter.
      Although homes and other buildings cracked and had minor damage, no severe injuries or major devastation was reported.    Saturday night’s earthquake jolted Oklahoma State University’s stadium shortly after the No. 3 Cowboys defeated No. 17 Kansas State.    “That shook up the place, had a lot of people nervous,” Oklahoma State wide receiver Justin Blackmon said.    “Yeah, it was pretty strong.”
      The magnitude-5.6 earthquake that hit late Saturday was centered near Sparks, 44 miles northeast of Oklahoma City, said Jessica Turner, a geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey.    It was felt throughout the state and in Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, northern Texas, and some parts of Illinois and Wisconsin. It followed a magnitude-4.7 quake early Saturday that was felt from Texas to Missouri.
      The weekend earthquakes were among the strongest yet in a state that has seen a dramatic, unexplained increase in seismic activity.    Oklahoma typically had about 50 earthquakes a year until 2009.    Then the number spiked, and 1,047 quakes shook the state last year, prompting researchers to in-stall seismographs in the area.    Still, most of the earthquakes have been small.
      Geologists now believe a magnitude 4.7 earthquake Saturday morning was a foreshock to the bigger one that followed that night.    They recorded10 aftershocks by midmorning Sunday and expected more.    Two of the aftershocks, at 4 a.m. and 9 a.m., were big, magnitude 4.0.
      “We will definitely continue to see aftershocks, as we’ve already seen aftershocks from this one,” said Paul Earle, a seismologist with the USGS in Golden, Colorado.    “We will see aftershocks in the days and weeks to come, possibly even months.”    Several homeowners and businesses reported cracked walls, fallen knickknacks and other minor damage.    Brad Collins, the spokesman for St. Gregory’s University in Shawnee, said one of the four towers on its “castle-looking” administration building had collapsed and the other three towers were damaged.    He estimated the towers were about 25 feet tall.
      In Sparks, Joe Reneau said clouds of dust belched from the corners of almost every room in his house and a roar that sounded like a jumbo jet filled the air.    Reneau’s redbrick chimney collapsed and fell into the roof above the living room.    By the time the shaking stopped, food had been strewn across the kitchen and shards of glass and pottery covered the floor.
      “It was like WHAM!” said Reneau, 75, gesturing with swipes of his arms.    “I thought in my mind the house would stand, but then again, maybe not.”    An emergency manager in Lincoln County near the epicenter said U.S. 62, a two-lane highway that meanders through rolling landscape between Oklahoma City and the Arkansas state line, crumpled in places.
      The crowd of nearly 59,000 was still leaving Oklahoma State’s Boone Pickens Stadium when the earthquake hit, and players were in the locker rooms beneath the stands.    The shaking seemed to last the better part of a minute, rippling upward to the stadium press box.
      “Everybody was looking around, and no one had any idea,” Oklahoma State quarterback Brandon Weeden said.    “We thought the people above us were doing something.    I’ve never felt one, so that was a first.”
      A few hours before dawn Sunday, the latest quake, with a magnitude of 4.0, set nerves on edge anew.    Oklahoma has had big earthquakes before.    USGS records show a 5.5 magnitude earthquake hit El Reno, just west of Oklahoma City, in 1952.
  
  
• 11/8/2011
  
  Flooding threatens subway, industry
      BANGKOK - Floodwaters from Thailand’s flood-ravaged central heartland pushed farther into Bangkok on Monday, as residents of longsubmerged provinces north of the capital started to rebuild their lives.    The water is threatening Bangkok’s subway system, two key industrial estates and the emergency headquarters set up to deal with the flooding that has claimed more than 500 lives nationwide.    Evacuations have been ordered in 12 of Bangkok’s 50 districts, with residents of the northern district of Klong Sam Wa told to leave Monday.
  
  
• 11/10/2011
  
  Quake kills at least 3 in Turkey by Associated Press
      ANKARA, Turkey — An earthquake struck eastern Turkey Wednesday night, killing at least three people and leaving dozens trapped in the rubble of toppled buildings damaged in the previous temblor, which killed 600 people.
      About two-dozen buildings collapsed in the provincial capital of Van following a 5.7-magnitude quake, though most of them were empty or had been declared unfit because they were weakened by the earlier quake, according to media reports.    About 1,400 aftershocks have rocked the region since the massive earthquake on Oct. 23, which killed 600 and left thousands homeless.
  
  
• 11/11/2011
  
  11 bodies found in collapsed hotels
      VAN, TURKEY - Eleven people were killed by an earthquake Wednesday in eastern Turkey, and angry residents protested Thursday that authorities should have closed two collapsed hotels that were damaged by a temblor last month.    All11fatalities occurred in the two collapsed hotels.
  
