History > 2007 > USA >

Nature, Wildlife, Climate, Weather (VI)

Moderate earthquake

hits Northern California

Wed Oct 31, 2007
6:14am EDT
Reuters

OAKLAND, California (Reuters) - A magnitude 5.6 earthquake struck in a rural area about 9 miles northeast of San Jose, California, Silicon Valley's biggest city, on Tuesday night, causing minor damage.

The earthquake was felt across the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond just before 8:05 p.m. (11:00 p.m. EDT on Tuesday).

There were no immediate reports of major damage but the San Jose Mercury News Web site reported phone service failed in a part of Palo Alto, home to Hewlett-Packard computer company and Stanford University.

It said the quake caused minor damage and residents poured out of apartments in downtown San Jose to survey the damage. San Jose in the 10th most populous U.S. city.

"It was pretty significant. you could actually hear the rumbling of the ground. It was a good shake," said Nick Muyo, a spokesman for the San Jose Police Department.

Asked about damage, he said he knew of "nothing other than things tipping off cabinets and dressers."

The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake occurred on the Calaveras Fault, located east of the San Andreas Fault along which some of the most destructive earthquakes in California have struck -- including one in 1906 which, together with a subsequent fire, destroyed much of San Francisco.

Residents of San Francisco, 50 miles north of San Jose, and Stockton, the same distance to the east, reported feeling Tuesday's quake.

Jeff Brown, a spokesman for video game publisher Electronic Arts Inc based in Redwood Shores, 25 miles north of San Jose, said: "There's no damage but a couple people are there and they said the curtains banged against the windows and the building creaked. They definitely felt it."

The quake occurred at a depth of 5.7 miles, according to the USGS.

(Additional reporting by Adam Tanner and Scott Hillis

Moderate earthquake hits Northern California, R, 31.10.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN3020977620071031

Boy With Matches Started One California Fire, Officials Say

October 31, 2007
Filed at 9:22 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

SANTA CLARITA, Calif. (AP) -- Officials blamed a wildfire that consumed more than 38,000 acres and destroyed 21 homes last week on a boy playing with matches, and said they would ask a prosecutor to consider the case.

The boy, whose name and age were not released, admitted to sparking the fire on Oct. 21, Los Angeles County sheriff's Sgt. Diane Hecht said Tuesday. Ferocious winds helped it quickly spread.

''He admitted to playing with matches and accidentally starting the fire,'' Hecht said in a statement.

The boy was released to his parents, and the case will be presented to the district attorney's office, Hecht said. It was not clear if he had been arrested or cited by detectives.

The fire began in an area near Agua Dulce and quickly spread. It was among 15 or so major wildfires that destroyed some 2,100 homes and blackened 809 square miles from Los Angeles to the Mexican border last week. Seven deaths were blamed directly on the fires, six evacuees died of natural causes and one person died of a fall.

Authorities arrested five people for arson during that period, but none have been linked to any of the major blazes.

All but four of the blazes are now fully contained. Firefighters on Wednesday continued to cut lines around the remaining fires and kept a close eye on the weather.

Forecasters have said moderate Santa Ana winds could pick up later in the week.

Investigators have blamed an arsonist for setting a destructive wildfire in Orange County that blackened 28,500 acres and destroyed 16 homes.

Authorities were seeking the driver of a white Ford F-150 pickup truck spotted in a canyon area around the time the fire broke out. They said they wanted to talk to the driver, but stopped short of calling the person a suspect.

Officials offered a $285,000 reward to anyone with information that will lead to an arrest and conviction.

    Boy With Matches Started One California Fire, Officials Say, NYT, 31.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-California-Wildfires.html

Logging Is Part of a Plan to Preserve Adirondacks

October 29, 2007
The New York Times
By ANTHONY DePALMA

ADIRONDACK FOREST PRESERVE — Late in the year, when the campers are gone but the hunters have not yet arrived, timber trucks rule Boreas Road in the heart of the Adirondacks, barging through the morning mists with 70,000 pounds of fresh-cut fir and spruce strapped to their backs.

“That’s one of ours,” said Michael T. Carr, a 44-year-old bear of a man driving a green S.U.V. headed west on Boreas Road as one of the timber trucks barreled eastward.

That is a jarring statement coming from Mr. Carr, who is not a lumber man, or paper company executive, but executive director of the Adirondack chapter of the Nature Conservancy, one of the world’s biggest environmental groups and, since June, the owner of 161,000 acres of highly prized Adirondack wild lands.

The conservancy entered the timber business when it purchased the land from Finch, Pruyn & Company, which had held it since the Civil War. As part of that $110 million deal, the conservancy agreed to continue logging to supply wood to the Finch Paper mill in Glens Falls, N.Y., for the next 20 years.

The Finch, Pruyn (pronounced Prine) lands, considered the last remaining large privately owned parcels in Adirondack Park, are an ecological marvel, containing 144 miles of river, 70 lakes and ponds, more than 80 mountains and a vast unbroken wilderness that only loggers and a few hunters have ever seen. The property also contains unmatched natural features like the blue ledges of the Hudson River Gorge, OK Slip Falls and Boreas Pond, with its stunning views of the Adirondack high peaks, which naturalists have dreamed of protecting for decades.

The Adirondack Explorer, a local newspaper, called the transaction “the deal of the young century.” Peter Bauer, executive director of the Residents’ Committee to Protect the Adirondacks, said the conservancy’s handling of the land “will have a huge impact on what kind of park we have in the future.”

Environmentalists cheered when the conservancy swooped in to buy the Finch holdings, but a stark reality is now setting in. Not all 161,000 acres will be preserved as public wilderness. The terms of the pulp supply agreement are confidential, but foresters with knowledge of the deal said the conservancy could cut at least 65,000 tons of pulpwood trees a year for the mill — which is about 15 percent less than Finch cut in the Adirondacks last year. In addition, maples and other hardwoods could be cut under strict certified forest management guidelines.

The conservancy expects eventually to sell much of the land to the state. But to pay the enormous debt it incurred and the $1 million in annual property taxes, the group will, in the near term, have to sell some portion of the property to private owners. While those buyers will not be allowed to build on the land, they will be able to keep out the public. Some small parcels near existing hamlets might even be sold for housing or commercial development, Mr. Carr said.

Mr. Carr expects his decisions about which parcels to sell and to whom will anger as many people as they excite.

“This is not a throw-the-gates-open-to-the-public kind of acquisition,” Mr. Carr said. A team of scientists is now conducting a rapid ecological assessment of the land. Final decisions will not be announced until next fall, Mr. Carr said, and they will be driven not by concerns about recreational opportunities, or economic development, but “by science.”

“We have no intention of making everyone happy,” he said.

He also said that he realizes that people might be confused by a conservation organization being in the timber business.

“Right now, people are not sure if we’re going to cut trees or hug them,” Mr. Carr said. He pointed out that in recent years wood supply deals have become accepted aspects of land preservation efforts, and the economics of this deal make logging — according to high standards of forest sustainability — absolutely essential.

Overcoming the perception that the conservancy has no business cutting trees is just one challenge Mr. Carr faces in managing one of the most complicated land deals ever attempted in the Northeast. Dealing with close public scrutiny is another. The conservancy came under criticism after The Washington Post published a series of articles in 2003 that focused on the group’s transactions, particularly a deal in Texas, where it drilled for natural gas on sensitive lands it had purchased.

But the most intense pressure is coming from local communities, environmental organizations and special interest groups, all clamoring to stake their interest in the property. Mr. Carr’s list of petitioners is long: raft guides, float plane pilots, hunting clubs, loggers, hikers, school superintendents, buffalo ranchers and municipal golf course operators looking to expand. “Mike Carr has created a five-year nightmare for himself in trying to decide how to unload this property,” said John Sheehan, spokesman for the Adirondack Council, a nonprofit environmental organization. The impact of those decisions on the Adirondacks and the people who live, work and play there, he said, will be immeasurable.

But overlapping regulations and competing interests abound within the Adirondack Park, the six million-acre Vermont-size slab of New York State that is a century-old experiment in conservation.

Created by the State Legislature in the late 19th century, the park is an unusual mix of public and private lands designed to preserve exquisite mountain wilderness and a rugged way of life. As state purchases added up, the conflict between conservation and economic development intensified, with some local officials arguing that enough property had already been protected.

Over the last decade, many American paper companies in the Northeast changed the way they operated. They sold off their forestlands, creating historic opportunities for governments or conservation groups to acquire vast tracts of woodlands. During the administration of Gov. George E. Pataki, more than 660,000 acres in the Adirondacks were protected.

The Finch, Pruyn lands, while not the largest parcels to change hands, are in some ways among the most important, said Michelle L. Brown, conservation scientist for the conservancy, because they filled in many missing pieces of one of the largest northern forests left in the world.

“What’s most impressive to me is the connectivity,” Ms. Brown said. “Everything’s intact — the rivers, bogs, wetlands and forest all come together.”

Seen from Tom Helms’s 30-year-old Cessna 206 seaplane, the Finch, Pruyn lands are a mountain-size screen saver, with lines of softwood green surrounding rainbow pixels of autumn-colored hardwoods. Although Finch has cut trees here for 150 years, almost no signs of commercial timber operations are visible from 1,500 feet in the air.

“It’s the nicest piece of land in the Adirondacks that the state doesn’t own,” Mr. Helms said.

Leonard J. Cronin, Adirondack forest manager for Finch, said the company cut 3,533 acres of woodlands in the Adirondacks last year. Of that, 66 acres were clear-cut.

In other Adirondack land deals, the state has purchased easements restricting new construction on timberland. State officials said they are studying the Finch lands now for possible purchases, although some of the Adirondack towns are expected to resist because state-owned land is removed from property tax rolls and they feel the state already owns too much of the Adirondacks. Finch holdings are spread across 31 towns, and money from the state’s Environmental Protection Fund can be used for land acquisitions if local communities do not object.

Existing leases with private hunting clubs that cover 130,000 acres of the 161,000 in the tract are another big issue. One recent morning, Mr. Carr was out surveying the lands when he ran into David Hubert of Queensbury, a member of the Gooley Club, one of the oldest sportsmen’s groups in the Adirondacks. Mr. Hubert, 67, said he was worried about the future of the 16,000 acres the club has leased for the last 50 years.

“Obviously, we’d like to see it put to use in the same fashion as it is now,” Mr. Hubert said. He had just come back from hunting woodcock with his Brittany spaniel. “I’d hate to see it become non-game-producing state land.”

Mr. Carr has spent months listening to leaseholders and community leaders. Both the Adirondack Council and the Adirondack Mountain Club have already made their desires known: They want the state to buy about half of the 161,000 acres for forest preserve, with most of the rest sold with conservation easements to private buyers.

And those groups agree that woodland crews should continue cutting trees for the conservancy. Mr. Carr said he hopes that shows there no longer needs to be a choice between cutting and conservation.

“At this scale, and with this much land,” he said, “there’s room for both.”

    Logging Is Part of a Plan to Preserve Adirondacks, NYT, 29.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/29/nyregion/29adirondacks.html?hp

Californians Mull Next Step After Fires

October 29, 2007
Filed at 10:09 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

SAN DIEGO (AP) -- A week after a half million people fled Southern California's wildfires, shelters began closing and residents were figuring out what to do next -- even as firefighters kept a wary eye on the possibility of strong winds developing later in the week.

There was a chance of moderate Santa Anas -- the fierce, dry winds that fanned the flames last week -- returning in the next seven days, forecasters said.

''It's a little premature to be celebrating, that's for sure,'' California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection spokesman Fred Daskoski said. ''We're looking for full control within a week but if we get any of these winds returning, there is a possibility that a couple of spots could have a blowout, and then we'd be off to the races again.''

The winds, which last week gusted up to 100 mph, pushed flames across more than 500,000 acres, destroying more than 2,000 homes and forcing thousands into emergency shelters in seven Southern California counties.

As of Sunday, the state Office of Emergency Services tallied 2,767 structures destroyed. The number included 2,013 homes, office spokeswoman Kim Oliver said.

With more than a dozen fires fully surrounded, firefighters were pushing to complete lines around seven others. Containment of those blazes ranged from 50 percent to 97 percent.

With nearly all mandatory evacuation orders lifted, wildfire victims have begun assessing damage and trying to figure out where to go next.

In San Diego, the largest remaining shelter is at the Del Mar Fairgrounds, where about 130 evacuees were living, some of them after losing homes.

Many came from other shelters, including high schools preparing to reopen on Monday and Qualcomm Stadium, which was closed by the city of San Diego Friday to prepare for the Chargers' Sunday home game.

Lisa Shields, 32, arrived at the fairgrounds last week with two small children after being ordered to evacuate her Ramona home. Days later, she said she hadn't gone home because of an ongoing boil-water order in her community.

''I don't want to risk it,'' Shields said. ''I'm not going to get up to boil water for the baby in the middle of the night, or take them to some other place for a bath, when we're already in good shape here.''

Others were trying to figure out how to get home.

In the hard-hit resort mountain communities of Lake Arrowhead and Running Springs, many wanting to return were frustrated by roadblocks outside their neighborhoods.

Brian Babauta, 31, drove up Sunday from a San Bernardino hotel to try to get to his parents' house at Lake Arrowhead, but was turned away at a checkpoint.

Babauta finished the day miles away, sleeping in his truck in a grocery store parking lot.

''We tried getting up there through a back route down a dirt road, and there was a firefighter sitting there saying stuff was still burning,'' Babauta said. ''I just want to see if the rumors are true that my house is still standing.''

Others were working out how they would survive financially.

Janet Knecht supports three daughters, a grandson and her mother by cleaning houses in the wealthy mountain communities. She is concerned she may suffer financially until residents return home.

Before the fires, she earned $1,200 to $1,500 each month.

Knecht believes her renter's insurance will cover some of her personal property losses, and she plans to apply for lost wages at FEMA.

''I think we'll bounce back,'' she said. ''The worst will be not being able to recover any of our personal things.''

Seven deaths have been directly attributed to the fires, including those of four suspected illegal immigrants, whose burned bodies were found near the U.S.-Mexico border on Thursday.

Eleven Mexicans were being treated at a San Diego hospital for burns suffered in the wildfires after they crossed the border illegally, the Mexican government confirmed Saturday. Four were in critical condition.

------

Associated Press writers Garance Burke in Crestline, Allison Hoffman and Bernie Wilson in San Diego, Aaron C. Davis in El Cajon, and Jacob Adelman and Christopher Weber in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

    Californians Mull Next Step After Fires, NYT, 29.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-California-Wildfires.html

Rethinking Fire Policy in the Tinderbox Zone

October 28, 2007
The New York Times
By KIRK JOHNSON and JESSE McKINLEY

SAN DIEGO, Oct. 27 — As Californians sift through the cinders of this week’s deadly wildfires, there is a growing consensus that the state’s war against such disasters — as it is currently being fought — cannot be won.

“California has lost 1.5 million acres in the last four years,” said Richard A. Minnich, a professor of earth sciences who teaches fire ecology at the University of California, Riverside. “When do we declare the policy a failure?”

Fire-management experts like Professor Minnich, who has compared fire histories in San Diego County and Baja California in Mexico, say the message is clear: Mexico has smaller fires that burn out naturally, regularly clearing out combustible underbrush and causing relatively little destruction because the cycle is still natural. California has giant ones because its longtime policies of fire suppression — in which the government has kept fires from their normal cycle — has created huge pockets of fuel that erupt into conflagrations that must be fought.

“We’re on all year round,” said Brett Chapman, a firefighter with the United States Forest Service who worked 15-hour shifts this week in the Lake Arrowhead area east of Los Angeles.

The main problem is that many in California are ruggedly obstinate about the choice they have made to live with the constant threat of fire. Even state officials who are interested in change concede it could take a decade — and more catastrophic wildfires — before it happens.

“If you’re going to live in paradise,” said Randall Holloman, a bar and restaurant owner in Cedar Glen, which is in an area that has burned twice in four years, “you’re going to have to deal.”

In San Diego County, which has borne the brunt of the recent fires, three out of four homes built since 1990 are in the dangerous zone where open spaces and housing meet. These are the most vulnerable and exposed places in fire season because wildfires by and large start in national forests, recreation areas and other publicly owned lands. About half of the land in San Diego County is publicly owned, much of it in the Cleveland National Forest.

Had this week’s fires burned in the same locations in 1980, about 61,000 homes would have been within a mile of a fire. By 2000, the number would have grown to 106,000 homes, and this year it was 125,000, according to an analysis by the University of Wisconsin.

Nine fires continued to burn in a four-county area of Southern California, and officials said 20,575 homes were still in danger.

Lighter winds and higher humidity have enabled firefighters to go on the attack more, but many of the fires remain unpredictable and worrisome.

Fire crews at the Santiago Canyon fire in Orange County are trying to make a stand on a ridge-top old truck trail to prevent the fire from burning several homes and heading into Riverside County.

Capt. Phil Rawlings of the Orange County Fire Authority said Saturday the fire there, which has consumed 27,600 acres, is in an area that has not burned in decades, making its path difficult to predict and its intensity particularly acute.

“We don’t know how the fire will burn,” Captain Rawlings said. At least 200 homes could be threatened depending on how the fire proceeds.

There was also concern about a fire near the century-old Palomar Mountain Observatory in San Diego County.

It will take more than a week to put the fires out, officials said, and probably longer to stamp out flare-ups.

The long-term battle is one that fire experts suggest cannot be won, even with the better building codes and evacuation plans that have become a staple of government here and across much of the West. As the events of this week illustrate — at least 480,000 acres burned, 1,575 residences destroyed and 7 people killed — the cycle roars on with higher stakes, greater risk, and the grim certainty that it will happen again.

The California state fire marshal, Kate Dargan, said discussions had begun at the highest levels of government on some of the toughest proposals: curtailing population growth on the wildland margins or a sweeping overhaul of how the public lands are managed for fire danger. But decisions are perhaps 5 to 10 years away because of the enormity and complexity of the task.

“In the meantime,” Ms. Dargan said, “we’ll have more people living out there, and if averages hold, we’ll have two more catastrophic incidents like this before the decisions get made.”

Many Californians say they want the best of both worlds — life in the danger zone and more fire protection — and are frustrated that they do not have it.

“I’m angry that we are in the same boat,” said Camie Pretzinger, who lost her Cedar Glen home to fire in 2003 and defied an evacuation order there this week. “Every time there’s a disaster,” Ms. Pretzinger said, “they have to reinvent the wheel.”

State and local governments are locked in an increasingly difficult battle with Mother Nature.

In the aftermath of the last big fires, in 2003, a range of state and local ordinances were passed in hopes of disrupting the cycle. San Diego County went through a painstaking self-evaluation after the Cedar and Paradise fires destroyed 2,400 homes and killed 18 people in 2003. Fire officials examined properties all through the fire zone, trying to determine exactly how each house had caught fire — by what vector an ember had gotten into an attic or under a deck, whether windows had imploded, whether the roof had been the weak point.

Since then, building codes have been reworked. The new codes, which took effect in 2004 apply to new homes built in risky areas, most of them adjacent to the Cleveland National Forest.

The new rules dictate requirements right down to which side of the house can have an attic vent (not be on the forest side). Decks with overhangs are natural nests for miniature swirling firestorms that can whip embers into flame, so deck design rules were changed, too.

San Diego County was among the first in the nation to adopt voluntary standards of home protection stringent enough that homes could be deemed safe enough to “shelter in place,” if evacuation is impossible. The standards require special fire resistant building materials, sprinkling systems and water supply fixtures for fire fighting, and fire-resistant vegetation controls.

There are early indications from the current fires that some of the new rules may have made a difference. Five housing projects have been built in the county under the shelter-in-place standards; all five have survived the fires.

The state, using information gleaned from San Diego, has also moved ahead with new building codes, and an updated map of the state shows the risk zone for every piece of property in California.

But few officials are talking seriously about stopping construction. Officials in San Diego, where growth has been as enshrined into the civic DNA as firmly as anywhere in America, make it clear that they will not restrain new construction in fire zones, even if it were possible to do so.

“The idea is not that we create goals and policies to slow growth, that’s not the intent,” said Jeff Murphy, the interim deputy director of at the San Diego County Department of Planning and Land Use, where the county’s new fire protection building codes were developed. “It’s to make sure that people are safe during a wildland fire.”

The San Bernardino Valley Audubon Society and three other environmental groups successfully sued in 2005 to block a proposed 57-home development near Lake Arrowhead, but that was the exception. Smaller communities like Cedar Glen, near San Bernardino National Forest, are also operating under new rules, including stipulations that homeowners provide 100 feet of defensible space around their homes.

Four years ago, most of the houses on Hook Creek Road in Cedar Glen burned to the ground when a blaze called the Old Fire came roaring out of the forest, devouring almost everything in its path and leaving behind chimneys and charred stumps that looked like headstones.

This week, history nearly repeated itself as the Slide Fire took almost the same path, burning south to north, up hills into towns, and off public lands onto private property.

Cedar Glen itself was largely spared. But just across Lake Arrowhead, the popular getaway where Ronald Reagan is said to have found the inspiration to run for public office, fire destroyed about 100 homes.

All along nearby Hook Creek Road are abandoned foundations from the last fire. The same is true to the south, where several tumbleweed-infested ruins sit along Route 18 outside the town of Skyforest, looking down onto the forest below, which is filled with burned trees from 2003 and — this week — with pillows of smoke from the recent fires.

But near the same spot, a new house is rising, built around an old staircase, apparently all that was left from a former house.

More often than not, the human response after fire is to restore, not relocate, said Thomas J. Campanella, an assistant professor of city and regional planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and co-editor of the 2004 book “The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster.”

“After disaster, people are not in any mood to change further,” said Professor Campanella. “They already had their lives turned upside down, they want to get back to they way it was yesterday — turns out to be a very bad time to have vision.”

Yet in the town of Running Springs, also in the San Bernardino Mountains, the reality of living next to a national forest is tragically apparent. Two hundred homes were lost in the Slide Fire. Entire neighborhoods were destroyed, including a cluster of homes at the corner of Wheel Barrow Drive and Wilderness Road, where a small yellow sign across the street read: “Property boundary: National Forest land behind this sign.”

On nearby roads, evacuated homes illustrated the dangers of forest-side living. The homes were close together with exposed wooden eaves and plenty of dry pine needles between them, even as smoke curled up from a smoldering fire in a canyon below. A drought-stressed pine tree grew through the deck of home, offering an enticing wick for an opportunistic flame.

Roger Straley, 47, one of the few local residents around the other day, said he had been evacuated seven or eight times in the last 20 years, and so had decided to try his hand at a fire-related profession: helping operate a water tender, which supplies water to fire trucks in the field.

“I’ve been evacuated so many times,” he said. “I might as well try to make money on it.”

Not far away, along Spyglass Drive in Lake Arrowhead, a group of five firefighters, including Mr. Chapman, the Forest Service firefighter, rested in a green Forest Service truck.

The crew had worked a 15-hour shift, and Jaime Cervantes, the driver, admitted to being tired. What would he do when the fires finally went out?