  
• 11/18/2011
  
  China dig offers info on hellish extinction by Seth Borenstein, Associated Press
      WASHINGTON — During the world’s biggest mass extinction created by volcanic eruptions, Earth seemed pretty close to a description of hell — fiery, smoky and explosive, according to research dug up in China.
      The study may provide a scary lesson about climate change, its authors say.
      It was the third of five extinctions in world history, occurring even before dinosaurs roamed.    It killed off more than three-quarters of life on the planet in an event scientists have called the Great Dying.
      The Chinese dig provides new dates and details of the event, which happened 252 million years ago and may have lasted less than 100,000 years, far shorter than scientists had thought, according to the study published Thursday in the journal Science.
      The study bolsters the theory that the giant die-off was caused by a massive shift in climate triggered by volcanic activity far beyond modern levels.
      The die-off took only about 20,000 years, less than previously thought, though the ecological damage lasted longer.
      Devastating fires raged worldwide.    “Imagine drying out the Amazon and burning it up,” said study co-author Douglas Erwin, a paleobiology curator at the Smithsonian Institution.
      “… You’re killing off 75 to 90 percent of everything on the planet.”    It was the only mass extinction in history to kill off hardy insects, he said.
  
  
• 11/19/2011
  
  Scientists expect more weather disasters
      WASHINGTON - Think of the Texas drought, floods in Thailand and Russia’s deadly heat waves as coming attractions in a warming world.    That’s the warning from top international climate scientists and disaster experts meeting in Africa.
      They said the world should prepare for more dangerous and “unprecedented extreme weather” caused by global warming.
      The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a special report on global warming and extreme weather Friday after meeting in Kampala, Uganda.    It was the first time the group of scientists has focused on the dangers of extreme weather events such as heat waves, floods, droughts and storms.
      The 29-page summary of the full report — to be completed in coming months — says extremes could get so bad that some regions may need to be abandoned.
  
  
• 11/20/2011
  
  Wind-fed Reno fire destroys 32 homes by Scott Sonner, Associated Press
      RENO, Nevada — The estimated number of homes destroyed in a wind-fueled wildfire reached at least 32, but Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval said it’s a miracle scores more weren’t lost.
      Saturday’s re-evaluation of the 2,000-acre burn found far more destruction than initially thought, Reno Fire Chief Mike Hernandez said.    The unusual, out-of-season blaze spread by galeforce winds of more than 70 mph ripped through the Sierra foothills early Friday, forcing the evacuation of nearly 10,000 people.    Most started returning Saturday afternoon.    “We had homes that were actively burning in densely populated areas,” Hernandez said.    Many families “had to leave in the middle of the night with very, very limited possessions, and they are coming back to devastation, to nothing,” he said.    After a helicopter tour of the area Saturday, the governor said that while the loss of homes was tragic, the 400 firefighters on the lines are heroes for saving more than 4,000 houses that could have burned in the blaze.    Investigators suspect it was started by arcing power lines.    “When you see something like that, you can’t help but be struck by the awesome and random power of nature,” Sandoval of the blackened path of the fire that snaked along the edge of the foothills, sometimes burning one home to the ground while neighboring houses on either side went untouched.    “It is nothing short of a miracle the amount of homes that have been saved,” he said.    Reno Mayor Bob Cashell thanked the numerous communities — from sometimes hundreds of miles away — for sending crews to help.    The fire was 80 percent contained Saturday and should be fully out by the middle of next week, fire officials said.
  
  
• 11/21/2011
  
  Fire crews work on lingering hot spots
      RENO, NEV. - Fire crews in Reno were focusing Sunday on lingering hot spots and starting repair work on the hillsides blackened by wildfire that destroyed 32 homes.    Sierra Fire Protection District Chief Mike Brown said the 2,000-acre fire was 95 percent contained.    Nearly 10,000 people were forced to leave their homes when the fire erupted Friday.    Most people returned Saturday night.
  
  Flooding death toll passes 600 in Thailand
      BANGKOK - The death toll from Thailand’s worst flooding in more than 50 years has passed 600.    The floods began in late July, fed by heavy monsoon rains and a series of tropical storms.
      Floodwaters swamped entire towns as they moved south through the nation’s central heartland to Bangkok and the Gulf of Thailand.    More than two-thirds of the country’s 77 provinces have been flooded during the fourmonthlong crisis.    The government said Sunday that the death toll has reached 602, the majority from drowning.
  
  
• 11/28/2011
  
  Sixth earthquake hits region in Oklahoma
      SPARKS, OKLA. - The U.S. Geological Survey said a 3.2-magnitude quake struck just before 6 a.m. Sunday about 27 miles northeast of Oklahoma City.    The Logan County Sheriff’s Office said no damage was reported.    On Saturday, a 2.4 magnitude tremor was recorded about 7 a.m. about 50 miles northeast of Oklahoma City near Sparks.
      Sunday’s earthquake was the sixth in the area since Thursday.
  
  U.N. meeting targets deadlock on carbon by Arthur Max, Associated Press
      DURBAN, South Africa — The U.N.’s top climate official said Sunday that she expects governments to make a long-delayed decision on whether industrial countries should make further commitments to reduce emissions of climatechanging greenhouse gases.
      Amid fresh warnings of climate-related disasters in the future, delegates from about 190 countries were gathering in Durban for a two-week conference beginning today.    They hope to break deadlocks on how to curb emissions of carbon dioxide and other pollutants.
      Christiana Figueres, head of the U.N. climate secretariat, said the stakes for the negotiations are high, underscored by new scientific studies.
      Under discussion was “nothing short of the most compelling energy, industrial, behavioral revolution that humanity has ever seen,” she said.
      Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a hero of the movement that ended apartheid in South Africa, led a rally at a rugby stadium later Sunday urging negotiators to be more ambitious during what were expected to be difficult talks.    Unseasonably cold, windy weather kept the crowd to a few hundred spectators.
      Tutu said the struggle to end the racist regime in his homeland is now followed by a fight against “another huge enemy, and no country can fight this particular enemy on its own.”    He chided countries that have been reluctant to renew pledges to cut carbon emissions.    Whether rich or poor, “this is the only home we have,” he said.    “For your own sakes, you who are rich, we are in-viting you: Come on the side of right.”    In Rome, Pope Benedict XVI — sometimes called the “green pope” for his outspokenness on environmental issues — also called for the delegates in Durban to heed the needs of the world’s poor.    “I hope that all members of the international community agree on a re-sponsible and credible response to this worrisome and complex phenomenon, taking into account the needs of the poorest and future generations,” he said during his traditional Sunday blessing from his studio overlooking St. Peter’s Square.    Hopes were scrapped for an overall treaty governing global carbon emissions after the collapse of talks at a climate summit in Copenhagen two years ago.    The “big bang” approach has been replaced by incremental efforts to build new institutions to help shift the global economy from carbon- intensive energy gen-eration, industries and transportation to more climate- friendly technologies.
      But an underlying division between rich and poor countries on the future of the1997 Kyoto Protocol has stymied the negotiators.
      Figueres said she hoped for a decision on extending emission reduction commitments under the Kyoto accord, which has been postponed for two years.    Previous commitments expire next year.
      “It’s a tall order for governments to face this,” but they show no interest in yet another delay, she said.
  
  
• 11/30/2011
  
  Helping poor nations go green debated
      DURBAN, S. AFRICA - International climate negotiators were at odds Tuesday on how to raise billions of dollars to help poor countries cope with global warming.    Putting the final touches on the Green Climate Fund is a top issue at the 192-party U.N. climate conference that was in its second day.    It is to last two weeks.
  
  
• 12/2/2011
  
  Arctic is warming faster, scientists say
      WASHINGTON - The Arctic region has changed for the worse in the past five years.    It is melting at a near record pace, and is darkening and absorbing too much of the sun’s heat.
      A new report card from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration rates the polar region with blazing red stop lights on three of five categories and yellow cautions for the other two.    But it doesn’t mean the Arctic is doomed, and it still will freeze in the winter, said report coeditor Jackie Richter-Menge.
      The Arctic acts as Earth’s refrigerator, cooling the planet.    What’s happening, scientists said, is like someone pushing the fridge’s thermostat too high.    The changes are from both man-made global warming and recent localized weather shifts on top of a longer term warming trend.
  
  Winds down trees, power lines in West
      LOS ANGELES - Some of the worst winds in years blasted the West on Thursday, toppling trees and trucks, kicking up blinding dust across highways and bringing hurricane-force gusts of more than 100 mph in the mountains.
      “It was like being in a hurricane.    I thought I was going to blow away,” said Bill Patzert of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who lives in the Southern California city of Sierra Madre.
      California was the hardesthit Western state, with more than 200,000 utility customers without power after the winds swept through Wednesday.    The winds downed trees and power lines and blew semi-trailers off the road. Drivers encountered tree branches blocking streets and darkened traffic lights.
  