“Relax,” Mr. Cervantes said, until the next one.

Carolyn Marshall and Randal C. Archibold contributed reporting from San Francisco, and Will Carless from San Diego.

    Rethinking Fire Policy in the Tinderbox Zone, NYT, 28.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/us/28threat.html?hp

Firefighters in Changing Battle

October 26, 2007
The New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

JAMUL, Calif., Oct. 25 — Fire oozed and crackled along the hill behind the house on Sierra Cielo Lane that firefighters had been watching all day. Great tongues of flame flapped from a ridge high above, and the pall of smoke was like an acrid steam bath.

But despite the cataclysmic appearance at this ranch-style home threatened by one of San Diego County’s biggest wildfires, the 22 firefighters of Deer Horn Strike Group exulted late Wednesday night.

They had carted lawn furniture, potted plants and old crates away from the encroaching blaze. They had lighted their own ring of fire around the property and hacked away brush and brittle trees abutting the house to take away the food these infernos so love.

“I think we can call it a save,” said one of the firefighters, Rod Johnson. By Thursday morning, he had been proved right. The fire had passed, the house saved, unlike others here.

On television, the battle against the enormous wildfires of Southern California has looked this way: aircraft spewing water and retardant, firefighters and residents frantically dousing a burning home, great columns of orange on the march.

Now, with the fires’ advance slowed by a decline in the Santa Ana winds and with cooler weather moving in, another phase of firefighting has begun. Backfires are being set to rob the wildfires of fuel, teams are moving into position beside surviving houses to guard against the inevitable flare-ups, and, in some cases, firefighters even stand watching as great swaths of terrain burn.

As long as a wildfire is not threatening a home, “we want it to burn,” said Capt. Mike Parkes of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, which is coordinating the firefighting in Southern California. “You’re eliminating all its fuel.”

Danger still abounds, though. On Thursday a hot spot developed on a hill near a clutch of houses in this unincorporated area southeast of San Diego that has been punished by the so-called Harris fire. That drew a response from the wasplike helicopter tankers that are workhorses in these blazes. Over and over they dumped water, while below, a team led by Mike Haworth moved in on a house to guard it and the main road it sits on.

“If it jumps that road, it’s just going to take off again and threaten even more homes down in that little valley,” Mr. Haworth said, his radio crackling with orders directing the helicopters as the smoke formed a dark cloud overhead.

This house-by-house tactic of the firefighters, moving hot spot by hot spot, can produce heart-stopping moments. But the teams, from across California and elsewhere in the West, must also endure long periods of tedium. One team sat roadside for more than three hours Wednesday as commanders studied the movement of the fire and deliberated the best way to cut it off from Lyons Valley Road, the main thoroughfare through this hilly back country, where several homes have been lost. Ultimately they moved along a trail to set fires that would burn themselves out and halt the wildfire’s progress.

Resources have been stretched to the limit by the sheer number of blazes throughout the region. Several firefighters said they had worked almost nonstop since Sunday, and state fire commanders estimate that the deployment for the Harris fire has been only a quarter the strength of what they would normally be able to position.

With the wind calmer Thursday, firefighters made progress, though wind shifts in the canyons and passes still bedeviled them.

“This house, one hour from now it could be burning down,” Pete Barry, a member of Mr. Haworth’s team, said as he watched the flames slink around rock and boulders up a hill. “The wind — it’s all about the wind now.”

Indeed, a part of the Harris fire that was close to “lying down” Wednesday afternoon unexpectedly kicked up several hours later as Capt. Mike Wilson of the state fire department drove through to check on his team. The blaze surged up over a dirt road directly in front of his truck, filling it with smoke and, for several minutes, blocking his path with torrents of red-orange flame 10 feet high.

“Boy, it’s really picking up,” he said in the calm monotone of emergency workers everywhere.

Captain Wilson described that hilly patch, dotted with trailers and small houses, as an island that had somehow escaped the initial burn. It stands along what has emerged as the main fire line of the Harris fire as it burns more to the north and east now instead of the west.

Mr. Johnson, the firefighter who correctly predicted a “save” of a home late Wednesday, is among a group here from the Peardale-Chicago Park volunteer fire company, northeast of Sacramento.

They are careful not to grow overconfident; even minor flare-ups can whisk embers under eaves and through cracks in siding. Mr. Johnson recalled once driving from what he thought was a secure house near a wildfire, only to see it erupt through his rearview mirror.

“I couldn’t believe it,” he said, “but there was nothing you could do then.”

He said the team this time would hose down brush that continued to burn near the house here and would also extinguish other spot fires before bedding down Thursday night. He glanced at the junk accumulated throughout the yard, guessing that the owner was a pack rat.

“I looked inside through a window, and it looked worse than outside,” he said. “But this is somebody’s home. Maybe he is an old fellow living out his last days. He’ll come home and appreciate his house is here.”

    Firefighters in Changing Battle, NYT, 26.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/26/us/26crew.html?ref=us

President’s Ties to Governor Stronger After Help on Fires

October 26, 2007
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

ESCONDIDO, Calif., Oct. 25 — One is the most powerful Republican in the country. The other is among the most popular. But it took an inferno in Southern California to thaw the ice between President Bush and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

It is no secret in California or Washington that the two have never been buddy-buddy, dating from when Mr. Schwarzenegger was a top fitness adviser to Mr. Bush’s father. Mr. Bush thought little of Mr. Schwarzenegger’s first bid for governor and did not endorse him.

Mr. Schwarzenegger has taken jabs at the president on issues like climate change, stem cell research and Republican fund-raising. Though he campaigned for Mr. Bush’s re-election in 2004 in the important swing state of Ohio, Mr. Schwarzenegger snubbed Mr. Bush last year, refusing to appear with him at the Reagan Presidential Library.

“Not hanging-out pals,” Mr. Schwarzenegger once said, describing their relationship.

But they have, for the moment, become political allies. With wildfires blazing across the southern part of the California, Mr. Bush made a quick visit here on Thursday, viewing the scarred landscape by helicopter, delivering a pep talk to emergency responders and promising Californians, “We’re not going to forget you in Washington, D.C.”

Mr. Schwarzenegger was there every step of the way, from the moment Mr. Bush stepped off Air Force One, where they clapped one another on the shoulder like football teammates, through the canyon neighborhood of Rancho Bernardo, where they picked their way through charred ruins. There, they stood on a hillside, Mr. Bush’s arm draped around a woman whose home had been leveled, and lavished each other with praise.

Mr. Bush went first: “The thing I like about Governor Schwarzenegger is, he says, ‘You show me a problem, I’ll charge it. You show me a hill, I’ll go up it.’”

Mr. Schwarzenegger returned the compliment. “I call this quick action,” he said of Mr. Bush’s response to the fires, “quicker than I expected.”

The gestures were not lost on analysts, who say both men benefit from the newfound bond. With his offers of helicopters and troops and federal money, Mr. Bush is coming to Mr. Schwarzenegger’s aid, helping him manage the crisis and look like a leader with pull in Washington.

But Mr. Schwarzenegger is coming to Mr. Bush’s aid as well, by heaping praise on the president — praise that the White House hopes can help Mr. Bush shed the damaging legacy of his administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina.

“They both get something out of it,” said John J. Pitney Jr., a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont. “Schwarzenegger gets the cash, and Bush gets the praise. But it’s like so much in politics. It’s a union of convenience, not emotion.”

Personally and politically, the two men have little in common. Mr. Schwarzenegger, the former bodybuilder and action-movie star, is his own brand of California moderate, left-leaning on social issues and popular even with Democrats. Mr. Bush, a Texas conservative with little affinity for the Hollywood crowd, lost California twice.

“Arnold has about as much in common with George W. Bush politically as he did physically with Danny DeVito in the movie ‘Twins,’” said Garry South, a Democratic strategist here.

The official line from both camps is that the differences are philosophical, and nothing more.

“There hasn’t been complete agreement on issues, I will acknowledge that,” said Representative David Dreier, a California Republican who is close to both men. “But the kind of hyperbole that we have seen reported is a gross exaggeration.”

The public complaints have come mostly from Mr. Schwarzenegger. But one Republican close to Mr. Bush described the relationship as “not good.” He said that when the two first met, while Mr. Bush’s father was president, Mr. Schwarzenegger treated Mr. Bush dismissively, like “some son of a famous important guy,” and that Mr. Bush never forgot it.

Others say Karl Rove, Mr. Bush’s former political strategist, caused a rift. “When Arnold was thinking of running, Rove, from his perch in the White House, treated him in a very high-handed and disrespectful way,” said one former Schwarzenegger aide. “Arnold’s reaction was, ‘Who the hell is this guy?’”

The tensions eased after Mr. Schwarzenegger was elected. Mr. Bush flew to California, stood by the new governor’s side and proclaimed him “a fine and strong leader.” Don Sipple, a media strategist who has worked for both men, said the meeting “had a good feel to it.”

The cordiality did not last. Mr. Schwarzenegger campaigned awkwardly for Mr. Bush in Ohio in 2004 — even upstaging the president in Columbus — then distanced himself in his own re-election campaign last year. As recently as February, in a speech at the National Press Club, he suggested that Mr. Bush had been too partisan, citing his own practice of sharing cigars with lawmakers of both parties in his “smoking tent” outside the California Capitol.

“My advice to the president is,” the governor said, “is, ‘Get yourself a smoking tent.’”

On Thursday, though, neither man offered the other public advice, although the governor did take the unusual liberty of putting words in the president’s mouth — something few others would have the nerve to do.

Standing at a command center here, with firefighters and trucks arrayed behind them, Mr. Schwarzenegger announced, “The president and I pledge that we will stay all the way with this.”

Mr. Bush didn’t flinch.

    President’s Ties to Governor Stronger After Help on Fires, NYT, 26.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/26/us/26bush.html?hp

As Calif. Fires Burned, Copters Grounded

October 26, 2007
Filed at 7:22 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- As wildfires were charging across Southern California, nearly two dozen water-dropping helicopters and two massive cargo planes sat idly by, grounded by government rules and bureaucracy.

How much the aircraft would have helped will never be known, but their inability to provide quick assistance raises troubling questions about California's preparations for a fire season that was widely expected to be among the worst on record.

It took as long as a day for Navy, Marine and California National Guard helicopters to get clearance early this week, in part because state rules require all firefighting choppers to be accompanied by state forestry ''fire spotters'' who coordinate water or retardant drops. By the time those spotters arrived, the powerful Santa Ana winds stoking the fires had made it too dangerous to fly.

The National Guard's C-130 cargo planes, among the most powerful aerial firefighting weapons, never were slated to help. The reason: They've yet to be outfitted with tanks needed to carry thousands of gallons of fire retardant, though that was promised four years ago.

''The weight of bureaucracy kept these planes from flying, not the heavy winds,'' Republican U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher told The Associated Press. ''When you look at what's happened, it's disgusting, inexcusable foot-dragging that's put tens of thousands of people in danger.''

Rohrabacher and other members of California's congressional delegation are demanding answers about aircraft deployment. And some fire officials have grumbled that a quicker deployment of aircraft could have helped corral many of the wildfires that quickly flared out of control and have so far burned 500,000 acres from Malibu to the Mexican border.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and other state officials have defended the state's response, saying the intense winds prevented a more timely air attack.

''Anyone that is complaining about the planes just wants to complain,'' Schwarzenegger replied angrily to a question Wednesday. ''The fact is that we could have all the planes in the world here -- we have 90 aircraft here and six that we got especially from the federal government -- and they can't fly because of the wind.''

Indeed, winds reaching 100 mph helped drive the flames and made it exceedingly dangerous to fly. Still, four state helicopters and two from the Navy were able to take off Monday while nearly two dozen others stayed grounded.

Thomas Eversole, executive director of the American Helicopter Services & Aerial Firefighting Association, a Virginia-based nonprofit that serves as a liaison between helicopter contractors and federal agencies, said valuable time was lost.

''The basis for the initial attack helicopters is to get there when the fire is still small enough that you can contain it,'' Eversole said. ''If you don't get there in time, you quickly run the risk of these fires getting out of control.''

The first of the 15 or so fires started around midnight Saturday. By Sunday afternoon, fires were raging in Los Angeles, San Diego and Orange counties.

At the request of firefighters on the ground, at 4 p.m. Sunday the state Office of Emergency Services asked the National Guard to supply four helicopters. Under state rules, a California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection ''spotter'' must accompany each military and National Guard helicopter to coordinate water drops.

The spotters have 24 hours to report for duty, and it took nearly all that time for them and the National Guard crews to assemble. By the time they were ready to go, the winds had made it unsafe to fly.

The helicopters finally got off the ground Tuesday.

Mike Padilla, aviation chief for the forestry department, acknowledged the Guard's helicopters were ready to fly before the spotters arrived. He said state officials were surprised.

''Typically we're waiting for them to get crews,'' Padilla said.

In a conference call with reporters Thursday, state officials rejected the notion they were ill-prepared, noting that more than 20 helicopters and airplanes were stockpiled in Southern California ahead of the wildfires because of the danger of flames erupting.

But high winds after the fires began meant ''there was very little opportunity'' to fly, said the forestry department's director, Ruben Grijalva.

''This is not a resource shortage on those days, this is a weather-condition problem,'' he said.

That explanation doesn't jibe with what U.S. Rep. Brian Bilbray said state officials told him Tuesday night. Bilbray, who represents parts of San Diego, and other lawmakers were informed that 19 Navy and Marine helicopters were ready to fly, some as early as Sunday, but didn't take off because there were no state fire spotters to accompany the crews, said Bilbray's spokesman, Kurt Bardella.

Alarmed, Bilbray quickly helped broker an agreement to waive the spotter requirement, allowing flights to begin Wednesday.

''We told them, 'You don't want the public to be asking why these units weren't flying while we had houses burning,''' Bilbray told the AP.

By the time the helicopters got airborne, the area burned had quadrupled to more than 390 square miles, and the number of homes destroyed jumped from 34 to more than 700.

Criticism from Bilbray and other lawmakers on the call helped lead Grijalva on Wednesday to abandon the state's long-standing policy to have a spotter aboard each aircraft and instead let one spotter orchestrate drops for a squadron of three helicopters.

''I directed them to do whatever was necessary to get those other military assets into operation,'' Grijalva said.

He said he could not explain why more spotters were not deployed before the flames spread to ensure that every aircraft ready to fly could take off.

Padilla said state spotters do training exercises with the Navy and National Guard and are used to working with them on fires. That's not the case with the Marines, so when helicopters from that branch were made available, the state was caught off guard and had no spotters available.

Regardless, he said, safety -- not availability of spotters -- was the overriding concern in determining when to allow aircraft into the skies.

Padilla said he didn't want the Marines to participate because they ''would have been a distraction'' since they weren't trained.

''It's no different from me walking into Baghdad and saying, 'I'm ready to fight the bad guys,''' he said. ''They would no more want me in their arenas, not being trained, prepared and equipped, than I would want them if they were not trained, prepared and equipped.''

The C-130 saga is a much different story.

More than a decade ago, Congress ordered replacement of the aging removable tanks for the military planes because of safety concerns and worries that they wouldn't fit with new-model aircraft. California's firefighting C-130 unit is one of four the Pentagon has positioned across the country to respond to fire disasters.

New tanks were designed, but they failed to fit into the latest C-130s. Designers were ordered back to the drawing board. Republican Rep. Elton Gallegly said Congress was assured the new tanks would be ready by 2003.

Four years later, the U.S. Forest Service and Air Force have yet to approve the revised design. Air Force spokeswoman Capt. Paula Kurtz said ''technical and design difficulties'' have delayed the program.

Rohrabacher and Gallegly are angered by the delay, which has left no C-130s capable of fighting fires on the West Coast. The last of the older-model C-130s with an original tank was retired by the California National Guard last year.

''It's an absolute tragedy, an unacceptable tragedy,'' Gallegly said.

The situation meant that rather than deploying C-130s from inside the state, Schwarzenegger was forced to ask Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to call in the six remaining older C-130s from other states as far away as North Carolina.

None of them began fighting the fires until Wednesday afternoon.

In the meantime, the state relied mostly on smaller retardant tankers that carry about a third of the C-130's 3,000-gallon capacity.

Gallegly said such firepower was sorely needed earlier.

''I have actually flown in one and pressed the button,'' he said. ''I know what they can do.''

    As Calif. Fires Burned, Copters Grounded, NYT, 26.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Wildfires-Grounded-Aircraft.html

Homes Still at Risk on Sixth Day of Fires

October 26, 2007
The New York Times
By MIKE NIZZA and JENNIFER STEINHAUER

While life began returning to normal in parts of southern California today, firefighters continued to battle several large blazes that still threatened more than 20,000 homes.

The death toll from the fires rose today to seven, San Diego county authorities said. Border patrol agents on Thursday night found the charred remains of four immigrants who may have been died after crossing the Mexican border. Earlier in the day, recovery crews, moving from house to house in towns where the fires had passed, found the bodies of two people in the shell of a home near Poway, northeast of San Diego.

They were the first confirmed fatalities since Sunday, when a man was killed in Potrero, not far from the border — but unlikely to be the last, officials said.

“I imagine we will be finding bodies into next year,” said Sgt. Mike Radovich of the San Diego Sheriff’s Department.

Evacuation orders began to lift in San Diego County, and Qualcomm Stadium, where thousands of evacuees have stayed, was set to close at noon today, Pacific time. Most of the temporary occupants left as San Diego authorities lifted evacuation orders after firefighters reported progress against several large fires in the county. The 350 people remaining in the stadium are to be transferred to another shelter, one of 34 in the county housing more than 9,000.

Evacuation orders have not been lifted in San Bernardino County, where two blazes threaten thousands of homes.

On Thursday, President Bush toured Southern California as investigators got down to the work of determining how one sunny fall day last weekend erupted into a 16-fire storm now in its sixth day.

Mr. Bush, joined by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, also a Republican, visited the charred remains of neighborhoods, met distraught residents and exhausted fire crews and viewed fires that continue to burn throughout the region. By Thursday, the fires had destroyed 1,800 homes, injured 57 people and burned a half-million acres, a little more than twice the size of New York City.

The president pointedly praised Mr. Schwarzenegger’s handling of the country’s biggest disaster since Hurricane Katrina two years ago, making veiled comparisons to local relief efforts at that time in Louisiana.

“It makes a big difference when you have someone in the statehouse willing to take the lead,” Mr. Bush said at a news conference, in an apparent dig at the Louisiana governor, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, a Democrat. He also assured California residents, “We’re not going to forget you in Washington, D.C.”

With most of the fires no longer posing a significant threat, fire officials were stepping up efforts to determine how much of the blame for the devastation fell on nature and how much on arsonists.

In Orange County, where the authorities have already determined that a large fire north of Mission Viejo was intentionally set, investigators have begun to interview people about possible suspects. A $150,000 reward was offered for information leading to a conviction in the case. On Thursday authorities closed canyon roads and searched the rubble for clues.

The fire there, which is still burning, has consumed 20,000 acres and nine houses. On Wednesday, F.B.I. agents descended on Santiago Canyon Road, near Irvine, to gather evidence, which was sent to a laboratory to be analyzed.

“We desperately want to catch the person or persons that did this,” said Chip Prather, the Orange County fire authority chief at a news conference in Irvine. The evidence at the scene, which he would not discuss further, suggested arson, Mr. Prather said.

A separate fire, to the east in Riverside County, was also found to be intentional. At least two people, in San Bernardino and Los Angeles Counties, have been arrested on suspicion of arson.

The scale and ferocity of the fires almost certainly stemmed from a trajectory familiar to firefighters, fire investigation experts said.

Typically, fires created by human error, lightning or a downed power line create large embers that can fly as far as a mile away with the force of the Santa Ana winds behind them, setting off new blazes. Early indications point to downed power lines as the culprit in a fire in Malibu and possibly two others.

Arsonists begin copying them, investigators said, aided by wind, miles of drought-created tinder and the steep hills that are prevalent throughout the state, which make for far better fire-spreading conditions than flat land.

“It’s not by accident that you get 17 or 18 fires going at the same time,” said Harold Schaitberger, general president of the International Association of Firefighters. “There is no question you then get serial artist copycats out to create the next and larger event.”

The history of wildfires in California has proved the point over and over.

Last year, arson and murder charges were filed against a 36-year-old man in connection with a wildfire that killed five Forest Service firefighters 90 miles east of Los Angeles. The authorities said they were investigating whether the man arrested in that fire had been involved with scores of other fires in the region over a number of years.

In 2003, arson was behind some of 15 fires that roared across six California counties, killing 22 people. In 1993, four people were killed in roughly 20 fires, half of which were found to stem from arson.

Investigators begin to suspect arson when they discover multiple points of origin in a fire — as was the case in the fire now burning in Orange County, the authorities say — and other physical evidence.

Charles P. Ewing, a forensic psychologist and law professor at the State University of New York in Buffalo, said the fires were sure to catch the attention of people inclined to arson.

“They are likely the ones following the fires very closely,” Mr. Ewing said. “Then, it’s not uncommon for arsonists to engage in copycat activity or to piggyback on a naturally occurring fire.”

Arson experts said juveniles, who are believed to be behind about half of intentional fires, are often curious about fire but do not intend to cause cataclysmic harm. Adults’ motivations are more complex.

Sometimes, Mr. Ewing said, “arsonists actually derive sexual pleasure from committing the act,” while others are seeking attention and may participate in extinguishing the very fires they light.

Two other features of California — its border with Mexico and the proclivity of its residents to live along remote canyons and hilltops — contribute to the excessive fire danger.

Illegal immigrants who have crossed the border where some of the fiercest fires have raged this week often start campfires that get out of control, Mr. Schaitberger said. And fire travels faster and with more vigor uphill, making those pathways extremely flammable.

Winds, high temperatures and extreme drought contributed to the severity of the current fires. While firefighters had the upper hand on most of them by Thursday, the fire in Orange County, which flared up late Wednesday night, and one burning near Lake Arrowhead were the biggest challenges. In San Diego County, over 800 houses remained threatened.

Elsewhere around Southern California, residents began to regroup, returning to homes that had been spared or taking in the heartbreaking spectacle of what used to be. In Qualcomm Stadium, in San Diego, the main way station for evacuees, officials estimated that fewer than 1,000 people remained.

Sergeant Radovich of the San Diego Sheriff’s Department said the bodies of the four Mexican immigrants had been found in a canyon area by a patrol. “It is more than likely they were overwhelmed by the fire,” he said.

The bodies were found in an area where people frequently pass after crossing the border illegally, he said. Officials have told firefighters to be on the lookout for bodies because the fire moved with great speed through that area and the terrain is perilous, making escape difficult.

Randal C. Archibold and Will Carless contributed reporting from San Diego, Ana Facio Contreras from Irvine.

    Homes Still at Risk on Sixth Day of Fires, NYT, 26.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/26/us/26cnd-calif.html?hp

Stadium Closing As Fire Evacuation Site

October 26, 2007
Filed at 10:25 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

SAN DIEGO (AP) -- The football stadium where thousands of displaced residents sought refuge is closing as an evacuation center, symbolic progress against wildfires menacing Southern California.