  
• 12/5/2011
  
  There’s another side to EPA’s new air rules - Some question need for delays by Renee Schoof, McClatchy Newspapers
      LAWRENCEBURG, Ind. — America has never had a nationwide limit on mercury and other toxic emis-sions from coal-fired power plants.    That’s about to change, though, and it will cost companies such as American Electric Power, which runs the Tanners Creek power station here on the Ohio River, billions of dollars.    Tanners Creek represents one side of a split in the American electric power industry.    Some industry lobbies and Republicans in the House of Representatives say the nation can’t afford the regulation of toxic air pollution from power plants that the Environmental Protection Agency plans to release in December.    And American Electric Power says it needs more time.    “Why is the EPA in a rush to push regulations that would saddle Americans with higher energy costs and throw even more of us out of work?”    The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, a power industry lobby, asks on its website.    There’s another side to this story, however, and it’s well represented by Brandon Shores, one of Constellation Energy’s biggest coal-fired plants (almost 1,300 megawatts), just outside Baltimore on the Chesapeake Bay.    Its scrubber has been running since early last year — because it’s required by Maryland law.    The Brandon Shores plant will meet the EPA’s new air toxics rule by “an ample margin,” said Paul Allen, Constellation’s senior vice president for corporate affairs.
      Constellation broke ground for the scrubber in June 2007 and finished in September 2009.    At the peak of construction, 1,385 people worked on it.
      Allen said he’d heard the complaint that the EPA wasn’t giving industry enough time.
      “That doesn’t square with our experience,” he said.    As with any construc-tion project, there was a trade-off between how much was spent and how fast the work got done.    The state deadline made Constellation move fast, and it spent $885 million.    It also added 30 jobs to run the pollution- control equipment — and it’s still profitable.
      Today, the white plumes rising from two new stacks at the plant emit mostly water vapor and carbon dioxide.    The scrubber — a large chemical plant next to the plant — cuts 95 percent of the sulfur dioxide, which contributes to soot, and 90 percent of the mercury.
      Allen said it was a good time for the power industry to invest in reducing toxic air pollution, because the price of electricity has gone down in recent years as a result of cheaper natural gas supplies from horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing.
      About 40 percent of the nation’s coal plants don’t have controls for toxic air pollution.    The EPA says the limits on mercury and other toxics will add jobs, save lives and produce health benefits estimated at up to $140 billion per year.    The emissions that will be reduced include mercury and lead, which can permanently reduce the thinking power of children; other metals that can cause cancer; and acid gases, which can damage the lungs.
      Slashing toxic air pollution is required under 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act.    After many years of false starts and delays, the EPA is under a court order to put out the rule’s fi-nal version by Dec. 16.    The question is how stringent it will be, and whether companies will get additional time to comply.
      American Electric Power is asking to move the overall compliance deadline to 2020.    In all, American Electric Power expects to spend $6 billion to $8 billion on emissions reduction, CEO Nick Akins said.    “We support what the EPA is trying to do relative to emission reductions at our power plants,” Akins said.    “What we are arguing about is the timetable.”
      Under the EPA’s pending rule, companies would get three years, until 2014, with a possible extension to 2015.    But Akins said scrubbers took five years to build, including time to get permits.    There will be too much demand for labor throughout the power industry to get all the equipment built within three or four years, he said.
      American Electric Power wants to stagger its plant retirements and pollution controls until 2020.
      “It would be great if we could do all this stuff overnight,” Akins said.    “We just need a chance to make that progress.”
      Environmentalists and health advocacy groups say that delay would cost lives.    The EPA has estimated that 6,800 to 17,000 lives would be saved in 2016 if plants are complying with its timetable.
      Unlike Constellation, American Electric Power operates in states where it needs approval from regulators to recover costs.    In areas with no state rules on toxic air pollution, it wouldn’t be able to get such regulator approval before the EPA puts out a final rule, company spokesman Pat Hemlepp said.    The company also expects rates 10 percent to 35 percent higher in the 11 states it serves as a result of the air toxics rule and other pending coal-related pollution regulations. And it expects layoffs.
      Brian Scragg, the plant manager at Tanners Creek, said the power station operated around the clock with 128 full-time employees and usually about 25 contractors, though sometimes as many as 80.    Clos-ing the three smaller units will mean less work for contractors and will require only about 65 fulltime jobs.    Scragg said he’d try to find jobs at other plants for the workers he’d let go.    On the other hand, the company plans to hire 100 to 200 workers at the peak of construction for the plant’s two new pollutioncontrol systems.
  
  
• 12/10/2011
  
  Climate talks struggle for deal by Arthur Max, Associated Press
      DURBAN, South Africa — Negotiators from Europe, tiny islands threatened by rising oceans and the world’s poorest countries sought to keep alive the only treaty governing global warming and move to the next stage, struggling against an unlikely alliance of the United States, China and India.
      Bleary-eyed delegates worked through the night and all day Friday, and the two-week U.N. conference stretched past the hour it was supposed to end, with the negotiators looking ahead to a second and final night of meetings expected to last until dawn today.    Delegates from the 194party conference are trying to map out the pathway toward limiting global emissions of greenhouse gases for the rest of this decade, and then how to continue beyond 2020.
      Scientists say that unless those emissions — chiefly carbon dioxide from power generation and industry — level out and reverse within a few years, the Earth will be set on a possibly irreversible path of rising temperatures that leads to ever greater climate catastrophes.
      More than 120 climatevulnerable countries signed on to the European Union vision calling for all countries to be held accountable for their carbon emissions in the future, not just the industrial countries.    The U.S., China and India, all for slightly different reasons, refused.
      The United States is concerned about conceding any competitive business advantage to China.    Beijing is resisting any suggestion to change its status as a developing country, saying it still has hundreds of millions of impoverished people.
  