Once sheltering more than 10,000 people, Qualcomm Stadium was home to just 350 on Friday morning. It was to close later in the day.

Across San Diego County, the region hardest hit by the firestorms that began last weekend, thousands of evacuees have been trickling back to neighborhoods stripped bare.

The lucky ones will find their homes still standing amid a blackened landscape. Others, like Robert Sanders, are not so fortunate.

The 56-year-old photographer returned to a smoldering mound that once was his rented house in the San Diego neighborhood of Rancho Bernardo.

Among the possessions he lost were his transparencies, melted inside a fire-resistant box, and a photograph of his father.

''I've lost my history,'' Sanders said. ''All the work I've done for the past 30 years, it's all destroyed.''

Thousands of people lost their homes, and several fires continued burning out of control Friday.

One had crested Palomar Mountain and was threatening the landmark Palomar Observatory.

''I'm not sure how close it is, but evidently it's close enough for us to be concerned about (the observatory) and the radio towers on top,'' said Fred Daskoski, a spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

He said crews were clearing brush from around the observatory and lighting back burns to halt the fire's advance. The observatory, operated by the California Institute of Technology, was home to the world's largest telescope when it opened in 1908.

To the southeast, the Witch Fire, which already has destroyed more than 1,000 homes, was churning its way toward Julian. The town of 3,000, nestled in the rolling hills of a popular apple-growing region, was under mandatory evacuation.

Flames were about six miles away, and firefighters were concerned that west winds would accelerate the blaze uphill toward the town.

East of San Diego, firefighters also were trying to keep flames from Lake Morena, which is surrounded by hundreds of homes.

Friday's flare-ups underscored the wildfires' continuing threat, even as crews were making rapid progress.

''Until you get a control line around each and every individual fire, there's a potential of them blowing out anywhere,'' Daskoski said.

In all, fires have raced across 490,000 acres -- or 765 square miles. They were fanned early in the week by Santa Ana winds that produced gusts topping 100 mph.

Of the 1,800 homes lost so far, 80 percent were in San Diego County. The property damage there alone surpassed $1 billion.

Still unsettled is whether the San Diego Chargers will play their home game against the Houston Texans at Qualcomm on Sunday. Mayor Jerry Sanders said the stadium should be ready but indicated the decision will be made by the NFL and the team.

Officials have opened assistance centers where displaced residents can get help with insurance, rebuilding and even mental health counseling.

''The challenge now is starting to rebuild and getting them the resources they need to do that,'' San Diego County spokeswoman Lesley Kirk said Friday. ''The county and city of San Diego are very committed to helping these people.''

A show of the federal government's support came Thursday when President Bush toured the area with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Bush pledged the government's cooperation.

''We want the people to know there's a better day ahead -- that today your life may look dismal, but tomorrow life's going to be better,'' he said.

As the governor and president witnessed the devastation, the state came under criticism for failing to deploy sufficient aerial support in the wildfires' crucial first hours.

An Associated Press investigation revealed that nearly two dozen water-dropping helicopters and two cargo planes were grounded by government rules and bureaucracy as flames spread.

The Navy, Marine and California National Guard helicopters were grounded for a day partly because state rules require all firefighting choppers to be accompanied by state forestry ''fire spotters'' who coordinate water or retardant drops. By the time those spotters arrived, the high winds made flying too dangerous.

Additionally, the National Guard's C-130 cargo planes were not part of the firefighting arsenal because long-standing retrofits have yet to be completed. The tanks they need to carry thousands of gallons of fire retardant were promised four years ago.

''When you look at what's happened, it's disgusting, inexcusable foot-dragging that's put tens of thousands of people in danger,'' Republican U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher said.

The wildfires are directly blamed for killing three people, a 52-year-old man in Tecate along the Mexican border and a couple in Escondido. Their bodies were discovered in the charred remains of their hillside home.

Border Patrol agents also found four charred bodies in what was believed to be a migrant camp east of San Diego, near the Mexican border. Medical examiners were trying to determine their identities and whether they had died in a fire that destroyed almost 100 homes.

In Orange County, local authorities, the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms were investigating a fire that destroyed 14 homes. It was believed to be started by an arsonist.

An aerial assault was helping firefighters corral two blazes in the San Bernardino Mountains east of Los Angeles, a thickly wooded resort area where 313 homes have been lost.

Sean Clevenger's home was a rare sight -- part of an oasis of seven unburned houses in a neighborhood that was largely destroyed by fire in the mountain community of Running Springs.

''I still can't believe this is my neighborhood,'' he said, staring across the street at a plume of flames rising from a broken gas main amid rubble.

''Right there was a red house and everything was green around it,'' he said. ''Now I look out and I see a lot of sky through the trees.''

------

Associated Press writers Elliot Spagat in San Diego, Martha Mendoza in Running Springs, Scott Lindlaw in Julian, Gillian Flaccus in Jamul and Thomas Watkins, Jacob Adelman, Chelsea J. Carter, Jeremiah Marquez and Robert Jablon in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

    Stadium Closing As Fire Evacuation Site, NYT, 26.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-California-Wildfires.html

Bodies Are Found on Burned Hilltop

October 26, 2007
The New York Times
By SOLOMON MOORE

HIGHLAND VALLEY, Calif., Oct. 25 — The fire came blowing in from the hills near here, carried by 80- to 90-mile-per-hour winds. It was 3 a.m. on Monday. Woodchip piles and cars burst into flame, and then the avocado groves and finally the houses.

Among them was the home of Chris Bain and Victoria Fox who lived on a hilltop at the end of a long winding road. The San Diego County authorities found them early Thursday, searching the property at the request of relatives. The house, in this unincorporated area near Poway, was destroyed; burned-out husks of several cars were at the entrance.

They were the second and third people identified by the authorities as having died in the wildfires that have raced across Southern California since Sunday, but have somewhat amazingly claimed relatively few lives. Late Thursday, Border Patrol agents were reported to have found the bodies of four unidentified immigrants believed to have been killed after crossing the Mexican border.

Neighbors here said Mr. Bain and Ms. Fox were found near their garage and speculated that they might have been trying to get out. The house was among a half dozen or so that burned along the same ridge.

John Snow, 68, has lived nearby for 40 years. He said he had been through many fires, but never one this bad. When he saw the hillside glowing through the smoke, he and his wife went to their truck.

“We were driving through fire for two miles,” Mr. Snow said.

He said he had seen the hillside where Mr. Bain and Mrs. Fox lived, but had assumed that everyone had left.

Several residents said they had no warning, just the sound of flames and smell of smoke. One resident recalled hearing a loudspeaker mounted on a truck announcing the approaching fire.

Later on Monday, a nephew of Ms. Fox called Mary Markle, 63, another longtime resident. He had not heard from his aunt and uncle, he said. They agreed that it would have been unlike Ms. Fox not to let friends and family know that the couple was safe.

Mrs. Markle, who befriended them 25 years ago, said the couple had been high school sweethearts who enjoyed line-dancing, piloting planes, skydiving and motorcycling. Ms. Fox, a public school teacher for 20 years taught line dancing at a nightclub in Poway, she said.

She said the couple were in their 50s and had a son in college.

Ms. Fox was also the fifth woman in a weekly rotating bridge game. Cathy Beard, another neighbor, whose house was spared, said the women would also gather to discuss politics.

“We were about 60-40 Republican and Democrat,” Ms. Beard said. “We had some very heated arguments about Iraq, President Bush, religion. But we were all very close.”

Mr. Bain was more of a loner, neighbors said, and an avid gun collector who bought and sold antique and rare firearms on eBay. He was also a real estate agent, and several neighbors mentioned that he slept with an oxygen pump running.

Bill Thompson, who lives on an avocado orchard nearby, stayed behind to douse his house with water and said the Bain house was one of the first to go.

“I just thought they got out like everybody else,” he said.

    Bodies Are Found on Burned Hilltop, NYT, 26.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/26/us/26dead.html?hp

3 Dead in Fires; On Visit, Bush Promises Aid

October 25, 2007
The New York Times
By KIRK JOHNSON and JENNIFER STEINHAUER

SAN DIEGO, Oct. 25 —President Bush toured fire-ravaged Southern California today, where air tankers began an all-out assault on the fires that continue to threaten thousands of homes even as the winds were finally dying down after days of consuming large swaths of the sprawling region.

Before flying west this morning, the president declared seven counties in Southern California disaster areas, making them eligible for federal assistance and paving the way for temporary housing, home repairs and low-cost loans. “There will be help for the people of California,” Mr. Bush said.

The number of casualties directly attributable to the fires increased to three today when recovery crews found the burned bodies of two people in the shell of a house in Poway, northeast of San Diego. Until then the only confirmed fatality had been a 52-year-old man who was killed by the Harris fire southeast of the city last Sunday.

San Diego County Sheriff Bill Kolender said Poway has been under a mandatory evacuation order since Tuesday. The Medical Examiner’s office was working to identify the newly discovered bodies, he said.

Even with the new discoveries, the casualty count remains well below the 22 fatalities caused by the last big outbreak of wildfires in the region in 2003. The reduction was attributed to better communications and fire response techniques developed since the last round of fires.

More than a dozen fires were still burning, and those in San Diego County, the hardest hit in the region, were no more than 40 percent contained. Some 8,500 homes in the county — where the value of housing lost is already estimated at more than $1 billion — were still threatened by the blazes.Nevertheless, more people were allowed to return home today, as evacuation orders were lifted in many communities. San Diego’s Qualcomm Stadium, where as many as 10,000 had sought shelter over the last few days, reported its population down to 2,500 this morning, The Associated Press said.

The president plans to tour the affected areas by helicopter with Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has expressed appreciation for the quick federal response. Speaking at an evacuation center in San Diego County on Wednesday, the governor said of the disaster declaration: “There is a lot of federal money coming through for the people of California. So we are very happy how all this has played out so far.”

Sheriff Kolender said today that two men had been arrested as they attempted to cross the border into Mexico carrying items that had been removed from a house. They were being treated as suspected looters, he said.

As the fierce Santa Ana winds began to subside Wednesday, firefighters began to assert control over the wildfires, which have burned through nearly 500,000 acres and displaced half a million residents over five days, the largest such evacuation in California’s history.

While officials warned that weather changes could reinvigorate waning flames, lower temperatures and abating winds helped greatly reduce the threat.

Some fire officials were congratulating themselves on having avoided extensive loss of life, even setting dates for when the biggest fires might be brought under control.

But the second-guessing that comes with any natural disaster was already beginning. Questions were being raised about how the fight against the fires had been coordinated, how resources had been deployed and whether Southern California had become smarter after the 2003 fires that ripped the region and its psyche, or if it had just become lucky.

Some fire chiefs and elected officials said that they were angry with the state government for not adopting recommendations made by a blue-ribbon panel after the fires in 2003, in particular those that called for more firefighting equipment.

“There were a lot of calls for equipment and resources,” said Assemblyman Todd Spitzer, who represents a district in Orange County. “When you have a finite amount of resources, you have to prioritize life and property first, and so we didn’t get water dropping until we started to lose structures.”

The fires of October 2007 have sharpened questions about the costs of protecting the increasing numbers of people who live in remote and highly flammable areas, reawakened old jealousies that simmer across Southern California and forced new examination of the tension between the need for local emergency services and the willingness to pay for them.

San Diego County, the largest county in California without a fire department, relies on a hodgepodge of local departments that are almost all serving areas where populations are growing faster than their tax bases, and which are often low on money among a constituency that is generally allergic to taxes.

“Typically it takes the second or third time for a local fire department to make a compelling case” for increased tax revenues, said Stewart Gary, a principal at City Gate Associates, a government consulting firm that studies San Diego fire departments.

One of the two firehouses in the East County Fire Protection District, which sits in the heart of the 2003 fire area, was nearly closed last month, saved only by a special tax approved by voters.

“San Diego County is very unique,” said Jack Grogger, the fire chief at East County. “A lot of times our communities end up having to tax themselves to pay for infrastructure.” Danny Mastro, the division chief of the Coronado Fire Services Department, also in San Diego County, said resources were never plentiful enough, but he said the region had learned from the hit it took four years ago.

“The communications between different agencies has significantly improved,” he said. “Emergency operations were set up a lot more quickly.”

A spokesman for San Diego County, Michael Workman, said he thought that the coordination across agency and jurisdictional lines in this crisis was great and that huge improvements in technology and operations had been introduced here since 2003.

Internet tools like WebEOC, a software system that allows information to be shared by multiple users at a time, and reverse-911, which automatically calls home phone numbers of a certain neighborhood or geographic grid to signal evacuation alerts, were introduced after the 2003 fires, Mr. Workman said.

As for the multiple levels in the fire-fighting system, he added, “Yeah, there’s some criticism, but we make it work.”

Some of the complaints reflect the structure of California’s emergency response system, which centralizes fire deployment decisions in a top-down state command. The system, which was developed after a devastating firestorm in Oakland in 1991, ranks fires and deploys resources based on their priority.

“It allows for adequate priority-setting in mitigating the emergency,” said Mark Ghilarducci, former deputy director of the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, who is now a consultant in Sacramento.

The centralized command can also lead to confusion, however. One of the hardest facts to nail down in the last few days has been the number of people forced to leave their homes. While many news media outlets reported nearly one million people evacuated, calls to each of the affected seven counties suggested the number was closer to 500,000.

According to figures provided by the county officials, by Wednesday 460,581 acres had burned; 1,248 structures, plus 170 mobile homes, had been destroyed; three people had died in the San Diego area, and 30 firefighters and 28 civilians had been injured.

Kirk Johnson reported from San Diego, and Jennifer Steinhauer from Los Angeles. Will Carless contributed from San Diego, Dan Frosch from Denver, Eric Lipton from Washington, and John Holushaand Maria Newman from New York.

    3 Dead in Fires; On Visit, Bush Promises Aid, NYT, 25.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/25/us/25cnd-fire.html?hp

2 Burned Bodies Are Found in Calif.

October 25, 2007
Filed at 1:38 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

SAN DIEGO (AP) -- Crews found two burned bodies in a gutted house, authorities said Thursday, and flames drew perilously close to thousands of homes in Southern California's firestorm despite a break in the harsh winds and a massive aerial assault.

Medical examiners were trying to establish the identities of the man and woman whose bodies were found near Poway, north of San Diego, said Sheriff's Department spokeswoman Jan Caldwell. They were believed to be related, officials said.

Neighbors told officials they last saw the pair around midnight Monday when they told the two to evacuate, Caldwell said. They were reported missing sometime after that.

Flames also claimed the life of a 52-year-old man in Tecate. The San Diego medical examiner's office listed seven other deaths as connected to the blazes because all who died were evacuees.

The number of victims could rise as authorities return to neighborhoods where homes burned.

The grim announcement came as the firefighters, aided by the calming Santa Ana winds and dropping temperatures, looked to gain control of some of the most severe fires. Firefighters had lost ground overnight on one Orange County blaze.

Some evacuees were being allowed back into their neighborhoods, and shelters were emptying. Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego, which sheltered more than 10,000 people at the height of the evacuations, had just 2,500 people left Thursday morning.

The hot, dry Santa Ana winds that have whipped the blazes into a destructive, indiscriminate fury since the weekend were expected to all but disappear. ''That will certainly aid in firefighting efforts,'' National Weather Service meteorologist Jamie Meier said.

But electricity was a concern. A wildfire cut a main power link with Arizona, while another blaze near Camp Pendleton was threatening the main north-south power corridor that connects San Diego with the rest of California. Additional power was being shipped from Mexico, said Sempra Utilities Chief Operating Officer Michael Niggli.

Even with the slackening winds, the San Diego County remains a tinderbox. Firefighters cut fire lines around the major blazes, but none of the four fires was more than 40 percent contained. More than 8,500 homes were still threatened.

Towns scattered throughout the county remained on the edge of disaster, including the apple-picking region around Julian, where dozens of homes burned in 2003.

To the northeast, in the San Bernardino County mountain resort of Lake Arrowhead, fire officials said 16,000 homes were in the path of two wildfires that had destroyed more than 300 homes.

The fires remained out of control, but were being bombarded by aerial tankers and helicopters that dumped more than 30 loads of water.

President Bush, who has declared a major disaster in a seven-county region, took an aerial tour of the burn areas with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

''It's a sad situation out there in Southern California,'' Bush said outside the White House before leaving for California. ''I fully understand that the people have got a lot of anguish in their hearts. They just need to know a lot of folks care about them.''

So far, at least 15 fires have destroyed about 1,500 homes in Southern California since late Saturday.

The total burn area of more than 482,000 acres -- about 753 square miles -- stretches in a broad arc from Ventura County north of Los Angeles east to the San Bernardino National Forest and south to the U.S.-Mexico border.

Losses total at least $1 billion in San Diego County alone, and include a third of the state's avocado crop. The losses are half as high as those in Southern California's 2003 fires, but are certain to rise.

The more hopeful news on the fire lines came a day after residents in some hard-hit San Diego County neighborhoods were allowed back to their streets, many lined with the wreckage of melted cars.

Running Springs resident Ricky Garcia returned to his house in the San Bernardino Mountains on Wednesday, panicked that his street had been wiped out and his cats, Jeff and Viper, were lost.

But his house, newly built on a cleared lot, was unscathed, unlike those of his neighbors. Hiding underneath a porch and mewing loudly was Jeff, his long, black hair gray with ash. Viper was nowhere in sight.

''I'm excited to see my cat and my house, but absolutely devastated for my neighbors,'' he said, preparing to evacuate again.

As nature's blitzkrieg starts to recede, many of the other refugees will be allowed back to their neighborhoods. More than 500,000 people were evacuated in San Diego County alone, part of the largest mass evacuation in California history.

''We are focusing more on recovery and getting these people back up on their feet again,'' County spokeswoman Lesley Kirk said.

In the middle of the arc of fire, the Santiago Fire in Orange County had burned nearly 23,000 acres and destroyed nine homes. It had been 50 percent contained Wednesday, but firefighters lost ground overnight as it moved into the Cleveland National Forest.

Agents from the FBI and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were sent to help investigate. Authorities said a smaller, more recent fire in Riverside County also is linked to arson.

Police shot and killed a man who fled Tuesday night when officers approached to see if he might be trying to set a fire in San Bernardino. The man, whose name was not released, had led police on a chase then backed his car into a police cruiser, police said.

------

Associated Press Writers Elliot Spagat in San Diego, Martha Mendoza in Running Springs, Scott Lindlaw in Julian, and Jacob Adelman, Thomas Watkins and Jeremiah Marquez in Los Angeles contributed to this report.

    2 Burned Bodies Are Found in Calif., NYT, 25.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-California-Wildfires.html

When 911 Is Your Next-Door Neighbor

October 25, 2007
The New York Times
By REGAN MORRIS

SANTA CLARITA, Calif., Oct. 23 — As Charlie Garcia shoveled hot coals from what used to be his neighbor’s bedroom on Monday night, he shouted for another man to hose down a flare-up in the fire that had ripped through their Canyon Country neighborhood.

Brian Lussier, 18, rushed in with the hose, dousing the flames as seven other neighbors hacked away at the smoldering rubble, their eyes red and sneakers gooey from the extraordinary heat.

With professional firefighters stretched to the breaking point across California, many neighbors throughout the state were left to their own devices this past week, manning garden hoses, axes and shovels to attack the flames.

Here on Camp Plenty Road, this ragtag strike force — frowned upon by professional firefighters — consisted of neighbors who barely knew each other’s names but found themselves working in coordinated efforts to save each other’s property.

They fought fires even in homes where no one knew the owners — but if it kept burning, their houses could be next. A broken gas main shot flames about eight feet in the air as gas company employees with jackhammers blasted through the sidewalk to try and reach the valve.

Three homes were completely destroyed on the road and several others badly damaged. Neighbors spent all night battling flare-ups and wayward embers, as tall palm trees burned, infuriatingly, out of reach of their hoses, shooting embers into the hot, gusting Santa Ana winds.

While shoveling hot coals from what used to be another neighbor’s bedroom, Mr. Garcia, 56, said the fires had brought out the best and worst in people, the worst being arsonists and looters, whom he vowed to shoot if the dared enter his neighborhood.

“We’re all being neighbors. We’re all helping each other out,” said Mr. Garcia, who had a heart attack last year, prompting neighbors to urge him to take it easy.

As Steven Navarez, 31, hosed down the smoldering coals that used to be his home, he was most worried about his neighbors.

“If I don’t get all the embers out, they could fly up and spark my neighbor’s house,” said Mr. Navarez, who had evacuated safely with his wife and two young sons before fire ripped through his home.

He pointed out where everything had been: “This was the master bedroom. That’s my boy’s room over there. That was my boy’s room.

About a mile away, with winds gusting at 60 miles per hour, several exhausted families with children as young as 7, doused their gardens and homes in water, as adults and teenagers battled flames racing up a ridge toward their back yards.

“I’m pretending to know what I’m doing,” said Diane Paterson, as she shoveled dirt over smoky hot spots beyond her chain-link fence. “You have to do something, you know? We keep calling 911. Where are the firefighters?”

Instead of being relieved, many neighbors were furious when firefighters showed up and decided to let the fire burn “controlled” up the ridge, to get rid of brush.

On Camp Plenty Road, one resident complained that Malibu had gotten more attention and resources, but most everyone else was thankful for firefighters, whom they credited with saving many of their homes with an overnight drop of water. Mr. Navarez said he was relieved his family was safe. Looking up to the ring of fire and smoke rimming the Santa Clarita Valley, he said he did not blame firefighters for not stopping the blaze. “There’s nothing you can do,” he said. “You just have to move on.”

People have an obligation to help the firefighters, Mr. Garcia said.

“We’re able to help ourselves out,” he said. “Let them go help somebody else out. That’s what they’re paid to do is help the most people with what they’ve got.”

The following morning, friends and family gathered to inspect the remains of the Navarez garage. Aside from tools, boxes of children’s clothes and some paint cans, the garage held a preserved treasure — a pristine 1949 Chevrolet Deluxe.

“The keys burned,” Mr. Navarez said. “This is all I’ve got left and AAA says they can’t get up here. It’s not the end of the world. My dad has another set of keys in Texas.”

    When 911 Is Your Next-Door Neighbor, NYT, 25.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/25/us/25cnd-clarita.html?hp

Fatigue Strikes Many SoCal Firefighters

October 25, 2007
Filed at 8:58 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

RUNNING SPRINGS, Calif. (AP) -- Forty hours after he arrived in the San Bernardino National Forest, firefighter Peter Stanton stepped gingerly over a sleeping colleague and wondered what his next assignment was going to be.

''We've been going nonstop. I kind of hope they're going to send us to sleep, but I'm pretty sure we're going back out,'' he said.

Fire crews, tankers and helicopters poured in to Southern California on Wednesday, bringing welcome relief to firefighters exhausted by as many as four straight days of fighting unusually ferocious blazes that were scattered across a huge swath of Southern California.