  
• 12/11/2011
  
  New Madrid quakes likely to come again - Series of huge tremors occurred 200 years ago by James Bruggers, The Courier-Journal
      Two centuries ago Friday, the first of three powerful earthquakes along the New Madrid fault zone jolted the lower Midwest and shook much of the nation.
      Buildings were flattened near the epicenter in Arkansas, and chimneys toppled hundreds of miles away.    Boats on the Mississippi River were overturned.    And large tracts of land became like liquid, swallowing croplands, grasslands and bottomland forests, leaving surface scars visible to this day.
      Over three months in 1811-12, the quakes and hundreds of aftershocks rocked the Midwest and upper South, including portions of Kentucky.    They remain among the most powerful earthquakes to ever strike the United States, occurring just across the Mississippi River near Western Kentucky.
      And on the bicentennial of the New Madrid quakes, geologists and emergency planners say future quakes along the fault are certain — and the U.S. Geological Survey expects that eventually, some will be very damaging.
      The USGS has projected a 6 percent to 10 percent likelihood of a 7.5-magnitude quake in the next 50 years, roughly on par with the massive quakes of 200 years ago.    The agency predicts a 25 percent to 40 percent chance of a weaker magnitude 6 quake, which would still cause damage, during the same time period.
      Steve Oglesby, the deputy earthquake program manager for the Kentucky Division of Emergency Management, said quakes the magnitude of those in 1811-12 would be devastating in this modern era.
      “It makes me concerned about what we will face when that big shaking occurs again,” Oglesby said.    “What we will be dealing with today are collapsed structures, and people trapped underneath, calling for help.”
      The 1811-12 earthquakes occurred when relatively few people lived in the region.    Louisville had recorded just 1,357 residents in the 1810 census, for example.
      And because there also wasn’t much to fall on people, the number of deaths from those quakes is be-lieved to be fairly small, said Robert A. Williams, the Central and Eastern United States Earthquake Program coordinator with the USGS.    But millions of people now live in the Memphis and St. Louis metropolitan areas, which are likely to face the most deadly damage, according to planning documents. Western Kentucky will also likely be hit hard.    “The news accounts of (recent major earthquakes in other countries) are what we will have in Western Kentucky, in Murray, in Paducah, and some of the smaller communities,” Oglesby said.    “It will be an unbelievable scene.”
      “Anybody that lives in this area has to worry about it,” said Paducah Mayor William F. Paxton III.    “But you can’t just live your life around it.    You have to go on, and work toward getting new businesses and new industries.    If it happens, you address it.”
      Hickman Mayor Charles Murphy said his Fulton County town with about 2,500 residents would “really be in trouble” in a major quake.
      “As a city, we don’t have much to work with,” he said.    “We have a dump truck and backhoe and we have a volunteer fire department.    We’d just have to try to make do, and hopefully we could depend on someone ... to come help us.”    The New Madrid earthquakes were “very big,” Williams said, with the largest likely between magnitude 7 and magnitude 8, putting them on par with the1906 San Francisco earthquake and subsequent fire, which killed 3,000 people.
      They were more powerful than the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, which killed 316,000 people, injured 300,000 and displaced 1.3 million.
  