From mountainside resorts to the shores of Malibu to the Mexican border, about 15 blazes destroyed at least 1,500 homes and threatened tens of thousands of others.

Stanton and his colleagues fought to save homes near the mountain resort area of Lake Arrowhead, and at times fought to stay clearheaded as they dragged hoses and drove fire engines into infernos.

''We are hearing about people getting tired,'' federal Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told reporters in San Diego, site of some of the worst fires. He added he had spoken with other authorities about ''the need to rotate firefighters out,'' giving them time to rest.

''One of the big hazards is exhaustion, which leads to impaired judgment,'' Chertoff said.

In some cases, however, the tired were relieving the tired. In northern Los Angeles County, some of the fire crews that had all but contained a 38,000-acre wildfire near Santa Clarita were being dispatched to the Lake Arrowhead area.

''We have no idea how long we'll be gone for,'' said firefighter Al Taylor of the state Department of Forestry. ''We just show up and try and have a good time.''

He and his colleagues planned to catch some sleep on the ride to their next assignment, a little more than 100 miles away.

Firefighters are used to working to the point of exhaustion, Calipatria fire Chief Chris Hall said. He worked 35 hours straight on the Lake Arrowhead fires, got a few hours rest and then was back on the lines, helping mop up hot spots on a narrow street in Running Springs.

The firefighters take pride in the homes they've been able to save since the blazes began breaking out one after another, beginning Sunday. Some said they are frustrated that there haven't been more people and equipment to help in the fight.

''We've just been really, really short on resources,'' said Stanton, who arrived in the Lake Arrowhead area Monday with a team of 20 firefighters from Imperial County, east of San Diego.

A two-pronged fire there in the San Bernardino Mountains has destroyed more than 300 homes so far. Stanton told of his crew having to abandon one small neighborhood in Running Springs when it became obvious that flames were going to overwhelm them.

Hours later, tired and in an almost dreamlike state, he described the scene:

''It was dark, the sky was glowing, the winds were blowing fiercely, and the longer we stayed the smokier we got,'' he said. ''The embers were getting bigger and thicker. I looked up, the entire ridge was glowing.

''You could tell the fire was coming closer and closer,'' he continued. ''Then it hit the tops of the trees. They were popping, exploding, all in flames. The call went out to evacuate the entire command post.''

He paused for a moment.

''I really haven't slept. Am I making any sense or just rambling?''

------

Associated Press writers Jacob Adelman in Santa Clarita and Scott Lindlaw in San Diego contributed to this story.

    Fatigue Strikes Many SoCal Firefighters, NYT, 25.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Fatigued-Firefighters.html

As Winds Ease,

Homes Still at Risk From Fire

October 25, 2007
The New York Times
By KIRK JOHNSON and JENNIFER STEINHAUER

SAN DIEGO, Oct. 25 — As winds abated today, air tankers began an all-out assault on the fires in southern California, but thousands of houses remained threatened as firefighters continued their struggle to contain the blazes that have scarred the region since Sunday.

More than a dozen fires were still burning, and those in San Diego County, the hardest hit in the region, were more than 40 percent contained. Some 8,500 homes in the county — where the value of housing lost is already estimated at more than $1 billion — were still threatened by the blazes.

President Bush prepared to visit the region later today, after declaring the seven counties in the area a major disaster zone. Before leaving Washington, he said “There will be help for the people of California.”

As the fierce Santa Ana winds began to subside Wednesday, firefighters began to assert control over the wildfires, which have burned through nearly 500,000 acres and displaced half a million residents over five days.

While officials warned that weather changes could reinvigorate waning flames, lower temperatures and abating winds helped greatly reduce the threat.

Some fire officials were congratulating themselves on having avoided extensive loss of life, even setting dates for when the biggest fires might be brought under control.

But the second-guessing that comes with any natural disaster was already beginning. Questions were being raised about how the fight against the fires had been coordinated, how resources had been deployed and whether Southern California had become smarter after the 2003 fires that ripped the region and its psyche, or if it had just become lucky.

Some fire chiefs and elected officials said that they were angry with the state government for not adopting recommendations made by a blue-ribbon panel after the fires in 2003, in particular those that called for more firefighting equipment.

“There were a lot of calls for equipment and resources,” said Assemblyman Todd Spitzer, who represents a district in Orange County. “When you have a finite amount of resources, you have to prioritize life and property first, and so we didn’t get water dropping until we started to lose structures.”

The fires of October 2007 have sharpened questions about the costs of protecting the increasing numbers of people who live in remote and highly flammable areas, reawakened old jealousies that simmer across Southern California and forced new examination of the tension between the need for local emergency services and the willingness to pay for them.

San Diego County, the largest county in California without a fire department, relies on a hodgepodge of local departments that are almost all serving areas where populations are growing faster than their tax bases, and which are often low on money among a constituency that is generally allergic to taxes.

“Typically it takes the second or third time for a local fire department to make a compelling case” for increased tax revenues, said Stewart Gary, a principal at City Gate Associates, a government consulting firm that studies San Diego fire departments.

One of the two firehouses in the East County Fire Protection District, which sits in the heart of the 2003 fire area, was nearly closed last month, saved only by a special tax approved by voters.

“San Diego County is very unique,” said Jack Grogger, the fire chief at East County. “A lot of times our communities end up having to tax themselves to pay for infrastructure.” Danny Mastro, the division chief of the Coronado Fire Services Department, also in San Diego County, said resources were never plentiful enough, but he said the region had learned from the hit it took four years ago.

“The communications between different agencies has significantly improved,” he said. “Emergency operations were set up a lot more quickly.”

A spokesman for San Diego County, Michael Workman, said he thought that the coordination across agency and jurisdictional lines in this crisis was great and that huge improvements in technology and operations had been introduced here since 2003.

Internet tools like WebEOC, a software system that allows information to be shared by multiple users at a time, and reverse-911, which automatically calls home phone numbers of a certain neighborhood or geographic grid to signal evacuation alerts, were introduced after the 2003 fires, Mr. Workman said.

As for the multiple levels in the fire-fighting system, he added, “Yeah, there’s some criticism, but we make it work.”

Some of the complaints reflect the structure of California’s emergency response system, which centralizes fire deployment decisions in a top-down state command. The system, which was developed after a devastating firestorm in Oakland in 1991, ranks fires and deploys resources based on their priority.

“It allows for adequate priority-setting in mitigating the emergency,” said Mark Ghilarducci, former deputy director of the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, who is now a consultant in Sacramento.

The centralized command can also lead to confusion, however. One of the hardest facts to nail down in the last few days has been the number of people forced to leave their homes. While many news media outlets reported nearly one million people evacuated, calls to each of the affected seven counties suggested the number was closer to 500,000.

According to figures provided by the county officials, by Wednesday 460,581 acres had burned; 1,248 structures, plus 170 mobile homes, had been destroyed; and 30 firefighters and 28 civilians had been injured.

Although San Diego County officials suggested that some elderly residents had perished in the evacuation, only one death was confirmed as having stemmed directly from the blazes.

Many of the fires on Wednesday slowed, but remained erratic. Camp Pendleton closed for part of the day after fires jumped Interstate 5, forcing it to close for a while as well.

After bureaucratic snags delayed deployment, 14 military fire-fighting helicopters and 5 C-130 military planes were released Wednesday to help fight the fires, said United States Representative Duncan Hunter, Republican of California.

In Orange County, one fire, known as the Santiago, was designated as arson, said Pat Markley, a county spokesman.

Officials in San Bernardino said the police at California State University, San Bernardino, had killed a man they chased out of some scrub near campus whom they suspected of trying to set a fire. According to the authorities, the police tried to detain the man, identified only as a 27-year-old from Arizona, but they shot him after he got into his car to flee and then tried to ram the officers’ vehicle.

Of the five fires burning in San Diego County on Wednesday, officials were most concerned about the enormous Witch fire, which merged overnight with the smaller Poomacho fire to form a blaze that has burned almost 200,000 acres of northeastern San Diego County.

In the very southernmost part of the county, the Harris fire, the only one so far to claim a life, continued to threaten homes in the tiny communities of Jamul and Jamacha. By Wednesday, the blaze had grown to 73,000 acres and was largely uncontained.

In general, though, the high pressure system that was driving the Santa Ana winds began moving east Wednesday, greatly reducing the fire threat. Over the next few days the southern part of the state is expected to take in an onshore flow of winds, with resulting 20-to-25-degree temperature drops and a rise in humidity, improving toward the weekend.

That is a good thing, because a new batch of federal firefighters will not get here until then.

Federal officials said they were scrambling on Wednesday to dispatch 125 teams of federal firefighters, after state officials reversed course late Tuesday and said they could use the help, officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency said.

Glenn Cannon, the agency’s assistant administrator overseeing disaster operations, said California officials had made clear as recently as 6 p.m. on Tuesday that they did not need backup personnel from the federal government, as they had firefighters from within the state and from other states.

The change in strategy meant that as many as 1,900 United States Forest Service firefighters would not all be in place until this weekend, Mr. Cannon said.

But Jay Alan, a spokesman for the governor’s office, said, “There is no indication that we didn’t want any help and then later did.”

“When we determined we wanted and needed help, that is when the call went out,” Mr. Alan said.

Also Wednesday, President Bush declared a major disaster in California, a higher designation than previously declared, paving the way for federal grants for temporary housing, home repairs and low-cost loans.

Kirk Johnson reported from San Diego, and Jennifer Steinhauer from Los Angeles. Will Carless contributed from San Diego, Dan Frosch from Denver, Eric Lipton from Washington and John Holusha from New York.

    As Winds Ease, Homes Still at Risk From Fire, NYT, 25.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/25/us/25cnd-fire.html?hp

Some Residents

Face Reality of Fire’s Devastation

October 25, 2007
The New York Times
By JESSE McKINLEY and SOLOMON MOORE

MALIBU, Calif., Oct. 24 — Tony Rodriguez and his wife, Tracey, returned to their house on a hill above Malibu on Wednesday knowing full well what they would find: nothing.

The Rodriguezes were just two of some 1,500 people evacuated from here on Sunday morning in front of the Canyon fire, which tore a swath of more than 4,000 acres around this famously celebrity-friendly city. Along with their two dogs, the couple fled about 5 a.m. to take shelter at a hotel, where they saw television pictures of their newly renovated home going up in flames.

The home’s new addition, said Mr. Rodriguez, 50, a finance executive with Warner Brothers, cost $800,000 and was not insured. Still, standing amid the ash and charred bricks where his bedroom had been, Mr. Rodriguez said: “My wife is looking for the only thing that mattered — her wedding ring. She’d taken it off that night, and in the hurry to evacuate, she didn’t pick it up.”

It was a scene played out over and over throughout Southern California on Wednesday, as residents started to trickle back to their homes or to the shells of those homes. As winds died down and firefighters concentrated their efforts on still-volatile blazes in San Diego County, the reality of this week’s wildfires began to resonate for thousands of evacuees.

For some, the return to their neighborhoods was a cause for relief, as the fickle fires had jumped over some houses while charring others.

In the Rancho Bernardo section of San Diego, the police barred residents from entering the community as structural engineers went house to house deciding which ones were total losses. Along several cul-de-sacs, all the homes burned to the ground. Along others, a single unscathed dwelling stood among the ruins of a dozen others.

The Rodriguezes’ house was the only one on their street to burn. Their next-door neighbors had lost a deck, and flames had drawn close enough to the house to char basement beams. But the house was still intact.

Often, though, the small losses carried the biggest hurt.

“We didn’t get our photos out,” said Ann Herrick, 61, looking over what was left of her and her husband’s home in Fallbrook, just east of Camp Pendleton, where new blazes gave firefighters fits all day Wednesday. “We didn’t get the Christmas quilts I was going to give to my grandchildren, the antiques passed down from our relatives.”

Even for those whose houses survived, everyday life suddenly carried unusual risks. In Ramona, a rural hillside town in northeastern San Diego County, near the Cleveland National Forest, the authorities warned residents not to drink the water without boiling it because of impurities in the reservoirs.

At the same time, it was water that had saved a Ramona resident, Joe Edwards, 51, and his 40 acres. For five hours on Sunday, Mr. Edwards said, he kept his sprinklers running and dashed around his country house and surrounding property with a five-gallon bucket.

“The fire went completely over us,” Mr. Edwards said. “When I looked out, all I could see was a wall of flame. It was all around us. It looked like it went a mile in every direction.”

While Mr. Edwards stayed, his wife, Sheri, and two sons fled to the home of friends about 45 miles away. Ms. Edwards, 47, a high school teacher, said she had not wanted her husband to stay and was more than a little chagrined by his stubbornness on Sunday night.

“We were in touch with him until the fire really got bad, and then the phone connection cut out,” Ms. Edwards said. “We didn’t know what to think.”

But on Wednesday, she and her boys returned home and saw Mr. Edwards for the first time. She said she was proud of her husband, and he was glad to see her, too.

“I thought I was fine until that wall of fire hit my generators, and they exploded,” said Mr. Edwards, who is a diabetic and needed an insulin refill. “That’s when I thought, maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to stay.”

Wednesday was also the beginning of repair and re-evaluation for many fighting fires or fixing up in areas where fires were brought under control. Telephone and electric crews lined canyon roads throughout Los Angeles County, working to restore phones and lights to residents, many of whom had decided to feed their pets what remained in their refrigerators after 72 hours without power.

“The dogs have been getting some good meals,” said Kathy Scott, a librarian in the Los Angeles school district. “And the cats got mahi-mahi.”

In Santa Clarita, about 35 miles north of Los Angeles, firefighters who had filled a soccer field overnight began to pack up and head south as part of a demobilization. More than 4,000 had swarmed three major fires in the county on Tuesday, but that number was expected to drop to about 600 by Wednesday night, said Rocky Oplinger, an incident commander.

At a predawn briefing, fire officials warned the troops — guzzling coffee amid the rumble of gasoline generators — against complacency during operations to finish off lingering fires.

“There’s no thrill out there,” one official said. “But let’s end this.”

Back in Malibu, the Pacific Coast Highway was reopened to traffic that was eerily light. Lingering smoke gave the town a dusky orange glow, and the normally green campus of Pepperdine University bore a scar of burned earth behind its gates.

There were some signs that life had started to return to normal. In a shopping center along the highway, businesses closed by the blaze began to reopen, as a few surfers wandered to and from the beach.

Up the hill, meanwhile, Mr. Rodriguez’s first trip home meant donning gloves and a mask and holding back tears. He put what belongings he could salvage into a pile under a singed palm tree — a pair of dog-shaped fire irons, a small ceramic statue of a cat.

But there was no wedding ring in sight.

Mr. Rodriguez said he was grateful to be alive, which he attributed to his dog Claire waking him and his wife as the flames surged through Malibu.

“We would have been killed,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “Claire will have biscuits for life.”

Jesse McKinley reported from Los Angeles County, and Solomon Moore from San Diego County.

    Some Residents Face Reality of Fire’s Devastation, NYT, 25.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/25/us/25scene.html

Stars, and Their Industry,

Watch Fires Warily

October 25, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 24 — The Hollywood Hills did not catch fire this week, but the entertainment industry collectively held its breath watching the devastation from the wildfires as far away as San Diego and as near as ridges outside Will Smith’s windows.

The heads of studios and other Hollywood players skipped work to watch over their estates, and deal making necessarily took a back seat.

Bert Fields, the powerhouse lawyer, said he had taken turns with his housekeeper hosing down his roof while his wife prayed. Chris Smith, an agent at International Creative Management, said he had been trying to close a deal for a client to star in a pilot when the television executive he was negotiating with sent him a message on his BlackBerry to say: “Fire’s hitting. Gotta Go. Might be a few days.”

“I’m just sitting here waiting to hear the outcome of that particular story,” Mr. Smith said.

The evacuees from the Malibu region included actors like Kelsey Grammer and Sally Field; 18 patients at Promises, the rehabilitation center of choice for stars like Lindsay Lohan; and hundreds of horses.

Houses on Carbon Beach, billionaires’ row in Malibu, were threatened but spared. A firefighter was photographed spraying protectant foam on the roof of a beach house belonging to Jeffrey Katzenberg, chief executive of DreamWorks. Mr. Katzenberg’s neighbor and studio partner, David Geffen, opened his new hotel down the beach to emergency workers.

In a canyon not far away, Will Smith saw flames out his windows on Sunday, but was safe at home for a “60 Minutes” interview, his publicity agent said.

Others merely had to contend with soot on their windows and ash on their cars. “A high-class problem,” a studio chief said.

Reports of actual losses were few. Disruptions and inconveniences were easier to track.

Fox’s hit series “24” abandoned shooting scenes with its star, Kiefer Sutherland, on Monday at El Toro Marine Air Station near Irvine when the smoke became too much for the cast and crew members.

“Cold Case,” on CBS-TV, had built a set in Simi Valley that high winds leveled. “Big Shots” on ABC-TV moved a cycling sequence from Malibu.

Perhaps the hardest-hit entertainment company was Sony Online Entertainment, maker of computer games, which closed its 600-worker office in the Miramar area of San Diego.

One production that pulled out and will not return was a wintry Audi commercial to be shot in the Angeles National Forest. “We were going to take over a road and, this is pretty funny, we were going to have snow machines out there and make a whole area of the forest into snow,” George Meeker of Furlined, the production company, said.

The producers, Mr. Meeker said, went to the Yukon to scout locations with real snow.

    Stars, and Their Industry, Watch Fires Warily, NYT, 25.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/25/us/25celebs.html

Fires’ Cost to Insurers

Is in Range of $1 Billion

October 25, 2007
The New York Times
By JOSEPH B. TREASTER

As bad as the California fires look on television and as horrible as they are for families with homes in their path, the wildfires are doing much less damage than Hurricane Katrina two years ago, and they are going to cost only a fraction of the $41.1 billion that insurance companies paid out for the hurricane.

Nearly 1,500 homes have been destroyed so far by the fires, and hundreds more have been damaged. Financial analysts and insurance experts are estimating the potential costs to insurers to be about $1 billion.

But the property insurance industry — with more than $513 billion in capital — can take that kind of a loss in stride. It reported more than $450 billion in sales of policies last year, and a record profit of nearly $65 billion.

So right now, from a business standpoint, “the losses look pretty minimal,” said Loretta L. Worters, a spokeswoman for the Insurance Information Institute, a trade group in New York.

For families who lose their homes, of course, rebuilding will be a lengthy struggle, as insurance companies haggle over what is covered and what is not. With concentrations of dozens of homes destroyed, it is also going to be difficult to get contractors to start rebuilding. Costs for materials like plywood and roofing tiles are likely to skyrocket, as they did after Hurricane Katrina and other storms.

“There’s a lot of anxiety, I don’t care who you are,” said Andrew Barile, an insurance consultant who grabbed passports and bank statements and a handful of clothes and, with his wife and son, evacuated his five-bedroom home in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif., at 8 a.m. Monday.

Settling claims, however, is generally expected to be more straightforward than after Hurricane Katrina. In that storm, much of the damage was caused by flooding, which is not covered by most home insurance policies. Thousands of homeowners argued in lawsuits that the flooding they experienced had been caused by hurricane winds and that their policies should pay, leading to lengthy court fights. The courts have general ruled in favor of the insurance companies.

Fire, on the other hand, was the first coverage contained in the first home insurance policy hundreds of years ago, and it is clear that insurance companies must cover it. But Randy Maniloff, a lawyer in Philadelphia who specializes in defending insurance companies, said many homeowners would probably find that they did not buy enough coverage to rebuild their homes.

After the worst recent outbreak of wildfires destroyed several thousand homes on the edge of San Diego in 2003, homeowners filed hundreds of lawsuits, Mr. Maniloff said, claiming that their agents and insurance companies should have advised them to buy more coverage. But this past April, he said, the first trial involving those cases ended in favor of the insurance company.

Before the fires, insurance experts said, insurers were competing with one another for customers in California and offering many options as incentives. Now, some experts say they expect the insurers to tighten their standards by not selling or renewing policies in some areas with high risk of fires.

But Robert P. Hartwig, president of the Insurance Information Institute, said he expected few if any changes in the availability and price of home insurance in California.

“An event of this magnitude is already built into the rates,” he said. “The risk is already reflected in the price of coverage. People in the high-risk areas already pay much more for coverage than people who live in areas that are not so prone to fire.”

Insurers will have to pay more for evacuations caused by this disaster than they did after Hurricane Katrina. While many homeowners had to rely on the federal government to pay for hotels, meals and other extra daily costs resulting from the evacuation, California law requires insurers to pay such costs. In all other states, insurance companies have to pay only for so-called additional living expenses when there is damage to a home.

    Fires’ Cost to Insurers Is in Range of $1 Billion, NYT, 25.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/25/us/25insure.html

Firefighters Get Control

as Questions Rise

October 25, 2007
The New York Times
By KIRK JOHNSON and JENNIFER STEINHAUER

SAN DIEGO, Oct. 24 — Firefighters on Wednesday began to assert control over wildfires that have burned through nearly 500,000 acres and displaced half a million residents over four days in Southern California.

While many fires continued to burn, especially east of San Diego, and officials warned that weather changes could reinvigorate waning flames, lower temperatures and abating winds helped greatly reduce the threat.

Some fire officials were congratulating themselves on having avoided extensive loss of life, even setting dates for when the biggest fires might be brought under control.

But the second-guessing that comes with any natural disaster was already beginning. Questions were being raised about how the fight against the fires had been coordinated, how resources had been deployed and whether Southern California had become smarter after the 2003 fires that ripped the region and its psyche, or if it had just become lucky.

Some fire chiefs and elected officials said that they were angry with the state government for not adopting recommendations made by a blue-ribbon panel after the fires in 2003, in particular those that called for more firefighting equipment.

“There were a lot of calls for equipment and resources,” said Assemblyman Todd Spitzer, who represents a district in Orange County. “When you have a finite amount of resources, you have to prioritize life and property first, and so we didn’t get water dropping until we started to lose structures.”

The fires of October 2007 have sharpened questions about the costs of protecting the increasing numbers of people who live in remote and highly flammable areas, reawakened old jealousies that simmer across Southern California and forced new examination of the tension between the need for local emergency services and the willingness to pay for them.

San Diego County, the largest county in California without a fire department, relies on a hodgepodge of local departments that are almost all serving areas where populations are growing faster than their tax bases, and which are often low on money among a constituency that is generally allergic to taxes.

“Typically it takes the second or third time for a local fire department to make a compelling case” for increased tax revenues, said Stewart Gary, a principal at City Gate Associates, a government consulting firm that studies San Diego fire departments.

One of the two firehouses in the East County Fire Protection District, which sits in the heart of the 2003 fire area, was nearly closed last month, saved only by a special tax approved by voters.

“San Diego County is very unique,” said Jack Grogger, the fire chief at East County. “A lot of times our communities end up having to tax themselves to pay for infrastructure.” Danny Mastro, the division chief of the Coronado Fire Services Department, also in San Diego County, said resources were never plentiful enough, but he said the region had learned from the hit it took four years ago.

“The communications between different agencies has significantly improved,” he said. “Emergency operations were set up a lot more quickly.”

A spokesman for San Diego County, Michael Workman, said he thought that the coordination across agency and jurisdictional lines in this crisis was great and that huge improvements in technology and operations had been introduced here since 2003.

Internet tools like WebEOC, a software system that allows information to be shared by multiple users at a time, and reverse-911, which automatically calls home phone numbers of a certain neighborhood or geographic grid to signal evacuation alerts, were introduced after the 2003 fires, Mr. Workman said.

As for the multiple levels in the fire-fighting system, he added, “Yeah, there’s some criticism, but we make it work.”

Some of the complaints reflect the structure of California’s emergency response system, which centralizes fire deployment decisions in a top-down state command. The system, which was developed after a devastating firestorm in Oakland in 1991, ranks fires and deploys resources based on their priority.

“It allows for adequate priority-setting in mitigating the emergency,” said Mark Ghilarducci, former deputy director of the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, who is now a consultant in Sacramento.

The centralized command can also lead to confusion, however. One of the hardest facts to nail down in the last few days has been the number of people forced to leave their homes. While many news media outlets reported nearly one million people evacuated, calls to each of the affected seven counties suggested the number was closer to 500,000.

According to figures provided by the county officials, by Wednesday 460,581 acres had burned; 1,248 structures, plus 170 mobile homes, had been destroyed; and 30 firefighters and 28 civilians had been injured.

Although San Diego County officials suggested that some elderly residents had perished in the evacuation, only one death was confirmed as having stemmed directly from the blazes.

Many of the fires on Wednesday slowed, but remained erratic. Camp Pendleton closed for part of the day after fires jumped Interstate 5, forcing it to close for a while as well.

After bureaucratic snags delayed deployment, 14 military fire-fighting helicopters and 5 C-130 military planes were released Wednesday to help fight the fires, said United States Representative Duncan Hunter, Republican of California.

In Orange County, one fire, known as the Santiago, was designated as arson, said Pat Markley, a county spokesman.

Officials in San Bernardino said the police at California State University, San Bernardino, had killed a man they chased out of some scrub near campus whom they suspected of trying to set a fire. According to the authorities, the police tried to detain the man, identified only as a 27-year-old from Arizona, but they shot him after he got into his car to flee and then tried to ram the officers’ vehicle.

Of the five fires burning in San Diego County on Wednesday, officials were most concerned about the enormous Witch fire, which merged overnight with the smaller Poomacho fire to form a blaze that has burned almost 200,000 acres of northeastern San Diego County.

In the very southernmost part of the county, the Harris fire, the only one so far to claim a life, continued to threaten homes in the tiny communities of Jamul and Jamacha. By Wednesday, the blaze had grown to 73,000 acres and was largely uncontained.

In general, though, the high pressure system that was driving the Santa Ana winds began moving east Wednesday, greatly reducing the fire threat. Over the next few days the southern part of the state is expected to take in an onshore flow of winds, with resulting 20-to-25-degree temperature drops and a rise in humidity, improving toward the weekend.

That is a good thing, because a new batch of federal firefighters will not get here until then.

Federal officials said they were scrambling on Wednesday to dispatch 125 teams of federal firefighters, after state officials reversed course late Tuesday and said they could use the help, officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency said.

Glenn Cannon, the agency’s assistant administrator overseeing disaster operations, said California officials had made clear as recently as 6 p.m. on Tuesday that they did not need backup personnel from the federal government, as they had firefighters from within the state and from other states.

The change in strategy meant that as many as 1,900 United States Forest Service firefighters would not all be in place until this weekend, Mr. Cannon said.

But Jay Alan, a spokesman for the governor’s office, said, “There is no indication that we didn’t want any help and then later did.”

“When we determined we wanted and needed help, that is when the call went out,” Mr. Alan said.

Also Wednesday, President Bush declared a major disaster in California, a higher designation than previously declared, paving the way for federal grants for temporary housing, home repairs and low-cost loans.

Kirk Johnson reported from San Diego, and Jennifer Steinhauer from Los Angeles. Will Carless contributed from San Diego, Dan Frosch from Denver and Eric Lipton from Washington.

    Firefighters Get Control as Questions Rise, NYT, 25.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/25/us/25calif.html


 

Document: Climate Change Remarks Altered

October 24, 2007
Filed at 2:58 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The White House significantly edited testimony prepared for a Senate hearing on the impact of climate change on health, deleting key portions citing diseases that could flourish in a warmer climate, documents obtained by The Associated Press showed Wednesday.

The White House on Wednesday denied that it had ''watered down'' the congressional testimony that Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, had given the day before to the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

But a draft of the testimony submitted for White House review shows that six pages of details about specific disease and other health problems that might flourish if the Earth warms were not delivered at the hearing.

Gerberding on Wednesday downplayed the significance of the changes made in her prepared text saying she never felt she was being censored and that she was free to go beyond her text -- and did when testifying. ''I was absolutely happy with my testimony in Congress. We finally had a chance to go and say what we though was important,'' she said at a luncheon appearance in Atlanta.

Later, she added, ''I don't let people put words in my mouth and I stand for science.''

The draft noted that ''scientific evidence supports the view that the earth's climate is changing'' and that many groups are working to address climate change. ''Despite this extensive activity, the public health effects of climate change remain largely unaddressed. CDC considers climate change a serious public health concern,'' the draft declares.

That paragraph was not in Gerberding's text as approved by the White House.

The draft document was obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press from a source other than the CDC, the Atlanta-based agency considered the government's premier disease tracking and monitoring agency.

Two people familiar with the documents told the AP on Tuesday, after the Senate hearing, that the White House Office of Management and Budget edited the CDC director's congressional testimony, removing specific scientific references to potential health risks.

Gerberding told a Senate hearing on Tuesday that climate change ''is anticipated to have a broad range of impacts on the health of Americans.''

But her prepared testimony was devoted almost entirely to the CDC's preparation, with few details on what effects climate change could have on the spread of disease. The prepared remarks covered six pages. The draft submitted for OMB was twice as long.

Referring to the draft, one CDC official familiar with both versions, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the review process, said that ''it was eviscerated.''

White House press secretary Dana Perino said the prepared testimony went through an interagency review process and the Office of Science and Technology Policy did not believe that the science in the testimony matched the science that was in a report by the International Panel on Climate Change.

''She testified yesterday. Her spokesperson said that she was able to say everything she wanted to say,'' Perino said. ''It was not watered down in terms of its science. It wasn't watered down in terms of the concerns that climate change raises for public health.''

The CDC official said that while it is customary for testimony to be changed in a White House review, these changes were particularly ''heavy-handed.''

The deleted sections of the draft, covering more than half of the original text, included a list of specific impacts on which ''climate change is likely to have a significant impact on health.'' The list included the effect of more frequent hot spells on vulnerable populations, the impact of extreme weather, more air pollution in drought areas, and greater likelihood of vector-borne and waterborne diseases as well as mental health problems.

While these impacts would be expected to be less significant in the United States than in the developing world, one deleted section says, ''nevertheless many Americans will likely experience difficult challenges.''

''Climate change-driven ecological changes such as variations in rainfall and temperature could significantly alter the range, seasonality and human incident of many zoonotic and vector-borne diseases,'' the draft says in another section deleted.

At Tuesday's hearing, Gerberding addressed some of those issues during questioning from senators after she delivered her prepared remarks.

Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., committee chairman, produced a CDC chart, listing many of the same concerns -- deleted from Gerberding's draft text -- that could be exacerbated by global warming.

''These are the potential things you can expect,'' replied Gerberding when asked about the items by Boxer. ''... In some of these areas its not a question of if, it's a question of who, what, how and when.''

----

Associated Press reporter Doug Gross contributed to this report from Atlanta.

    Document: Climate Change Remarks Altered, NYT, 24.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Global-Warming-Health.html

Californians Share Their Thoughts on Fires

October 24, 2007
The New York Times
By ANAHAD O’CONNOR

As wildfires continued to burn through California for a fourth day, people throughout the southern part of the state, including those not yet directly affected by the flames, have been watching with anxiety as acrid smoke fills the air and the specter of evacuation looms.

Some who can see plumes of smoke miles away from their homes have begun to pack their cars and stock their homes with the essentials. Residents of downtown San Diego have watched on television as their old neighborhoods and the homes of friends burned. People have traveled to fire-stricken areas to sneak past police barricades and check on loved ones and their homes.

Over the last two days, many of those concerned about the wildfires have posted comments about their experiences, thoughts and fears on a message board on NYTimes.com.

“We’ve been packed since yesterday,” Renee Christensen, from the San Diego area, said in a written comment on the Times website. “It was tough for our youngest, 11, to have to think about, ‘What do I take and what do I leave?’ No child should have to go through all this.

“We’ve had friends and family calling constantly to make sure we’re O.K.,” she added, “That is a great help ... to know that someone out there cares.”

Some who could see the smoke and flames, but still considered themselves a safe distance away, described in their postings on the website the small measures they took to help their neighbors. They wrote of staying home from work — to steer clear of smoky air and to avoid jamming the highways and slowing emergency vehicles. They wrote of taking volunteer courses with the Red Cross so they could help at local shelters. And they wrote of opening their homes to displaced friends and strangers, providing them with food, a place to rest, and their sympathies.

“We have burned-out friends living with us (but not their seven cats),” wrote Margaret Agne, who lives in a relatively unscathed section of Rancho Bernardo, a northern section of San Diego. “I was turned away by police several times today trying to visit streets where friends lived north and west of us.

“I have friends in all evacuated sections, but have I no idea if they were spared,” she added. “Rancho Bernardo is consistently shown on TV as in the burn area, but not all of it.”

Other residents of the San Diego area wrote that even after evacuating, they were left to contend with sickening odors and choke-inducing air. One resident of the Black Mountain area in San Diego, who identified himself as Abhay Dixit, wrote that he and his family, including a small baby, fled their home with after getting a reverse 911 call two days ago and spent the night at a friend’s house. But the air was so bad that they had to flee again, this time much further away to the Bay area.

“We have black soot everywhere and a pungent smoky odor all over,” he wrote. “It was very tragic to see such beautiful homes getting burnt. Our heart goes out to the victims.”

But others who were concerned about the smoke and soot said they could not go far, for fear that their homes would be vandalized or broken into. One commenter, who identified himself as Jason S., said his parents evacuated their home in Poway and felt lucky that it was ultimately spared, even as scores of homes nearby were burned to the ground. Nonetheless, with the evacuation orders still in place, his relatives returned to the area.

“Last night, my brother snuck past police barricades to check on our family home and watch for looters,” he wrote. “Despite the risk, I think everyone is really proud of him for doing this.”

After he returned from the home, his brother reported that a neighbor was camped out on another lawn with a shotgun and a sign that read “Looters will be shot.”

Meanwhile, as residents of California shared their grief, people from other parts of the country offered support. Many offered encouragement and focused on a simple theme: You will get through this.

“I read the reports and I am just beside myself,” wrote John E. Healey, who gave his hometown as Juneau, Alaska. “I wish I could bag all this moisture here and send it to you folks in California and Georgia, which will be the next part of the United States to experience hardship if the drought conditions there do not subside.

“It is just not fair,” he added. “My prayers are with you.”

But mixed among the words of grief and anguish was the sentiment that this is nothing new. Gregory Kerr wrote that many Californians have grown used to the risk of fire, and that most of his neighbors in the Canoga Park area continued with business as usual even as they could see “a new fire’s mushroom cloud curling up over the ridge on the hills behind the shopping center.”

“This is no Katrina,” he wrote. “Here there is no meltdown of public services. Life goes on completely normally for those whose houses are not on the fire lines.”

But there was also anger.

“Why did it take three days for the federal government to unlock the assistance gate?” wrote Michel Dedina of Imperial Beach in San Diego County. “If there was a fire at the White House West Wing — would they wait three days to call the Fire Department?”

    Californians Share Their Thoughts on Fires, NYT, 24.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/24/us/24cnd-firesidebar.html

Calif. Wildfire Losses Top $1 Billion

October 24, 2007
Filed at 2:44 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

SAN DIEGO (AP) -- The devastating wildfires in Southern California have caused at least $1 billion in damage in San Diego County alone, officials said Wednesday, as easing wind gave firefighters hope that they could begin to gain ground against the flames.

The fires, in their fourth day, had destroyed 1,500 homes and caused at least a half-million people to flee -- the largest evacuation in state history. At least 1,200 of the damaged homes were in San Diego County, and officials believe that number will rise.

''Clearly, this is going to be a $1 billion or more disaster,'' Ron Lane, San Diego County's director of emergency services, told reporters during a news conference.

The announcement of San Diego's staggering losses came as President Bush signed a major disaster declaration for California in the wake of the wildfires that have charred about 426,000 acres, or about 665 square miles.

The declaration puts in motion long-term federal recovery programs to help state and local governments, families, individuals and certain nonprofit organizations recover. Bush plans to visit the state on Thursday.

''Americans all across this land care deeply about them,'' the president said after a Cabinet meeting convened to coordinate federal relief efforts. ''We're concerned about their safety. We're concerned about their property.''

The fierce Santa Ana wind that has stoked the explosive blazes had started to moderate Wednesday although stiff gusts continued to blow through some canyon areas. Forecasters said the wind eventually would be followed by cooling sea breezes.

Wind was reported blowing at a sustained speed of 21 to 36 mph in some areas Wednesday, considerably less than the gusts of up to 100 mph earlier in the week.

The shift could allow for a greater aerial assault and help firefighters beat back the most destructive blazes, said Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.

An unmanned NASA aircraft outfitted with high-tech imaging equipment took off Wednesday from Edwards Air Force Base on Wednesday for a 10-hour flight to help firefighters locate hot spots. Pilots at NASA Dryden Flight Research Center were remotely controlling the aircraft, outfitted with a thermal-infrared imaging system capable of seeing through thick smoke.

Crews also were anticipating additional firefighters and equipment from other states, mostly throughout the West. Frustration over the firefighting effort began to emerge Tuesday when a fire official said not enough had been done to protect homes.

Orange County Fire Chief Chip Prather told reporters that firefighters' lives were threatened because too few crews were on the ground. He said a quick deployment of aircraft could have corralled a massive blaze near Irvine.

''It is an absolute fact: Had we had more air resources, we would have been able to control this fire,'' he said.

The state's top firefighter said Prather misstated the availability of firefighters and equipment. Eight of the state's nine water-dumping helicopters were in Southern California by Sunday, when the first fires began, along with 13 air tankers, said Ruben Grijalva, director of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. Grijalva said the fires would have overwhelmed most efforts to fight them.

''Anyone that is complaining about the planes just wants to complain because there's a bunch of nonsense,'' Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger told ABC News. ''The fact is that we could have all the planes in the world here -- we have 90 aircraft here and six that we got especially from the federal government -- and they can't fly because of the wind situation.''

Twenty-one firefighters and at least 24 others have been injured. One person was killed by the flames, and the San Diego medical examiner's officer listed five other deaths as connected to the blazes.

Thousands of people remained in emergency shelters, where many had an agonizing wait to find out whether their homes had survived.

''I'm ready to go, but at the same time, I don't want to go up there and be surprised,'' said Mary Busch, 41, who did not know whether her home in Ramona, in San Diego County, was still standing. She has lived at the evacuation center at Qualcomm Stadium since Monday, sleeping in her SUV with her 11- and 8-year-old sons.

Others were eager to return to houses they were confident had survived.

''I called my home and my answering machine still works, so that's how I know we're OK,'' said Rancho Bernardo resident Fuli Du, who packed his belongings Wednesday preparing to leave Qualcomm.

He spent his 41st birthday Tuesday at the stadium, where he has been staying with his wife and two young sons.

More evacuation orders were issued Wednesday. Residents of the San Diego County communities of Fallbrook and Julian, an area devastated by a 2003 wildfire, were ordered out of their homes. Officials also were evacuating De Luz, an unincorporated community north of Camp Pendleton that was being threatened by a wildfire on the Marine base. The fire also closed Interstate 5 and the Metrolink commuter rail, snagging the morning commute.

However, residents were allowed to return to some areas of San Diego County including Carlsbad, Chula Vista, Del Mar, Encinitas and Solana Beach.

''There are some hot spots and issues there, but we wouldn't be letting people go back if it weren't safe,'' county spokeswoman Lesley Kirk said.

The city of San Diego was assessing whether to allow people to return to their homes in Rancho Bernardo, one of the hardest-hit areas, Mayor Jerry Sanders said.

A man accused of setting a small brush fire in a rural foothill area of the San Bernardino Mountains was booked for investigation of arson. However, San Bernardino County sheriff's spokeswoman Cindy Beavers said authorities don't know if he is connected to any of the region's wildfires.

So far, the fires have inflicted the worst damage in San Diego County, where five blazes continued to burn. The largest fire had charred 196,420 acres -- about 300 square miles -- from Witch Creek to Rancho Santa Fe, destroying 650 homes, businesses and other buildings. Other hard-hit areas included San Bernardino County, where hundreds of homes burned in the mountain resort communities near Lake Arrowhead.

------

Associated Press writers Chelsea J. Carter, Jeremiah Marquez, Daisy Nguyen, Robert Jablon and Thomas Watkins in Los Angeles, Martha Mendoza in Lake Arrowhead, Jacob Adelman in Santa Clarita, Elliot Spagat, Allison Hoffman and Scott Lindlaw in San Diego, Pauline Arrillaga in Del Mar, Ryan Pearson in Lake Forest and Jennifer Loven in Washington contributed to this report.

    Calif. Wildfire Losses Top $1 Billion, NYT, 24.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-California-Wildfires.html

Fires Disrupt Hollywood Lives, Work

October 24, 2007
Filed at 7:43 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- The rich and famous of Hollywood couldn't evade Southern California's devastating fires. Production on TV series was disrupted and stars traded their beachfront homes for shelter in posh hotels.

Kelsey Grammer was among those who fled Malibu, the celebrity-favored oceanfront town that also is home to Mel Gibson, Cher, Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, Nick Nolte, Jennifer Aniston, Mel Brooks, Ryan O'Neal and more.

Grammer made light of the evacuation for the sake of his 6-year-old, Mason.

''My daughter was nervous in the beginning,'' he told the E! entertainment channel Monday. ''I said, 'Oh, honey, it's nothing. Just relax. Come on, we're going to have some fun.' So she shined the flashlight around and we got out. ... We're safe. We got the dog, we got the kids.''

His house remained untouched Tuesday, said his publicist, Stan Rosenfield.

Promises, the Malibu rehabilitation center where Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan have sought treatment, moved staff members and about 18 patients.

''We evacuated Sunday morning before the order came because the conditions there were very frightening,'' Promises founder and CEO Richard Rogg told The Associated Press on Tuesday. ''The power went out, the winds were blowing at hurricane force and you could see flames coming over the mountain top.''

Rooms were booked for patients in an ''upscale hotel'' near the Promises facility in west Los Angeles, where staff members ''regrouped and tried to keep the schedule going as normally as possible,'' Rogg said.

Promises, which said its Malibu facility was undamaged Tuesday, does not disclose patient names.

Malibu resident Jane Seymour was sweeping across the stage Monday on ABC's ''Dancing with the Stars'' while her husband, actor-director James Keach, protected their house.

''The fire is close to our home, and there was a mandatory evacuation. My husband is illegally there, fighting the fire,'' Seymour told People magazine. She stayed focused on her performance ''with great difficulty,'' she said.

''I actually decided to abandon my cell phone today. I told a friend if there's something I need to know, then let me know,'' said the actress (''Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman'').

The couple's home was undamaged and didn't appear to be in any imminent danger Tuesday, according to a spokeswoman, Susan Madore.

Tori Spelling and her husband, Dean McDermott, whose San Diego County bed-and-breakfast is featured on their Oxygen channel show ''Tori & Dean: Inn Love,'' learned Monday that the Fallbrook-area B&B had been evacuated, along with the town.

''Fallbrook is obviously very near and dear to our hearts, so we're really worried about the people that live there, there are such great people in that little town,'' Spelling told the TV magazine ''Entertainment Tonight.''

Meanwhile, Hollywood mogul David Geffen opened up his recently renovated Malibu Beach Inn to firefighters and rescue workers for free, the trade paper Daily Variety reported.

While many evacuees sought refuge in school gyms and a San Diego stadium, the well-heeled chose different accommodations.

Shutters on the Beach and the Viceroy in Santa Monica and Beverly Hills' Peninsula and Four Seasons hotels were booked for the rest of the week with guests who had fled the fires in Malibu and San Diego, hotel reservations managers told Variety.

Reservations at some of the hotels had been light until the fires erupted Sunday, the paper said.

Wind-fueled wildfires across Southern California have destroyed more than 1,300 homes, burned more than 500 square miles and driven hundreds of thousands from their homes.

The business side of Hollywood also was affected by the far-flung disaster, which came as studios are bracing for a possible writers' guild strike and trying to stockpile projects.

Fox's ''24'' was scheduled to shoot Monday and Tuesday at a shuttered Naval air station in the Orange County city of Irvine but was forced to retreat because ''smoky conditions made filming impossible,'' according to producer 20th Century Fox Television.

The cast and crew returned to the studio to shoot other scenes and it was uncertain if or when they would return to the Irvine facility, a spokesman said Tuesday.

ABC's freshman series ''Big Shots'' had to reschedule a shoot planned for Tuesday in the Angeles National Forest, a network spokesman said.

Production on CBS' ''NCIS,'' which shoots at a Santa Clarita studio near the so-called Magic Fire in northern Los Angeles County, encountered minimal disruption, with a few crew members unable to make it to work because of fire concerns, a show spokeswoman said.

''It's not really going to make a difference for the show. This (the fire) will be gone in a week or two and production will be back up ... It makes a difference for the 100,000-plus people directly affected by the fire, losing their homes and being evacuated,'' series creator Don Bellisario said.

    Fires Disrupt Hollywood Lives, Work, NYT, 24.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/arts/AP-Wildfires-Hollywood.html

The Nation's Weather

October 24, 2007
Filed at 7:43 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

Santa Anna winds that fanned Southern California's wildfires were expected to weaken Wednesday and a gradual cooling trend was anticipated by Thursday.

Light rain was forecast for northwestern Washington as a Pacific front moves into the region.

A cold front was expected to bring rain showers to the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic.

Farther south, a low pressure system stalled over the Tennessee Valley and the system's cold front was projected to move through the Southeast, delivering showers and thunderstorms to the region. Severe storms were possible in some areas.

In the North, a trough of low pressure was expected to sag through the Upper Great Lakes region, bringing mostly light rain.

Temperatures in the Lower 48 states Tuesday ranged from a low of minus 2 degrees at Lake George, Colo., to a high of 99 degrees at Fullerton, Calif.