  Hundreds of quakes
      The first New Madrid fault quake of 1811, a magnitude 7.7, struck early in the morning, and a magnitude 7 aftershock came five hours later. In Louisville, 380 miles from the epicenters in northeast Arkansas, Jared Brooks began documenting the intensity of each quake with pendulums.    He went on to describe hundreds of them in a detailed account.    The shaking that first day “became constant, at a dreadful rate to tremendous, so as to threaten the town with total destruction,” he wrote on Dec. 16, according to published historical accounts.
      Though the town was not destroyed, Brooks wrote that a “great noise was produced by the agitation of all the loose matter in town ... the general consternation is great, and the damage done considerable; gable ends parapets and chimneys of many houses are thrown down,” according to the 1882 book “History of the Ohio Falls Cities and their Counties,” by L.A. Williams & Co.    People were awakened by the shaking in New York City and Charleston, S.C.
      On Jan. 23, 1812, at 9:15 a.m., a 7.5-magnitude quake struck New Madrid.    Because the Ohio River was frozen over, there was less river traffic and fewer observers, but there were reports of ground warping, new fissures and severe landslides, according to a USGS account.
      The final major quake in the series, estimated at magnitude 7.7, was at 3:45 a.m. on Feb. 7, and was fol-lowed by several destructive shocks.    The town of New Madrid, Mo., was destroyed, and in St. Louis, “many houses were damaged severely and their chimneys were thrown down,” according to the USGS.
      Jefferson County resident Mathias M. Speed was sleeping on a boat in the Mississippi River near New Madrid on Feb. 7,1812, and later wrote about his experience for the Bardstown Repository newspaper, which was reprinted in the Kentucky Gazette, another newspaper of the day.    “About 3 o’clock on the morning of the 7th,” he wrote, “we were waked by the violent agitation of the boat, attended with a noise more tremendous and terrific than I can describe or any one conceive, who was not present or near to such a scene — the constant discharge of a heavy cannon might give some idea of the noise for loudness, but this was infinitely more terrible, on account of its appearing to be subterra-neous.
      Two hundred years later, the USGS considers the New Madrid fault zone a serious threat, Williams said.    In recent years, geologists who look for clues of past earthquakes to help predict when more might strike have gained a better understanding of the region and the risk it presents, he said.    “In the last 15 years, we have learned a lot, and one of those important things, is that it wasn’t just a single episode,” Williams said.    “Sequences of large earthquakes have happened at least twice before, and perhaps three times before.”
      The two most recent were double quakes that happened around 1450 and 900, he said.
  
  Thousands of deaths
      Government officials and academic researchers have looked at a variety of worst-case scenarios for future quakes, and one completed in 2009 by the Mid-America Earthquake Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Cham-paign and Virginia Tech researchers assumes three large quakes occurring at the roughly the same time, at 2 a.m. when most people are home and casualties are likely to be less severe.    Still, the study projected 86,000 casualties, including 3,500 deaths in eight states.    Nearly 715,000 buildings would be destroyed. Some 3,500 bridges would be damaged.    About 2.6 million households would be without electricity and 1.1 million households would be without drinking water.
      Road, rail, air and river travel would be severely limited. In southwest Indiana, as many as 6,800 buildings would be destroyed and as many as 80 people might be.    “What we will be dealing with today are collapsed structures, and people trapped underneath, calling for help.”
      STEVE OGLESBY, deputy earthquake program manager for the Kentucky Division of Emergency Management.
  
  Climate meeting forges landmark deal - Program would chart new path by Arthur Max, Associated Press
      DURBAN, South Africa — A U.N. climate conference reached a hard-fought agreement early today on a complex and far-reaching program meant to set a new course for the global fight against climate change for the coming decades.
      The 194-party conference agreed to start negotiations on a new accord that would put all countries un-der the same legal regime enforcing commitments to control greenhouse gases. It would take effect by 2020 at the latest.
      The deal also set up the bodies that will collect, govern and distribute tens of billions of dollars a year for poor countries.    Other documents in the package lay out rules for monitoring and verifying emissions reductions, protecting forests, transferring clean technologies to developing countries and scores of technical issues.
      Currently, only industrial countries have legally binding emissions targets under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.    Those commitments expire next year, but they will be extended for another five years under the accord adopted today— akey demand by developing countries seeking to preserve the only existing treaty regulating carbon emissions.
      The proposed Durban Platform offered answers to problems that have bedeviled global warming ne-gotiations for years about sharing the responsibility for controlling carbon emissions and helping the world’s poorest and most climate-vulnerable nations cope with changing forces of nature.
      The United States was a reluctant supporter, concerned about agreeing to join an international climate system that likely would find much opposition in the U.S. Congress.
      “This is a very significant package.    None of us likes everything in it.    Believe me, there is plenty the United States is not thrilled about,” said U.S. climate envoy Todd Stern.    But the package captured important advances that would be undone if it is rejected, he told the delegates.
      Environmentalists criticized the package — as did many developing countries in the debate — for failing to address what they called the most urgent issue, to move faster and deeper in cutting carbon emissions.
      Scientists say that unless those emissions — chiefly carbon dioxide from power generation and industry — level out and reverse within a few years, the Earth will be set on a possibly irreversible path of rising temperatures that lead to ever greater climate catastrophes.
      “The good news is we avoided a train wreck,” said Alden Meyer, recalling predictions a few days ago of a likely failure.    “The bad news is that we did very little here to affect the emissions curve.”
      The breakthrough capped13 days of hectic negotiations that ran a day and a half over schedule, including two round-theclock days that left negotiators bleary-eyed and stumbling with words.    Delegates were seen nodding off in the final plenary session, despite the high drama, barely constrained emotions and uncertainty whether the talks would end in triumph or total collapse.
      The nearly fatal issue involved the legal nature of the accord that will govern carbon emissions by the turn of the next decade.
      A plan put forward by the European Union sought strong language that would bind all countries equally to carry out their emissions commitments.    India led the objectors, saying it wanted a less rigorous option.    Environment Minister Jayanthi Natarajan argued that the EU proposal undermined the 20year-old principle that developing countries have less responsibility than industrial nations that caused the problem.    “The equity of burdensharing cannot be shifted,” she said in angry tones.
  
  
• 12/12/2011
  
  Climate deal doesn’t make it worse — or better by Karl Ritter, Associated Press
      JOHANNESBURG, South Africa — The hard-fought deal at a global climate conference in South Africa keeps talks alive but does not address the core problem: The world’s biggest carbon polluters aren’t willing to cut emissions of greenhouse gases enough to stave off dangerous levels of global warming.
      With many scientists saying time is running out, a bigger part of the solution may have to come from cli-mate- friendly technologies being developed outside the U.N. process.    “We avoided a train wreck and we got some useful incremental decisions,” said Alden Meyer, of the Washington-based Union of Concerned Scien-tists.    “The bad news is that we did very little here to affect the emissions curve which is accelerating.”
      Scientists say that if levels of greenhouse gases continue to rise, eventually the world’s climate will reach a tipping point, with irreversible melting of some ice sheets and a several- foot rise in sea levels.    The two-decade-long climate talks have been focused on keeping global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Fahr-enheit above current levels by the end of this century.
      A report released before the Durban talks by the U.N. Environment Programme said greenhouse gas emissions need to peak before 2020 for the world to have a shot of reaching that target.    It said that’s doable only if nations raise their emissions pledges.    In Durban, they didn’t. Sunday’s deal extends by five years the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 agreement that has binding emissions targets for some industrial nations but not the world’s biggest carbon polluters, China and the U.S.    The Durban deal also envisions a new accord with binding targets for all nations to take effect in 2020.    And it sets up bodies that will collect, govern and distribute tens of billions of dollars to poor nations suffering the effects of climate change.    “But the core question of whether more than 190 nations can cooperate ... and bring down emissions to the necessary level by 2020 remains open — it is a high-risk strategy for the planet and its people,” said UNEP chief Achim Steiner.    Climate talks have snagged on rifts between rich and poor, between fully industrialized nations and emerging economies, and differences on how to share the burden of reducing greenhouse emissions.
      Held back by a skeptical Congress, the U.S. doesn’t want to commit to any binding deal unless it also imposes strict emissions targets on China and India.    The latter insist their targets should be more lenient because, historically, the Westhascaused more manmade warming.
  
  
• 12/13/2011
  
  Canada quits global warming treaty
      TORONTO - Canada pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change Monday, saying the accord won’t help solve the climate crisis.    It dealt a blow to the global warming treaty, which has not been formally renounced by any other country.    Environment Minister Peter Kent said Kyoto doesn’t represent the way forward for Canada or the world.    Canada, joined by Japan and Russia, said last year it will not accept new Kyoto commitments, but withdrawing from the accord is another setback to the 1997 treaty.    Canada’s previous Liberal government signed the accord but did little to implement it, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government never embraced it.
  
  
• 12/18/2011
  
  Flash floods kill more than 450 in Philippines by Oliver Teves, Associated Press
      Flash floods devastated a southern Philippines region unaccustomed to serious storms, killing more than 450 people while they slept, driving hundreds of others to their rooftops and turning two coastal cities into muddy, waterways filled with overturned vehicles and toppled trees.
      With nearly 300 people missing, top military officials were to fly to the worst-hit city of Cagayan de Oro today to help oversee search-and-rescue efforts and deal with thousands of displaced villagers.
      Among the items urgently needed are coffins and body bags, said Benito Ramos, who heads the gov-ernment’s disaster-response agency.    “It’s overwhelming. We didn’t expect these many dead,” Ramos said.    Army officers reported unidentified bodies piled up in morgues in Cagayan de Oro city, where electricity was restored in some areas, although the city of more than 500,000 people remained without tap water.
      Most of the victims were asleep Friday night when raging floodwaters cascaded from the mountains after 12 hours of rain from a late-season tropical storm in the southern Mindanao region.    The region is unaccustomed to the typhoons that are common elsewhere in the nation.
      Ayi Hernandez, a former congressman, said he and his family were resting in their home in Cagayan de Oro late Friday when they heard a loud “swooshing” sound and water quickly rose ankledeep inside.    He left for a neighbor’s two-story house.    “It was a good thing, because in less than an hour the water rose to about 11 feet,” filling his house to the ceiling, he said.    At least 436 people died, based on a body count in funeral parlors, said Philippine Red Cross Secretary General Gwen Pang.    She said 215 died in Cagayan de Oro — a city of more than 500,000 — and 144 in nearby Iligan, with more than 300,000 residents.
      The missing included prominent Filipino radio broadcaster Enie Alsonado, who was swept away while trying to save his neighbors, Iligan Mayor Lawrence Cruz said.
      Many of the bodies wereunclaimedafternearly 24 hours, suggesting that entire families had died, Pang said.    Tropical Storm Washi dumped more than a month of average rains on Mindanao in just 12 hours.    Saturday night it was headed for Palawan province southwest of Manila.
      Rescuers in boats rushed offshore to save people swept out to sea.    In Misamis Oriental province, 60 people were plucked from the ocean off El Salvador city, about six miles northwest of Cagayan de Oro.    Another 120 were rescued off Opol township.
  