------

On the Net:

Weather Underground: http://www.wunderground.com

National Weather Service: http://iwin.nws.noaa.gov

Intellicast: http://www.intellicast.com

    The Nation's Weather, NYT, 24.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Weatherpage-Weather.html

FEMA Vows Aggressive Effort on Wildfires

October 24, 2007
Filed at 7:29 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush admintration's disaster assistance chief promised no repeat of the Hurricane Katrina experience Wednesday as federal officials weighed options to best help victims of devastating California wildfires.

''We're going to make sure this operation runs as smoothly as possible given the size of this disaster,'' David Paulison, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said when asked if people who lost homes can expect a more aggressive response than witnessed when Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast over two years ago.

Paulison, who was to join other emergency management officials in a Cabinet-level briefing for President Bush later Wednesday morning, conceded ''things didn't run as smoothly'' as necessary during the Katrina.

Responding to questions about the availability of a sufficient number of aircraft to spray fire retartant in the afflicted areas, Paulison noted the obstacle that gale force winds were providing. ''There's quite a bit of resources on the ground right now. Part of the issue is the winds,'' he said.

Bush, meantime, has scheduled a visit to California Thursday, said White House press secretary Dana Perino.

Paulison was interviewed from California on NBC's ''Today'' show and CBS's ''The Early Show.''

    FEMA Vows Aggressive Effort on Wildfires, NYT, 24.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Bush-Wildfires.html

California's wildfires rage into fourth day

Wed Oct 24, 2007
5:30am EDT
Reuters
By Dana Ford

SAN DIEGO (Reuters) - Relentless wildfires forcing the largest evacuations in California's modern history raged into a fourth day on Wednesday as 10,000 exhausted firefighters hoped for a break in the hot winds whipping the flames.

With half a million people driven from their homes, 1,000 houses already lost and some 470 square miles scorched across the southern half of the state, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's government has put economic losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

"If the weather cooperates maybe we can turn the tide," U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said as he toured San Diego's Qualcomm Stadium, where 10,000 people have taken refuge. "We're still facing some very serious fires."

Weather forecasters say fierce Santa Ana winds blowing in from the desert should begin to subside by Wednesday afternoon.

A drop in the winds, which can howl at gale forces through Southern California's mountain passes and canyons, would also allow for lower temperatures and higher humidity, which could prove crucial in fighting more than a dozen wildfires still burning out of control.

In the San Diego area in the south, firefighters were struggling with four major fires that have forced 500,000 people into the largest evacuation in the state's recorded history.

"I'm worried for my baby, my house, my kids, everything," said Ana Ramirez, 30 and pregnant, who was taking shelter at the stadium with her 4-year-old daughter.

Most of the destroyed homes were in the San Diego area, where one person was killed on Sunday. Four other deaths were reported among the evacuees and more than three dozen people have been injured, including 18 firefighters.

Fires also burned on the outskirts of the Mexican city of Tijuana, 20 miles from San Diego.

'MAJOR DISASTER'

Schwarzenegger asked President George W. Bush to upgrade California's wildfires to a "major disaster," which would trigger federal help.

Bush had issued a declaration of emergency on Tuesday and plans to visit the fire-stricken area on Thursday.

But in a new letter, Schwarzenegger told Bush "this disaster is of such severity and magnitude that effective response is beyond the capability of the state and local governments."

Schwarzenegger said 68,000 homes, from cabins to luxury villas, were threatened across the state and that 10,000 men and women were working the fire lines against flames shooting as high as 100 feet.

There were some signs of progress as crews largely contained a fire in the hills above the seaside enclave of Malibu, allowing residents to return. Some San Diego evacuees were allowed back to their neighborhoods late on Tuesday.

Those taking shelter at the stadium, including senior citizens from nursing homes, called it well organized and clean -- in contrast to the chaos at the Superdome in New Orleans, a refuge for thousands of people after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in 2005.

Paul Fiest, a spokesman for California's Office of Emergency Services, said the state had not seen such a large evacuation at least since 1917, the earliest date that records were kept.
 

(Additional reporting by Dan Whitcomb in Los Angeles)

    California's wildfires rage into fourth day, R, 24.10.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSHUN40455820071024

Bush Moving on California Wildfires

October 24, 2007
Filed at 4:12 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush mobilized federal emergency assistance Tuesday on behalf of Southern California officials struggling with devastating wildfires, and scheduled a visit to the stricken region on Thursday.

''The president wants to travel to California to witness firsthand what the people there are going through with these wildfires,'' White House press secretary Dana Perino said. ''He wants to ensure that the state and local governments are getting what they need from the federal government and he wants to make sure to deliver a message in person to the victims that he has them in his thoughts and prayers.''

To make the trip, Bush is canceling a previously scheduled trip to St. Louis, where he was to deliver remarks on the budget and headline a fundraiser for the national Republican Party. Vice President Dick Cheney was going to fill in for the president, but the White House later decided to reschedule the events.

Earlier Tuesday, Perino said that it was premature to talk about a presidential visit to California, saying: ''The last thing California needs right now is a trip from the president to take away assets.'' Later, she said Bush and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger agreed during a phone call that Thursday was the best day for Bush to come.

The dozen wildfires in California have set ablaze 375,000 acres -- 585 square miles -- and forecasts call for hotter temperatures and high winds that most expect to dramatically increase the destruction.

Perino also announced that Bush was convening a Cabinet meeting on Wednesday morning for a briefing from FEMA Administrator R. David Paulison and his boss, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. The top federal disaster officials were arriving in California on Tuesday night to see what more could be done from Washington and were to address the president and the Cabinet via secure videoconference.

Ahead of the Cabinet meeting, Bush held a half-hour conference call Tuesday night with several officials involved in the federal effort, with all receiving an initial update from the ground from Chertoff and Paulison. Chertoff reported that weather conditions are hampering efforts to contain the fires, and said top immediate priorities include helping with evacuation and shelter, providing relief for weary firefighters and sending medical teams, White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said.

Schwarzenegger sent a letter to Bush late Tuesday asking him to declare a major disaster in California due to the fires. The move would pave the way for the federal government to provide financial assistance to those who lost possessions in the fire.

Bush briefly departed from a war on terror speech at the National Defense University to offer prayers for those losing houses and businesses -- or about to lose them.

''All of us across this nation are concerned for the families who have lost their homes and the many families who have been evacuated from their homes,'' he said. ''We send the help of the federal government.''

Just before 4 a.m. EDT, he declared a federal emergency for seven California counties, a move that will speed disaster-relief efforts. But it will take a major disaster declaration to help victims with property losses.

Perino said the federal government is applying lessons learned from a disaster that deeply damaged Bush's presidency -- Hurricane Katrina along the Gulf Coast in 2005 -- to do a better job now. Such an improved response -- mainly in terms of swift communication with state and local officials -- has been evident in previous disasters, such as after tornadoes in Kansas and Alabama, and a major bridge collapse in Minnesota, she said.

''Clearly those lessons were learned, and they're being applied,'' Perino said.

To dramatize federal efforts and head off any suggestion of indifference of the kind that dogged Bush after Katrina, Perino showed slides at her daily briefing that detailed Washington's contribution so far in California. It includes 32 firefighting crews and dozens of fire engines from the Agriculture Department, 1,239 federal firefighters, 25,000 cots and 280,000 bottles of water.

California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer complained on Capitol Hill Tuesday that the ability of the state's National Guard to respond to disasters like the fires has been compromised because too much of its equipment and personnel are committed in Iraq.

Perino said there are other places to get the needed resources to do the job.

''When you are a nation at war you have to use assets available to you and sometimes those come from the National Guard,'' Perino said. ''The president has said we will get them what they need.''

The wildfires have burned more than 1,300 homes, required at least 500,000 people to be evacuated, claimed at least one life and injured dozens, including many firefighters.

------

Associated Press writer Erica Werner contributed to this story.

    Bush Moving on California Wildfires, NYT, 24.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/pages/aponline/index.html

California Fires Out of Control as More Than 500,000 Flee

October 24, 2007
The New York Times
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 23 — Punishing winds and unstable thermal conditions — married with strained firefighting resources — stymied efforts Tuesday to contain a slew of wildfires burning for a third day across Southern California.

While firefighters late Tuesday began to get the upper hand on some fires in Los Angeles county, officials in San Diego were left worried that the fires could march toward more populated areas along the Pacific Ocean.

“As long as the east wind continues to blow, that is the direction things are going,” said Roxanne Provaznik, spokeswoman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. “There are a lot of homes on that coastal community, so there is so much potential injury.”

By Tuesday, more than 400 square miles in seven counties had been consumed by some 16 fires, flames fueled by high desert winds and hot temperatures that remained largely impervious to air attacks, garden hoses, fire retardant or prayers for relief.

The authorities said the blazes, raging from the Simi Valley northwest of Los Angeles to the Mexican border, were responsible for two deaths, and possibly five others. At least 25 firefighters and civilians were reported to have suffered burns.

By late Tuesday, the fires had consumed well over 1,000 homes and commercial structures, with the authorities reporting that 68,500 homes remained threatened. At least 500,000 people were estimated to have evacuated and thousands more had been ordered to move, making the evacuation effort roughly half the size of that from the New Orleans area after Hurricane Katrina. The authorities said firefighters were overwhelmed as new blazes sparked and existing ones thrashed in new directions, impeding efforts to focus energy and resources. By midday, a new fire began in San Diego County even as fires elsewhere became partially contained.

President Bush, responding to entreaties from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, declared a state of emergency in California, paving the way for federal disaster aid to arrive, and said he would survey the state on Thursday.

While Mr. Schwarzenegger said during a news conference Tuesday that he was “happy” with the number of firefighters working the blazes, officials said that they were stretched thin and that a lack of resources was as much a burden as the temperatures and winds.

“Our resources are low,” Ms. Provaznik said in a telephone interview from San Diego. “Our firefighters are stretched out because of the number of fires around the state.”

Mr. Bush, mindful of the embarrassment his administration suffered after the Gulf Coast disaster two years ago, dispatched officials from the Department of Homeland Security to assess the damage. Federal and local fire teams from Nevada, Oregon and Wyoming joined the fight, and the governor called up 1,500 National Guard members.

The governor expanded his request to Mr. Bush on Tuesday afternoon, asking him to raise his declaration to “major disaster,” which would affect how the state is reimbursed later. The governor estimated that $75 million in federal aid would be needed.

Tuesday evening, Gov. Schwarzenegger said he had ordered state prisons to deploy their fire fighting muscle — including six fire engines and 18 fire captains — to assist in fire fighting. The state’s corrections department also has more than 2,640 trained inmate firefighters actively battling the southern California wildfires today after being deployed by Mr. Schwarzenegger.

Swift emergency response efforts, most likely matched by memories of the devastating fires here in 2003, may have contributed to the relatively low death toll.

“These are big fires, tragic, and the impact of these things will last a long time,” said Jodi Traversaro, spokeswoman for the state’s Office of Emergency Services. “I think Katrina taught us a whole lot.”

Two fires in Los Angeles County were largely contained Tuesday night. “This is a good news story," Lee Baca, the Los Angeles County sheriff, said at a news conference. But the rest of the state was less lucky.

San Diego County remained the worst of the burning regions, with at least 1,250 homes and 102 buildings destroyed and half a million people, according to local officials, displaced. The estimates of the number of people displaced, however, varied wildly between state and local officials. Thousands of evacuees headed for Qualcomm, the 60,000-seat home of the San Diego Chargers as others stuffed into area hotels.

A shift in the prevailing winds in the area on Tuesday, from the fierce but predictable Santa Ana winds, to more volatile western ones, also plagued firefighters.

But the director of San Diego County’s Office of Emergency Services, Ron Lane, said at a news conference Tuesday evening that he thought the corner had been turned and that more favorable weather forecast would allow firefighters to make real headway. “The worst is behind us,” Mr. Lane said.

For all the dislocation and destruction, the five deaths in San Diego County that local officials attributed directly or indirectly to the fires as of Tuesday afternoon also underscored how difficult it is to classify and describe the real dimensions of a disaster that has, at least so far, mainly been measured in property loss, charred landscape and disrupted life.

Three of the people who died were in their 90s, including two who died in nursing homes in what county officials said were “natural causes.” The oldest fatality, June E. Brewer, was 95. She died in her hotel room, the county said in news release, after being evacuated.

Thomas James Varshock, 52, died on his property on Sunday, the county said, during the Harris Fire the only death directly linked to fire. Another victim, Suzanne Elizabeth Casey, 62, died in a fall in a restaurant, the county said, but had previously been evacuated from her home.

In many areas, firefighters were no match for speeding flames and sought refuge in aluminum fire shelters or retreated in the face of burning hillsides. Strong winds made attacks from the air difficult.

“We tried to get back in there at about 5 a.m. but we couldn’t get through,” John Miller, a United States Forest Service spokesman, said, referring to two fires in the town of Lake Arrowhead, in the San Bernardino National Forest, where at least 100 homes and 5,000 acres have been destroyed. “It was a wall of fire.”

California residents who were forced to leave home struggled to sift through the rumors. David Yurkovic, 43, was in a shelter in San Bernardino with his five children and his pregnant wife, Roberta. “She’s due in two months; she doesn’t feel so good,” he said. “I don’t know if my house is O.K. I have no idea. The worst part here is the rumors.”

The speed and ferocity of the fires were fueled by a lethal combination of heat, drought and the often hurricanelike Santa Ana winds that travel from the Mojave Desert into the coastal mountains, which become hotter as they hit parched valleys.

Throughout Southern California, the sky was illuminated with a pink, hazy glow, and smoke rose like a marine layer of fog. Angry red embers jumped from yards to roads. Ash fell onto parked cars miles from fires.

The typically bustling Lake Arrowhead resembled a ghost town, with abandoned shops and homes. A choking haze of smoke and ash covered the mountain, creating dusk at noon. At 6,000 feet, the smoke blacked out the sun above and the valley below.

The closer to the center of the blazes, the louder the roaring crackle of fire. The air filled with smoke, gas and fine particles, making it extremely difficult to breathe comfortably in some areas. Air-quality experts implored residents to curtail outdoor activities.

Not everyone obeyed orders to leave. Greg Curfman, 42, and his daughter Brittney, 18, were among a group of Silverado Canyon residents who refused to leave their homes. By 3 p.m. on Tuesday, Mr. Curfman was exhausted from helping transfer the animals on his ranch to safe places around Orange County. “I’m staying here unless it’s a last-ditch effort,” said Mr. Curfman, who has lived in the canyon for 15 years.

In Castaic, Calif., a suburban enclave in northern Los Angeles County, a fast-moving fire surprised local residents who had thought the troubles were confined to areas to their south.

Roughly 60 Mexican firefighters from the border cities of Tijuana and Tecate crossed into the United States on Sunday to help fight the fires, but they scrambled home Monday when fires broke out south of the border.

A survey conducted by the California Farm Bureau Federation found that avocado and citrus groves, nurseries, vineyards, rangeland, and other farm and ranch operations were possibly damaged, with thousands of horses evacuated to shelters and livestock also possibly caught in the fires’ paths.
 

Reporting was contributed by Ana Facio Contreras from Silverado Canyon, Kirk Johnson from San Diego, Marc Lacey from Mexico, Jesse McKinley from Santa Clarita and Regan Morris from Lake Arrowhead.

    California Fires Out of Control as More Than 500,000 Flee, NYT, 24.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/24/us/24calif.html?hp

Victims in Wildfire’s Path Say, ‘Why Me?’

October 24, 2007
The New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD and SOLOMON MOORE

SAN DIEGO, Oct. 23 — Through a dirty fog of ash and soot, a sport utility vehicle dashed up one street and then another, turning around again and again as it met police barricades, fire trucks and finally a wall of glowing billowing smoke.

Just beyond, on the other side of the hill where the smoke boiled up, sat the home of Ben and Marla Martin, who finally pulled over, defeated.

“Look, there’s a helicopter, Ben,” Ms. Martin said. “That’s a good sign, right?”

Four fire trucks raced past and a police officer began closing this street off, too, in an area where the main fire had passed but a sinister arm reached out, reminding the Martins and firefighters that, three days in, the work of one of the biggest wildfires in state history was not quite done.

Off West Bernardo Drive, the capriciousness of the wind-driven blaze left some houses untouched in their glorious peach stucco amid green grass and well-tended flower beds. Next door, twisted, blackened heaps of that same dream lay smoldering, a garden sprinkler still clack, clack, clacking in vain.

Dr. Joe Fiore of Aguamiel Drive saw it all, this fickle, fiery tornado of smoke and tennis-ball-sized embers blasting through as the main fire passed. Propane tanks and dried palm fronds exploded, as one house went up in minutes while another escaped damage.

Dr. Fiore refused to leave the neighborhood off Interstate 15 that he and others never figured would be in danger. He stood on his roof for hours, hosing it down, nearly falling. His wife caught an ember in her eye and rushed to the hospital, while Dr. Fiore, an emergency room physician, battled on, unwilling to abandon the house he has lived in since 1986.

“It was very chaotic,” Dr. Fiore said. “That fire came over the mountain in minutes, like nothing I could ever imagine. It was the wind, the wind was like a funnel blowing it right through here and the embers were everywhere. I had like 20 campfires going all around my house I had to put out.”

Hundreds of thousands of people did heed orders to leave, many packing a football stadium near downtown and the Del Mar Fairgrounds on the coast. Normally busy Lake Arrowhead, a town where more than a 100 homes burned northeast of Los Angeles, was virtually abandoned to firefighters and emergency workers.

Evacuees grasped for any shred of news, any word on whether they had won the wildfire lottery or lost.

Among them were Kiat Tohsakul and John Becker, who live less than a quarter-mile apart in the hard-hit Rancho Bernardo section of northern San Diego.

Mr. Tohsakul, a television news program manager, rested assured on Monday that the fire was miles from his house after viewing scenes of the area shot by one of the station’s cameramen. But on Tuesday afternoon, he sat in his driveway taking deep breaths at the sight of the roof caved in and his possessions charred.

“What did I do to deserve this?” he said, looking at several unscathed homes next to his. “It’s just unbelievable.”

Mr. Becker returned from out of town and talked his way past police barricades to arrive at his house, with only a touch of damage to a fence. “I have no idea why we got saved and others didn’t,” he said.

Local television overnight had fixed on the image of a large house, a 10,000-square-foot Mediterranean-style hilltop jewel, burning to the ground in Rancho Santa Fe, a wealthy area. It belonged to Bob Jaffe, a venture capitalist, who visited the wreck on Tuesday. His Porsche somehow survived.

“Yes, they managed to save my Porsche,” Mr. Jaffe said. “But I’d much rather they had saved my daughter’s stuffed animals.”

The police in the afternoon escorted some residents in northern San Diego to retrieve medicine and urgent belongings. Of course, that definition was flexible.

“Bongos? Why the heck are you bringing bongos! We don’t need bongos!” Gerald DaSilva shouted to his daughter as they raced in and out of their relatively undamaged house and loaded their pickup. “Look at all this stuff — CDs, magazines, come on, what is all this stuff? Get your phone chargers.”

Some residents fumed at what they considered a slow response by firefighters, who have struggled to rush from fire to fire across Southern California.

“Just now they are getting aircraft up there? Unbelievable,” said Rex Houser, who packed his disabled father and four Jack Russell terriers into his old Camaro and watched the fire march on a hillside nearby.

In the burn areas, and even places far from them, a visitor might at first assume the heavy air was the shroud of mist common along the coast. But the acrid smell detectable miles away would quickly disabuse the notion, if not the singed hillsides, closed roads and occasional odd scenes wrought by desperation.

In the otherwise deserted parking lot of North County Fair, an Escondido shopping mall, several horses stood about, hitched to trailers, eating feed and leaving their mark on the pavement. Their owners, who had fled the nearby canyons as the fire approached on Monday, said they had no other place to take them and were not sure the authorities or mall owner would let them stay.

A woman who gave only her first name, Jackie, out of concern over the propriety of this very emergency shelter, walked J. P., a 14-year-old quarter horse, in front of the Macy’s store.

“We have enough food for them for a couple of days, but after that I don’t know,” she said. “Hopefully we can get back by then.”

Any second thoughts about living in a fire zone?

“Not a one,” she replied. “There is no place like it.”

A friend, Richard Sanders, explained, saying, “You are there, in rural hills, and in a few minutes in urban over here, if you want it.” But with the charm of the rural hideaways or the subdivisions with names like Whispering Woods come frayed nerves when the seasonal Santa Ana winds blow.

Mr. Sanders and his wife, Jean, have lived near the Rancho Bernardo neighborhood for 19 years, relishing the smell of eucalyptus and pine and tending their dogs and horses. Then, they evacuated, and Mrs. Sanders stared open-mouthed at the fury of the fire as it descended on their neighborhood, sparing their house but devouring others.

“The fire just flew over the hills at what must have been at least 30 miles per hour,” she said. “It just hopped the freeway with no problem, caught the grass over there and went straight up the hill and started catching houses on fire randomly.”

She shook her head.

“Part of me says get out of town,” she said. “And the other part says I could not stand to leave.”

Will Carless contributed reporting from San Diego, and Regan Morris from Lake Arrowhead, Calif.

    Victims in Wildfire’s Path Say, ‘Why Me?’, NYT, 24.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/24/us/24scene.html?hp

Automated Phone System Warns San Diego

October 24, 2007
The New York Times
By MICHAEL PARRISH

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 23 — With wildfires bearing down on the northern end of San Diego, the authorities used a technology bought two years ago, after California’s deadliest outbreak of wildfires, to warn more than a half-million people to evacuate.

The automated phone system, known as a reverse 911 system, sends a recorded message, in this case from the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, to phone numbers en masse, listed and unlisted, in a geographical calling area. If the system gets a busy signal, it can keep ringing until someone, or at least an answering machine, answers.

“It works, and I’m really impressed with it,” said Rich Bergman, 65, a retired federal employee who lives in fire-prone Wildcat Canyon, 23 miles east of San Diego, in a telephone interview Tuesday from a restaurant in El Cajon, where he waited to see whether his house had survived. The system, from PlantCML of Temecula, Calif., cost the Sheriff’s Department $300,000 to buy and install, said Lt. Phil Brust.

It is the same system used in the Southern California cities of Long Beach and Santa Barbara, according to the company’s marketing director, Kelli Schmith.

Another vendor, Twenty First Century Communications of Columbus, Ohio, has contracts with 137 municipalities, including San Diego County; Santa Clarita, Calif.; and Washington, according to its chief executive, James Kennedy. In Washington, Mr. Kennedy said, the system sent out warnings to 20,000 residents when their water was found to be contaminated.

Mr. Bergman said he received an automated call at 10:10 p.m. Sunday and quickly packed his S.U.V. with valuables. But because there was no wind, and this was his first night in the home he had just finished rebuilding after it was lost in the 2003 Cedar fire, he stayed awake and kept his TV on, evacuating the next morning.

That fire, which burned 311 residences in San Diego County, prompted the county and the Sheriff’s Department to buy mass-notification systems and to begin using them in 2005. Since then, they have been used to warn residents to lock their doors when deputies were searching for criminals, but mainly to evacuate people from smaller fires.

By noon on Tuesday, 394,915 calls had been made to San Diego County households, the most extensive use of the system to date, according to a Sheriff’s Department spokeswoman. “It has been extremely valuable,” said Hanan Harb, the communications coordinator for the Sheriff’s Department, who was up all night Monday customizing recorded calls to be sent to individual neighborhoods. A message typically tells people that the caller is the Sheriff’s Department, the location of the fire or disturbance, and where the resident or family should go for safety. A contact phone number is included.

Not every phone will be called, however. “It’s like anything else, it’s not 100 percent,” Ms. Harb said. Also, the systems do not contact cellphones.

As before, the department follows up with bullhorns, helicopter announcements and news media statements. But Lieutenant Brust said he thought the system was “worth every penny.” “And with the mudslides we expect after these fires,” he said, “I’m sure we’ll have more use for it.”

    Automated Phone System Warns San Diego, NYT, 24.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/24/us/24alert.html

Santa Ana Winds, Frequent and Troublesome

October 24, 2007
The New York Times
By KENNETH CHANG

Those often furious, sometimes deadly Santa Ana winds, blowing east-to-west across Southern California, are a phenomenon of geography as well as meteorology.

When a bubble of high-pressure air moves south into Nevada, Utah and Arizona, it pushes air up and over the San Gabriel Mountains. The air rolls down the west side of the mountains, accelerating through canyons into California. The air, compressed by the winds, heats up.

This week, a particularly strong high-pressure system has generated particularly strong hot, dry winds. “This has been quite an extreme Santa Ana event,” said Mark Jackson, meteorologist in charge of the Los Angeles Forecast Office of the National Weather Service.

Santa Anas, which occur most often in the fall, typically gust up to 35 to 45 miles per hour and warm the air by about 10 degrees.

On Sunday, Mr. Jackson said, numerous gusts of more than 80 m.p.h. were recorded, including a gust of 111 m.p.h. at a coastal spot north of Los Angeles. Temperatures have reached the 90s, about 20 degrees above normal. The air has also been very dry, with the relative humidity dropping below 10 percent in places.

The Santa Anas slowed yesterday and are forecast to slow further and perhaps stall today. By the end of the week, winds are expected to reverse direction, bringing moister air off the Pacific Ocean and dampening the forest fires. But until the moisture returns, weaker, erratic winds could pose trouble for the firefighters. “It may take these fires in a whole different direction,” Mr. Jackson said.

Even if the winds die, he said, “we’re at record dry conditions, and if you don’t have moisture in the air, it’s critical fire conditions.”

    Santa Ana Winds, Frequent and Troublesome, NYT, 24.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/24/us/24winds.html

Geologists: Collier Glacier Is Shrinking

October 23, 2007
Filed at 11:33 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

BEND, Ore. (AP) -- Between the North Sister and Middle Sister in Oregon's Cascade Range, Collier Glacier has advanced and receded for hundreds of thousands of years. But like many glaciers, it is headed in one direction these days: backward.

It is in serious peril, says geologist Ellen Morris Bishop of the Fossil-based Oregon Paleo Lands Institute. ''We have basically a really sad picture of Collier Glacier today.''

Geologists blame among other things a warming climate, altering the landscape and perhaps the availability of water to high-elevation ecosystems. Collier is shrinking faster than most of the 35 glaciers in the state.

''Now everything is just in a chaotic shrink,'' Bishop said.

This summer she led a climate change-themed tour of the Central Oregon Cascades, starting from McKenzie Pass and heading south. Volcanic activity built the Cascades, but over eons the glaciers have worn them down.

At the glacier's base is a moraine, or a ridge of rocks, deposited by the slowly moving glacier when it was bigger. Today an empty valley fills the space between the ridge and the glacial edge.

''This was a full valley in 1906,'' Bishop said. Since then it has retreated more than a mile.

The ice sheet has visibly shrunk since she first visited the glacier in the 1980s, Bishop said.

''We're in trouble,'' said David Eddleston, of Bend and a participant in the field trip. ''It's right there in front of our eyes.''

The shrinking of the glacier started about the same time carbon dioxide emissions started rising, Bishop said.

''It's all tied to climate change, said Peter Clark, a geosciences professor at Oregon State University.

In the late 19th century, many glaciers started to retreat, he said. That shrinking was probably due to natural fluctuations in the atmospheric temperature.

But in the last 20 to 30 years, all of the Cascades' glaciers have been shrinking, he said.

Collier is reflective of glaciers all along the Cascades, Clark said.

And because the actions of glaciers reflect temperatures from two decades ago, even if warming trends were to stop today, glaciers would still be shrinking for at least 20 years to come, he said.

With warming predicted to rise between 3 and 5 degrees by the end of the century, temperature will likely be the main factor that causes glaciers' decline.

''Most people would say that by the turn of the century there will be very little ice left on the mountains,'' Clark said.

Glaciers store water in the winter and then release it throughout the year, Clark said, spreading out the time when water is flowing. Without the glaciers, many streams will rely more on springtime runoff.

''It will affect the water balance of the mountainous regions,'' he said.

''At some point, they're going to be so small that they're not going to pump out that water,'' said Andrew Fountain, a geology professor at Portland State University.

And when that happens, lands at higher elevations will be much drier and subject to droughts, Fountain said. Stream flow will probably decrease, which means that plant life along those waterways would diminish.

Some lakes previously fed by glaciers would become clearer because there would be no sediment but they could also start to evaporate and become smaller.

But while glaciers might shrink, that doesn't mean the ice on mountains will disappear completely, he said.

''It's actually tough to get rid of a glacier,'' Fountain said. As glaciers retreat, they do so by inching up to higher mountain elevations, where the air is colder.

''But it's the difference,'' Fountain said, ''between the Collier Glacier today and a little ice patch that might be 100 yards long.''

------

Information from: The Bulletin, http://www.bendbulletin.com 

    Geologists: Collier Glacier Is Shrinking, NYT, 23.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Vanishing-Glaciers.html

FACTBOX-Five facts about California wildfires

Tue Oct 23, 2007
6:32am EDT
Reuters

(Reuters) - Five facts about California wildfires:

* California's parched climate, often desiccated brush, and Santa Ana winds create the perfect recipe for wildfires. The Santa Anas begin in deserts to the east and rush erratically through mountain passes and canyons into Southern California communities.

* During Santa Ana conditions, fires can be easily ignited by nature, in the case of lightning, or by humans. Some are arson, while others can be sparked by machinery operated near dry brush, campfires or carelessly tossed cigarettes. Downed power lines also pose a fire hazard. Once the wildfires are whipped by the winds, they spread quickly and are extremely dangerous and difficult to fight.

* "Fire Season" officially begins in early summer and lasts through October, though officials say that as the state suffers through cyclical drought conditions, they consider the season to be almost year-round in Southern California.

* The worst California wildfire of the past decade was the Cedar Fire in October of 2003, which killed 15 people and destroyed more than 4,800 structures, many of them houses, as it burned nearly 300,000 acres in San Diego County.

* Earlier this year, Los Angeles firefighters battled major brush fires -- one that blackened 817 acres in the city's landmark Griffith Park and another that threatened the town of Avalon on Catalina Island, some 22 miles off the coast. The Zaca fire burned through 240,000 acres of Santa Barbara ranchland for two months over the summer.

    FACTBOX-Five facts about California wildfires, R, 23.10.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUKN2218909720071023

Calif. Fires Destroy Hundreds of Homes
 

October 23, 2007
Filed at 1:33 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

SAN DIEGO (AP) -- Walls of wind-whipped flames consumed hundreds of homes across tinder-dry Southern California on Tuesday, raising the number of people forced to flee the flames into the hundreds of thousands.

The blazes bedeviled firefighters as fires roared from mountain passes to the edges of the state's celebrated coastline, spreading so quickly that even hotels serving as temporary shelters for evacuees had to be evacuated.

By day three, the dozen wildfires had burned more than 1,200 homes and businesses, and the destruction may only be the start for the region. With forecasts calling for hotter temperatures and fierce wind gusts, the flames were proving nearly impossible to fight.

At least 346,000 homes were evacuated in San Diego County alone, sheriff's officials said. But the total number could be much higher, and state officials were still struggling to estimate how many people had fled.

Marilee Bishop of Running Springs and her 10 year-old-daughter, Erica, rubbed their red eyes Tuesday morning as they woke up in a Wal-Mart parking lot where they spent the night after being forced to leave their home.

''No one ever expects something like this to happen to them,'' said Bishop, as thick smoke rose in the skies behind her.

Since they began Sunday, the fires have burned at least 245,957 acres, or 384 square miles -- an area larger than New York City.

As the fires spread, most out of control, smaller blazes were merging into larger, more fearsome ones. Evacuations were being announced in one community after another as firefighters found themselves overwhelmed by gale-force Santa Ana winds, some gusting to 70 mph.

President Bush declared a federal emergency for seven counties, a move that will speed disaster-relief efforts. He also sent federal disaster officials to California. He did not plan to visit the area himself, fearing his visit would detract from firefighting efforts.

''All of us across this nation are concerned for the families who have lost their homes and the many families who have been evacuated from their homes,'' Bush said Tuesday. ''We send the help of the federal government.''

Fire crews and fleeing residents described desperate conditions that were sure to get worse. Temperatures across Southern California were about 10 degrees above average and were expected to approach 100 degrees Tuesday in Orange and San Diego counties.

Deputies arrested two men for looting in the community of Ramona, and there were a handful of other looting cases reported, said San Diego Sheriff's Lt. Mike McClain.

The fires were exploding and shooting embers in all directions, preventing crews from forming traditional fire lines and severely limiting aerial bombardment, officials said.

''Lifesaving is our priority. Getting people out from in front of the fire -- those have been our priorities,'' said Capt. Don Camp, a spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

Thousands of residents sought shelter at fairgrounds, schools and community centers. The largest gathering was at Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego, where up to 10,000 evacuees anxiously watched the stadium's television sets, hoping for a glimpse of their neighborhood on the local news. San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders pleaded for donations of blankets, cots, pillows and food for the people staying there, and officials said more people were expected to arrive Tuesday.

San Diego County was ablaze from its rural north to its border region with Mexico, where the wildfires that started Sunday claimed their only fatality to date: Thomas Varshock, 52, of Tecate, a town on the U.S. side of the border southeast of San Diego. His body was found Sunday afternoon, the San Diego County Medical Examiner's Office said.

Forty-two people were injured, 16 of them firefighters.

In San Diego County, public schools were closed, as were campuses at the University of California, San Diego and San Diego State University.

The scope of the infernos was immense and was reminiscent of the blazes that tore through Southern California four years ago this month, killing 22 and destroying 3,640 homes.

The fires have been made worse by fierce Santa Ana winds. The winds -- which sweep through Southern California's canyons in fall and winter -- are stronger than normal, turning already parched scrubland into tinder. They generated walls of flame that bore down on housing developments in a wide swath.

East of Los Angeles, a two-front fire destroyed at least 160 homes in the Lake Arrowhead area, the same mountain resort community where hundreds of homes were lost four years earlier. Officials said at least 100 more homes were destroyed Tuesday in the mountain community of Running Springs, not far away.

Touring an evacuee camp at Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger pledged to do everything in his power to assist the firefighting effort and help those who have lost their homes.

''I will be relentless all the way through this,'' Schwarzenegger said.

------

Associated Press writers Chelsea J. Carter, Jeremiah Marquez, Daisy Nguyen and Thomas Watkins in Los Angeles, Martha Mendoza in Lake Arrowhead, Jacob Adelman in Santa Clarita, Elliot Spagat and Scott Lindlaw in San Diego, Pauline Arrillaga in Del Mar and Jennifer Loven in Washington contributed to this report.

    Calif. Fires Destroy Hundreds of Homes, NYT, 23.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-California-Wildfires.html

California Fires Force 300,000 From Homes

October 23, 2007
The New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 23 — More than a dozen wildfires continued to rage unstopped in southern California for a third day today, forcing an estimated 300,000 people to evacuate their homes and blackening over 400 square miles of brushland and suburbs.

Hot, gusting winds made the advancing flames nearly impossible for firefighters to control, officials said. The winds are expected to keep blowing through the day, and perhaps longer.

The worst conditions continued to be in San Diego County, where large sections were under mandatory evacuation orders. Several hundred houses appeared to have been destroyed or heavily damaged, according to the governor’s Office of Emergency Services, and thousands more were in danger.

Officials appealed to residents outside the evacuated areas to stay at home if possible and to limit their use of cellular phones, to keep highways and communication lines clear for emergency use.

Ron Roberts, the chairman of the San Diego Board of Supervisors, said yesterday, “We have a very dangerous. unpredictable situation that is going on. We have, as we’ve noted, we have some of the highest temperatures, some of the driest landscape conditions, some of the most powerful winds; all of the ingredients for a perfect firestorm.”

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said 800 National Guard troops would be diverted from duty on the southern border to assist with evacuation and ground control in the county. The fires, a Hydra with at least 15 separate burns in seven counties fed by gale-force winds, burned some 267,000 acres from Santa Barbara to the Mexican border. Engines and firefighters from as far as Nevada and Arizona were summoned as resources were stretched to the limit.

Houses burned with no firefighters in sight as emergency crews on the ground and in the air struggled to keep up with shifting winds that fanned new fires and made others recede and reignite.

Officials marveled that there had been just one death, in a fire in southeastern San Diego County on Sunday that also injured several people, including four firefighters. But thousands of residents remained just one step ahead of the flames.

His face smudged with ash, Bruce Gallagher fled in a motor home as flames approached his house in Ramona, San Diego County. He roamed the parking lot of a mall in Escondido, carrying two large plastic bottles in search of water.

“I have a feeling it’s probably gone,” Mr. Gallagher said of his home.

There, seven fires intensified and forced the largest evacuation ever in San Diego County, including entire towns like Ramona and Rancho Santa Fe in the rustic northern stretches. A total of 250,000 people were urged to evacuate.

State emergency officials said they feared that the fires, devouring some of the thickest and driest brush in years, could surpass the destruction of 2003, when California experienced its worst fire season on record.

Gov. Schwarzenegger, who had declared a state of emergency in seven counties on Sunday, said President Bush had called to offer federal assistance with the blazes, which could take several days to extinguish.

In San Diego, some worry the flames will advance from inland mountains to the Pacific Ocean.

Thousands of uprooted people in San Diego County descended on Qualcomm Stadium near downtown and the Del Mar Fairgrounds north of the city, both of which opened as emergency shelters. National Guard troops were sent to each location to help, and officials said they expected more evacuees today. Other people jammed freeways or made desperate bids to save their homes with garden hoses.

San Diego is particularly haunted by wildfires. The worst one in state history burned nearly 750,000 acres in 2003, destroyed 3,600 homes and other buildings, and killed 24 people across Southern California, with much of the damage and more than a dozen of the deaths in San Diego County.

Officials there said those memories prompted swift action this time as the latest fire burned in much of the same area and same direction as 2003.

The San Diego Wild Animal Park, a major tourist draw, was closed and the animals were moved to safer quarters while owners of horses throughout northern San Diego also rushed to save their animals.

Because of the fires’ erratic nature, state officials had difficulty compiling accurate data on the scope of the damage or progress in controlling them. Just as state officials at a midmorning news conference in Malibu were declaring a fire in suburban Los Angeles the state’s top priority, San Diego officials were issuing sweeping evacuation orders and television showed images of scores of buildings burning in a remote area of Los Angeles.

The hot, gusting winds, not expected to let up until late Tuesday, at times grounded fire-fighting airplanes, which are pivotal for their ability to dump tremendous amounts of water and fire retardant.

“We have to just pray the wind slows down because the wind is the No. 1 enemy in the dry weather,” Mr. Schwarzenegger said in Malibu, where a large fire destroyed landmarks Sunday and flared anew after dying down somewhat overnight.

Some of the fires appeared to have been started by downed power lines, but a few were thought to have been caused by arson.

Brush and small trees burned in most cases, but firefighters faced a difficult problem northeast of Los Angeles at the Lake Arrowhead resort, where a forest fire erupted early in the afternoon and added to the plume of smoke hanging over most of the region. Towers of flame tore through houses and other structures there, and water-dropping aircraft did not arrive for a few hours as they fought a larger fire 70 miles away in heavily populated Santa Clarita Valley, a typical dilemma firefighters faced.

Scenes of residents taking matters into their own hands played out as some fires burned for long periods without a firefighter in sight.

Dozens of men, women and children in Canyon Country, north of Los Angeles, grabbed shovels and garden hoses and fought flames creeping up a canyon within 50 feet of their homes.

About seven children and young teenagers worked in tandem with their parents as the flames approached their back fences.

“That was hot!” said Steven Driedger, 14, as he examined his scratched legs for signs of a burn. “But I’m fine.”

Steven’s mother, Carolyn Driedger, said the family, along with their neighbors, had been battling the blaze since 4 a.m.

“Our neighborhood has really come together,” Ms. Driedger said, as a firefighting crew finally pulled up in the late morning. “We had to. These are the first official firefighters we’ve seen.”

In some of the day’s only good news, firefighters made significant progress in surrounding a fire in Orange County without a single home lost.

Reporting was contributed by Will Carless from Escondido, Ana Facio Contreras from Irvine, Larry Dorman from Poway, Regan Morris from Canyon Country and John Holusha from New York.

    California Fires Force 300,000 From Homes, NYT, 23.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/us/23cnd-fire.html?hp

New to Being Dry, the South Struggles to Adapt

October 23, 2007
The New York Times
By SHAILA DEWAN and BRENDA GOODMAN

ATLANTA, Oct. 22 — For more than five months, the lake that provides drinking water to almost five million people here has been draining away in a withering drought. Sandy beaches have expanded into flats of orange mud. Tree stumps not seen in half a century have resurfaced. Scientists have warned of impending disaster.

And life, for the most part, has gone on just as before.

The response to the worst drought on record in the Southeast has unfolded in ultra-slow motion. All summer, more than a year after the drought began, fountains sprayed and football fields were watered, prisoners got two showers a day and Coca-Cola’s bottling plants chugged along at full strength. On an 81-degree day this month, an outdoor theme park began to manufacture what was intended to be a 1.2-million-gallon mountain of snow.

By September, with the lake forecast to dip into the dregs of its storage capacity in less than four months, the state imposed a ban on outdoor water use.

Gov. Sonny Perdue of Georgia declared October “Take a Shorter Shower Month.” And Saturday, Mr. Perdue declared a state of emergency for more than half the state and asked for federal assistance, though the state has not yet restricted indoor water use or cut back on major commercial and industrial users, a step that could cause a significant loss of jobs.

These last-minute measures belie a history of inaction in Georgia and across the South when it comes to managing and conserving water, even in the face of rapid growth. Between 1990 and 2000, water use in Georgia increased 30 percent. But the state has not yet come up with an estimate of how much water is available during periods of normal rainfall, much less a plan to handle the worst-case event — dry faucets.

“We have made it clear to the planners and executive management of this state for years that we may very well be on the verge of a systemwide emergency,” said Mark Crisp, a water expert in the Atlanta office of the engineering firm C. H. Guernsey.

But a sense of urgency has been slow to take hold. Last year, a bill died in the Georgia Legislature that would have required that low-flow water devices be installed in older houses before they are resold. Most golf courses are classified as “agricultural.” Water permits are still approved first come first served.

And Georgia is not at the back of the pack. Alabama, where severe drought is even more widespread, is even further behind in its planning.

A realistic statewide plan, experts say, would tell developers that they could not build if no water was available, and might have restricted some of the enormous growth in the Atlanta area over the last decade. Already, officials have little notion how to provide for a projected doubling of demand over the next 30 years. The ideas that have been floated, including piping in water from Tennessee or desalinating ocean water, would require hundreds of billions of dollars and painful decision making the state has been reluctant to undertake.

“It’s been develop first and ask questions later,” said Gil Rogers, a lawyer with the Southern Environmental Law Center.

Instead, Georgia has engaged in interminable squabbles with neighboring states over dam releases and flow rates. The latest effort at mediation with Alabama fell apart just last month. And Georgia officials insist that Atlanta would have plenty of water were it not for the Army Corps of Engineers, which they say has released more water from its main source of water, Lake Lanier, than is necessary to protect three endangered species downstream. Last week, Mr. Perdue filed for an injunction against the corps to stop the release of water. (Downstream, Alabama officials responded in protest, saying they need the releases.)

“We are not here because we consumed our way into this drought, as some would suggest,” said Carol Couch, Mr. Perdue’s director of environmental protection.

Those making that argument against Georgia include many people in Florida, the only state in the region to have adopted a water plan and home to the downstream end of the basin that includes Lake Lanier. An editorial Friday in the St. Petersburg Times said that the blame lay not with the corps but with “a record drought, unrestrained population growth and poor water-conservation habits.”

Bruce A. Karas, vice president of sustainability for Coca-Cola, said no one from the City of Atlanta or its water planning district had approached company officials to ask them to conserve water. Mr. Karas said the company had worked to reduce consumption on its own since 2004.

“We’re very concerned,” Mr. Karas said. “Water is our main ingredient. As a company, we look at areas where we expect water abundance and water scarcity, and we know water is scarce in the Southwest. It’s very surprising to us that the Southeast is in a water shortage.”

Mary Kay Woodworth, executive director of the Metro Atlanta Landscape and Turf Association, said almost 14,000 workers in landscaping and other businesses that depend on planting and watering had lost their jobs.

“This is a precious natural resource, and it has not been managed well,” Ms. Woodworth said. “That’s one of the reasons we’re in this situation today. The infrastructure was not in place for the development.”

In 2001, the state did establish the Metropolitan North Georgia Water Planning District for 16 counties and dozens of jurisdictions in the Atlanta area. The district has focused on conservation pricing, under which the price of water rises with consumption, and on incentives for replacing inefficient plumbing and monitoring for leaks, a major cause of water loss.

Some environmentalists criticize the district, saying its requirements are weak and its progress unmeasured. The district’s projections, they say, are based on an outdated estimate of water availability, provided by the state, that does not take into account climate change. Pat Stevens, chief environmental planner for the Atlanta Regional Committee, which provides employees to the water district, said the plan was being revised and the requirements would tighten.

“You can’t just do this overnight,” Ms. Stevens said. “Otherwise, you will close businesses.”

“We will out-conservation California,” she added. “But, you know, it takes time.”

In January, the Legislature will consider a proposal to expand the planning process statewide.

State officials defend their response, saying the drought got very bad very quickly.

And Georgia is not the only state in trouble. The drought has afflicted most of the Southeast, a region that is accustomed to abundant water and that tends to view mandatory restrictions as government meddling. Lake Lanier is part of the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint River system, which forms much of the border between Georgia and Alabama and then spills into Florida. There, the river provides a habitat for two types of mussel and a sturgeon that are endangered.

The temptation to blame the corps is strong. Because of years of litigation, the corps operates the dams on the river system under an interim policy driven largely by the need to protect the endangered species of fish and shellfish downstream. Critics say the policy’s minimum-flow requirement does not take into account severe dry spells and is not supported by science. Mr. Perdue has said that the flow is twice what nature would provide under similar circumstances.