  
• 12/19/2011
  
  Tropical storm kills more than 650
      ILIGAN, PHILIPPINES - Tropical Storm Washi blew away Sunday after devastating a wide swath of the mountainous region on Mindanao island, which is unaccustomed to major storms.    It killed at least 652 people and left more than 900 others missing, the Philippine Red Cross said.
      Most of the victims were asleep Friday night when flash floods cascaded down mountain slopes with logs and uprooted trees, swelling rivers.    The late-season tropical storm turned the worst-hit coastal cities of Cagayan de Oro and nearby Iligan into muddy wastelands filled with overturned cars and broken trees.
  
  
• 12/23/2011
  
  Quakes topple items, terrify residents
      WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND - A series of strong earthquakes in the 5.8-magnitude range struck the city of Christchurch today, rattling buildings, sending goods tumbling from shelves and prompting terrified holiday shoppers to flee into the streets.    The city appeared to have been spared major damage.    One person was injured at a city mall and was taken to a hospital, and four people had to be rescued after being trapped by a rock fall, Christchurch police said in a statement.
      But there were no immediate reports of serious injuries or widespread damage in the city, which is still recovering from a devastating February earthquake that killed182 people and destroyed much of downtown.
  
  
• 12/27/2011
  
  Coal mining analysis has Obama in hard spot - Climate-change challenge posed by Juliet Eilperin, The Washington Post
      When it comes to coal mining in the United States, environmentalists have a simple goal: End it.    For the Obama administration, it’s a little more complicated.
      In its nearly three years, the administration has restricted coal-mining waste from being dumped into streams and imposed new pollution controls on coalfired power plants.    But on the fundamental question of whether the government should halt federal leasing, the administration’s answer thus far: not yet.
      Instead, the federal government is analyzing the environmental impact of extracting coal from public land, drawing fire from both sides.    Environmentalists say such action doesn’t go far enough; industry officials ask why it would pursue this analysis in the absence of a federal law on greenhouse gas emissions.    “On some level, the twin goals of increased fossil fuel production and reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions are necessarily in conflict, at least without a national cap on emissions,” said Paul Bledsoe, a special assistant at the Interior Department during the Clinton administration.    “This fundamental contradiction in current U.S. energy policy is playing out on the Keystone oil pipeline, in our public lands policy and throughout the energy economy.”
      Deputy Interior Secretary David J. Hayes said the agency is “committed to evaluating greenhouse gas emissions among the many important factors we analyze when considering whether or not a coal-extraction lease sale makes sense for the environment, the economy and America’s energy security.”
      Even as Interior has given added scrutiny to leasing and pushed for the development of renewable energy alternatives, Hayes added, it hasn’t sought to shut down coal production altogether.    “Coal is providing close to half the electricity in the United States, and 40 percent of the coal used in that mix comes from the public land — our land,” he said.    “It’s an important part of our energy mix.    The revenues that come from it are significant.”    Overall U.S. coal production has dipped slightly since 2008, and federal coal leases have fallen more sharply.    Coal production totaled 1.17 billion short tons in 2008, according to the Energy Information Agency.    It declined to 1.074 billion tons in 2009 and last year reached 1.084 billion.    It is expected to be roughly 1.08 billion tons in 2011.
      The center of gravity for coal production in the United States has shifted over the past few decades for both economic and environmental reasons, moving from central Appalachia to the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana.
      Central Appalachia now produces just 17 percent of the nation’s coal compared with 70 percent in the 1970s, according to Tom Sanzillo, president of the consulting group T.R. Rose Associates.    The Powder River Basin accounts for 43 percent, more than all of the coal produced east of the Mississippi River.
      Increasingly, both the mining industry and environmentalists have focused on the Powder River Basin, where coal extraction has more than doubled over the past two decades.    In 1990, the federal govern-ment decided to decertify the area as a coal production region, allowing coal companies to name the tracts of land they’d like to lease rather than having the Bureau of Land Management select them.
  
  
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This file created on October 12, 2011, updated on October 24, 2011, and December 27, 2011.