Two weekends ago, the corps added to the pain in North Georgia by increasing the flow out of Lake Lanier even as it was shrinking. The lake is the only one in the basin that still has water in what is considered the storage pool, usually the top 60 percent of capacity. (Using the remaining water, called “dead storage,” could require different intake mechanisms and more treatment.)

In response to Mr. Perdue’s complaints, the corps has agreed to consult the federal Fish and Wildlife Service, which protects endangered species, about modifying flow requirements in the Apalachicola River.

With a public anxious over the possibility of running out of water, the corps has not been the only entity to shoulder blame.

On Oct. 1, Stone Mountain Park began to make snow for a winter mountain, hoping to attract children who had not seen the real thing. The mountain was planned during the very wet summer of 2005, and the state and local governments were duly informed, said Christine Parker, a spokeswoman for the park.

The state announced a Level 4 drought response on a Friday and, after park officials reviewed the list of exceptions for businesses, snow-blowing began the following Monday, before much of the public had fully grasped the severity of the situation. After the project was ridiculed in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the park shut it down. Ms. Parker said that only then did the park hear from state environmental authorities.

Stone Mountain had never intended to take a cavalier attitude toward the drought, Ms. Parker said, but had not been given any guidance.

“A lot of businesses are having to go out and ask the right questions,” she said, “so they can do the right thing.”

    New to Being Dry, the South Struggles to Adapt, NYT, 23.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/us/23drought.html?hp

Inch by Inch, Great Lakes Shrink, and Cargo Carriers Face Losses

October 22, 2007
The New York Times

By FERNANDA SANTOSOSWEGO, N.Y. — From his office at the port here, Jonathan Daniels stared at a watermark etched on the rocks that hug one of the commercial piers — a thick dark line several inches above the surface of Lake Ontario — and wondered how much lower the water would dip.

“What we need is some rain,” said Mr. Daniels, director of the Port of Oswego Authority, one of a dozen public port agencies on the United States side of the Great Lakes. “The more we lose water, the less cargo the ships that travel in the Great Lakes can carry, and each time that happens, shipping companies lose money,” he said. “Ultimately, it’s people like you and I who are going to pay the price.”

Water levels in the Great Lakes are falling; Lake Ontario, for example, is about seven inches below where it was a year ago. And for every inch of water that the lakes lose, the ships that ferry bulk materials across them must lighten their loads by 270 tons — or 540,000 pounds — or risk running aground, according to the Lake Carriers’ Association, a trade group for United States-flag cargo companies.

As a result, more ships are needed, adding millions of dollars to shipping companies’ operating costs, experts in maritime commerce estimate.

“When a ship leaves a dock, and it’s not filled to capacity, it’s the same as a plane leaving an airport with empty seats: It cuts into their earning capacity,” said Richard D. Stewart, a co-director of the Transportation and Logistics Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Superior.

“Because it’s mostly raw materials we’re talking about, the average consumer may see an increase in pennies in the price they pay for, say, a new car or washing machine,” Dr. Stewart said. For major manufacturers or firms managing big projects, however, the increase in transportation costs “is much more significant,” he said.

The port of Oswego receives scraps of aluminum from Canada, which are rolled into sheets at a local plant and sent to car manufacturers; soy beans for a bio-diesel plant in nearby Fulton; and parts for windmills that are used to generate power on a farm south of Canandaigua Lake, near Rochester, said L. Michael Treadwell, director of Operation Oswego County, a nonprofit economic development agency. The windmill parts arrive from Brazil and Indonesia, in ships that enter Lake Ontario through the St. Lawrence Seaway, which connects the lake to the Atlantic Ocean.

The port also handles soy beans grown in central New York and sent to the Middle East, and it receives potash, a mineral used in fertilizer, and road salt, which are distributed by truck and rail to companies across the Eastern United States.

The water levels in all five Great Lakes — Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie and Ontario — are below long-term averages and are likely to stay that way until at least March, according to the Army Corps of Engineers. (The same is true at Lake St. Clair, which straddles the border between the state of Michigan and the province of Ontario and is between Lake Huron and Lake Erie; it is not considered one of the Great Lakes, although it is part of the Great Lakes system.)

Most environmental researchers say that low precipitation, mild winters and high evaporation, due largely to a lack of heavy ice covers to shield cold lake waters from the warmer air above, are depleting the lakes. The Great Lakes follow a natural cycle, their levels rising in the spring, peaking in the summer and reaching a low in the winter, as the evaporation rate rises.

In the past two years, evaporation has been higher than average, and not enough rain and snow have fallen in the upper lakes — Superior, Michigan and Huron — which supply water to the lower lakes, to restore the system to its normal levels, said Keith Kompoltowicz, a meteorologist at the Corps of Engineers’ office in Detroit, which monitors water levels in the lakes. “Mother Nature is largely the driving force on what the water levels are, and it plays a large role in what we project water levels to be,” Mr. Kompoltowicz said.

The International Joint Commission, which advises the United States and Canada on water resources, is conducting a $17 million, five-year study to determine whether the shrinking of the Great Lakes is related to the seasonal rise-and-fall cycles or is a result of climate change, said Greg McGillis, a spokesman for the commission. A final report is expected in March 2012.

Lake Ontario’s water level can be regulated through releases from a dam on the United States-Canada border, which allowed the lake to maintain its normal levels until May, Mr. McGillis said. Then a drought hit, and the releases became less generous, said Robert O’Gorman, supervisor of the United States Geological Survey field station here. The drought and the lower inflows from the upper lakes, diminished Lake Ontario’s water level, he said.

Lake Ontario stood at 244.1 feet as of Wednesday — 3 inches below where it was at the beginning of the month, 5 inches below last month’s average and about a foot below last year’s average. The water, however, is still about 2 feet above the lake’s low of 242.19 feet, registered in 1934, according to the Corps of Engineers.

The picture is just as serious in the upper Great Lakes and is particularly grave in Lake Superior, where water levels have hovered below average since 1998 and, based on provisional data, set record lows in August and September. It is the longest stretch of below-average readings at Lake Superior since the Corps of Engineers started tracking the Great Lakes’ levels in 1918.

On average, 240 million tons of cargo travel across the Great Lakes every year. The United States fleet circulating in the Great Lakes has 63 ships, which have lost a total of 8,000 tons of cargo capacity for every inch of water the lakes have fallen below normal this year, said James H. I. Weakley, president of the carriers’ association. Those 8,000 tons, he said, correspond to enough iron ore to produce 6,000 cars, or enough coal to provide electricity to the Detroit area for three hours, or enough stone to build 24 houses.

Mark W. Barker, president of Interlake Steamship Company, said the nine ships his company operated made about 50 trips a year across the Great Lakes, and the larger ones have transported 1,800 tons less per trip this year compared with last year — the equivalent of losing an entire ship’s capacity over the length of a season.

“We get paid by the ton, so we’re losing a lot of revenue per trip, and we’re just going to have to reclaim that loss by increasing our rates,” said Mr. Barker, whose family has owned the company since 1987. “It’s either doing that or risk the business.”

The Great Lakes region is home to about 70 percent of the steel industry in North America and about half of the heavy manufacturing in the United States, Mr. Weakley said.

Here in Oswego, a city of 18,000 residents that is 40 miles north of Syracuse, the port has acquired renewed significance in the past two years, largely because of a budding renewable energy sector that depends in part on lake shipments. The area’s economy has struggled since the decline of its agricultural-based industries, like brewing, began in the 1970s.

Mr. Daniels, the port director, said that water transportation was still one of the most efficient alternatives for companies that rely on bulk cargo, and that Oswego was banking “on the water coming back to the lakes.”

“If the low levels in the Great Lakes are a result of global warming, I don’t know,” he said. “What I know is that we can’t control nature. All we can do is hope for rain.”

    Inch by Inch, Great Lakes Shrink, and Cargo Carriers Face Losses, NYT, 22.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/nyregion/22oswego.html

Unusually Strong Santa Anas Fan Flames

October 22, 2007
Filed at 11:02 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Wildfires tearing through thousands of parched acres of Southern California are being fanned by unusually powerful seasonal winds that have whipped the flames with alarming speed, experts said Monday. And they warn that Californians might be in for more this winter.

The hot, dry Santa Ana winds typically blow between October and February, peaking in December. They blow from the northeast with steady speeds of at least 20 mph, and a spell typically lasts just a day or two.

This week's Santa Anas, though, started over the weekend and were not expected to diminish until Tuesday night.

''We have Santa Anas throughout the winter, but they tend to be more noticed this time of year because they're warmer and more likely to start fires,'' said Robert G. Fovell, professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles.

The strong winds have stoked the flames and left residents little time to flee. The fires have killed at least one person, charred thousands of acres, destroyed scores of homes and forced the evacuation of thousands of people.

Wind gusts were clocked at 108 mph at Whitaker Peak northwest of Los Angeles over weekend, and gusts of 85 mph were common below mountain passes and canyons, the Weather Service said. Sustained winds measured at 30 mph to 40 mph.

''For it to be this strong for so many days is unusual,'' said Stuart Seto, a specialist with the National Weather Service.

The strong winds originate in the fall and winter in the Great Basin -- the vast desert that covers much of Nevada, Utah and southern Idaho -- when the desert is relatively cold.

The intensity of Santa Ana winds depends on the difference in pressure between a cool, high-pressure system in the Great Basin and a low-pressure system along coastal Southern California. The greater the pressure difference, the stronger the winds, which funnel through canyons and valleys and pick up speed as they sweep toward the coast.

With much of Southern California experiencing drought conditions this year, fast-moving Santa Anas, combined with high temperatures and low humidity, can increase the danger of wildfires and fan flames once blazes are ignited.

The root cause of most of the fires is still being investigated, but authorities believe some were caused by downed power lines, a vehicle fire and in one case, arson.

The last time Santa Anas caused major destruction in California was in 2003, when 15 wildfires raged, killing 22 people, destroying 3,640 homes and scorching 750,000 acres.

Last year, there were 78 Santa Ana days -- more than three times the normal number, said Bill Patzert of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

All indications show this winter will continue to be extremely dry, Patzert said.

''This is the beginning, unfortunately, of the Santa Ana season,'' Patzert said. ''It looks like what's happening now is a preview of the coming attraction.''

------

Associated Press writer Gillian Flaccus in Escondido contributed to this report.

------

On the Net:

National Weather Service: http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/lox/

Jet Propulsion Laboratory: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov 

    Unusually Strong Santa Anas Fan Flames, NYT, 22.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-California-Wildfires-Santa-Anas.html

Calif. Fires Force 250, 000 to Evacuate

October 22, 2007
Filed at 1:19 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

SAN DIEGO (AP) -- Authorities say wildfires in California have forced evacuations of nearly 250,000 people from their homes in San Diego County.

Hundreds of patients are being evacuated from a hospital and nursing homes in the path of one of more than a dozen wildfires engulfing Southern California. The fires fanned by fierce desert winds killed at least one person, injured dozens more and forced tens of thousands to flee their homes.

The hospital and neighboring nursing homes in Poway, a San Diego suburb, were evacuating patients in ambulances and school buses, sheriff's spokeswoman Susan Knauss said.

About a dozen blazes erupted over the weekend, feeding on drought-parched land from the high desert to the Pacific Ocean. One person was killed and several injured in a fire near the Mexican border, and dozens of structures have burned across the region.

Things got worse Monday, when new fires sprouted and others merged, adding to the 40,000 acres -- or 62 square miles -- that already have burned.

Some of the worst damage was in Malibu, where a church, homes and a historic castle were destroyed.

All San Diego Police Department officers and off duty detectives were ordered to return to work to help with evacuations.

In many cases, crews couldn't begin to fight the fires because they were too busy rescuing residents who refused to leave, fire officials said.

''They didn't evacuate at all, or delayed until it was too late,'' said Bill Metcalf, chief of the North County Fire Protection District. ''And those folks who are making those decisions are actually stripping fire resources.''

    Calif. Fires Force 250, 000 to Evacuate, NYT, 22.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-California-Wildfires.html

California Fires Force More Orders to Evacuate

October 22, 2007
The New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

MALIBU, Calif., Oct. 22 — Tens of thousands of people were ordered to evacuate their homes today as wind-driven wildfires continued to spread across Southern California. Near San Diego, a rapidly advancing blaze prompted authorities to order the evacuation of the community of Ramona, which has a population of 36,000.

More than a dozen fires from south near the Mexican border to north by Santa Barbara resulted in other home evacuations, school closings and blocked roads. One death was reported Sunday night as a result of the blazes and as many as 17 were injured.

In San Diego County as many as 10,000 homes were under evacuation orders, but authorities said many homeowners were refusing to leave. This forced firefighters to divert their attention to rescuing residents in danger of being engulfed in smoke and fire.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency in seven counties, where flames had burned 30,000 acres.

On Sunday, thousands of homes in Canyon Country, north of Los Angeles, were threatened by a fire that had engulfed more than 10,000 acres in a few hours. By early evening, the blaze had already burned several homes and other structures and had led to the evacuation of 800 homes.

Residents battled the flames with garden hoses and shovels while others gave up and fled in their vehicles. Television stations showed images of fire descending on structures with little to stop it, and Los Angeles County rushed to shift firefighters there from another large fire in Malibu that had earlier seemed poised for large-scale destruction.

Chief P. Michael Freeman of the Los Angeles County Fire Department, speaking at the Malibu fire in the late afternoon, said state and local resources “are trying to deal with all these fires, and we are thin.”

Officials have warned for months that the driest year on record has made brush, grown thick from previous wet years, especially susceptible to fires.

The one death came in a fire in San Diego’s backcountry, in Potrero, one of two blazes that had consumed more than 10,000 acres by evening. Several people were injured in the fires, including four firefighters who were hospitalized in serious condition with burns, said Roxanne Provaznik, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

The Border Patrol said that several illegal immigrants who had crossed the border might have been trapped in the flames and that a search had begun.

Other large fires broke out as Sunday wore on, recalling a 2003 firestorm that killed 24 people, destroyed 3,700 homes and burned 750,000 acres, the worst fire in state history.

The causes of Sunday’s fires were undetermined, but investigators in Malibu were looking into whether power lines downed by an overnight windstorm played a role.

Nearly a thousand firefighters fought to gain control of the Malibu fire, which had burned 1,200 acres by early afternoon in a densely populated area. The Pacific Coast Highway was closed as smoke and flame billowed from the hillsides and canyons opposite beachfront homes.

Los Angeles County officials said five homes and a church were destroyed, and other commercial buildings damaged. The fire was fanned by winds of 50 to 60 miles per hour and even higher in passes and canyons.

About 1,500 people were evacuated from their homes, with several sent to Zuma Beach, better known as a surfing spot in Malibu. Some beachgoers continued to surf and sunbathe as the fire raged several miles away in this city of 13,000 about 25 miles from downtown Los Angeles.

“We’ve got everything on our side except for Mother Nature,” said State Assemblywoman Julia Brownley, who represents the area. For a time, the fire here threatened Pepperdine University on the Pacific Coast Highway, but the campus was not evacuated and winds eventually blew the fire away from it.

For residents, the fire prompted the all-too-familiar rhythms of fire season: the wind at night, the smell of smoke, the wail of sirens and racing hearts.

Mike Weinstock stood outside his beachfront house watching firefighters put out a small fire in a shopping center across the street and a wall of smoke billowing from the main fire a few miles down the highway.

The house three doors down had burned overnight, and Mr. Weinstock climbed onto his roof with a garden hose.

“I’ve lived here 20 years,” he said, “and I am not going anywhere.” The threat of fire is simply part of life here, he said, with several fires, some much larger and destructive, having swept parts of Malibu over the years.

This fire, though, is likely to be remembered as the one that destroyed two landmarks, the Malibu Presbyterian Church and a home known as Castle Kashan or Hodges’ Castle, which overlooked the civic center and played host to community functions.

Built in 1978 in the style of a Scottish castle, which residents considered fabulous or an abomination or both, the home was owned by Lilly Lawrence, a philanthropist and the daughter of a former Iranian oil minister. She had recently put it on the market for $17 million.

At Canyon Country, hundreds of people, many with pet dogs, gathered in parking lots and along roadways, watching the flames. Glenn and Claire Reeves left with their children and pet dogs and turtles.

“I started loading up pictures of the kids and I saw flames come up the hill,” said Ms. Reeves, watching the fire from a drug store parking lot near her home. “We had less than half an hour to get out.”

John Holusha contributed reporting from New York, Regan Morris from Malibu, Solomon Moore from Los Angeles, and Will Carless from Potrero.

    California Fires Force More Orders to Evacuate, NYT, 22.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/22/us/22cnd-fire.html?hp

The Future Is Drying Up

October 21, 2007
By JOE GERTNER
The New York Times

Scientists sometimes refer to the effect a hotter world will have on this country’s fresh water as the other water problem, because global warming more commonly evokes the specter of rising oceans submerging our great coastal cities. By comparison, the steady decrease in mountain snowpack — the loss of the deep accumulation of high-altitude winter snow that melts each spring to provide the American West with most of its water — seems to be a more modest worry. But not all researchers agree with this ranking of dangers. Last May, for instance, Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, one of the United States government’s pre-eminent research facilities, remarked that diminished supplies of fresh water might prove a far more serious problem than slowly rising seas. When I met with Chu last summer in Berkeley, the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, which provides most of the water for Northern California, was at its lowest level in 20 years. Chu noted that even the most optimistic climate models for the second half of this century suggest that 30 to 70 percent of the snowpack will disappear. “There’s a two-thirds chance there will be a disaster,” Chu said, “and that’s in the best scenario.”

In the Southwest this past summer, the outlook was equally sobering. A catastrophic reduction in the flow of the Colorado River — which mostly consists of snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains — has always served as a kind of thought experiment for water engineers, a risk situation from the outer edge of their practical imaginations. Some 30 million people depend on that water. A greatly reduced river would wreak chaos in seven states: Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California. An almost unfathomable legal morass might well result, with farmers suing the federal government; cities suing cities; states suing states; Indian nations suing state officials; and foreign nations (by treaty, Mexico has a small claim on the river) bringing international law to bear on the United States government. In addition, a lesser Colorado River would almost certainly lead to a considerable amount of economic havoc, as the future water supplies for the West’s industries, agriculture and growing municipalities are threatened. As one prominent Western water official described the possible future to me, if some of the Southwest’s largest reservoirs empty out, the region would experience an apocalypse, “an Armageddon.”

One day last June, an environmental engineer named Bradley Udall appeared before a Senate subcommittee that was seeking to understand how severe the country’s fresh-water problems might become in an era of global warming. As far as Washington hearings go, the testimony was an obscure affair, which was perhaps fitting: Udall is the head of an obscure organization, the Western Water Assessment. The bureau is located in the Boulder, Colo., offices of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the government agency that collects obscure data about the sky and seas. Still, Udall has a name that commands some attention, at least within the Beltway. His father was Morris Udall, the congressman and onetime presidential candidate, and his uncle was Stewart Udall, the secretary of the interior under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Bradley Udall’s great-great-grandfather, John D. Lee, moreover, was the founder of Lee’s Ferry, a flyspeck spot in northern Arizona that means nothing to most Americans but holds near-mythic status to those who work with water for a living. Near Lee’s Ferry is where the annual flow of the Colorado River is measured in order to divvy up its water among the seven states that depend on it. To many politicians, economists and climatologists, there are few things more important than what has happened at Lee’s Ferry in the past, just as there are few things more important than what will happen at Lee’s Ferry in the future.

The importance of the water there was essentially what Udall came to talk about. A report by the National Academies on the Colorado River basin had recently concluded that the combination of limited Colorado River water supplies, increasing demands, warmer temperatures and the prospect of recurrent droughts “point to a future in which the potential for conflict” among those who use the river will be ever-present. Over the past few decades, the driest states in the United States have become some of our fastest-growing; meanwhile, an ongoing drought has brought the flow of the Colorado to its lowest levels since measurements at Lee’s Ferry began 85 years ago. At the Senate hearing, Udall stated that the Colorado River basin is already two degrees warmer than it was in 1976 and that it is foolhardy to imagine that the next 50 years will resemble the last 50. Lake Mead, the enormous reservoir in Arizona and Nevada that supplies nearly all the water for Las Vegas, is half-empty, and statistical models indicate that it will never be full again. “As we move forward,” Udall told his audience, “all water-management actions based on ‘normal’ as defined by the 20th century will increasingly turn out to be bad bets.”

A few weeks after his testimony, I flew to Boulder to meet with Udall, and we spent a day driving switchback roads high in the Rockies in his old Subaru. It had been a wet season on the east slope of the Rockies, but the farther west we went, the drier it became. Udall wanted to show me some of the local reservoirs and water systems that were built over the past century, so I could get a sense of their complexity as well as their vulnerability. As he put it, he wants to connect the disparate members of the water economy in a way that has never really been done before, so that utility executives, scientists, environmentalists, business leaders, farmers and politicians can begin discussing how to cope with the inevitable shortages of fresh water. In the American West, whose huge economy and political power derive from the ability of 20th-century engineers to conquer rivers like the Colorado and establish a reliable water supply, the prospect that there will be less water in the future, rather than the same amount, is unnerving. “We have a very short period of time here to get people educated on what this means,” Udall told me as we drove through the mountains. “Then once that occurs, perhaps we can start talking about how do we deal with it.”

Udall suggested that I meet a water manager named Peter Binney, who works for Aurora, Colo., a city — the 60th-largest in the United States — that sprawls over an enormous swath of flat, postagricultural land south of the Denver airport. It may be difficult for residents of the East Coast to understand the political celebrity of some Western water managers, but in a place like Aurora, where water, not available land, limits economic growth, Binney has enormous responsibilities. In effect, the city’s viability depends on his wherewithal to conjure new sources of water or increase the output of old ones. As Binney told me when we first spoke, “We have to find a new way of meeting the needs of all this population that’s turning up and still satisfy all of our recreational and environmental demands.” Aurora has a population of 310,000 now, Binney said, but that figure is projected to surpass 500,000 by 2035.

I asked if he had enough water for that many people. “Oh, no,” he replied. He seemed surprised that someone could even presume that he might. In fact, he explained, his job is to figure out how to find more water in a region where every drop is already spoken for and at a moment when there is little possibility that any more will ever be discovered.

Binney and I got together outside Dillon, a village in the Colorado Rockies 75 miles from Aurora and just a few miles west of the Continental Divide. We met in a small parking lot beside Dillon Reservoir, which sits at the bottom of a bowl of snow-capped mountains. Binney, a thickset 54-year-old with dark red hair and a fair complexion, had driven up in a large S.U.V. He still carries a strong accent from his native New Zealand, and in conversation he comes across as less a utility manager than a polymath with the combined savvy of an engineer, an economist and a politician. As we moved to a picnic table, Binney told me that we were looking at Denver’s water, not Aurora’s, and that it would eventually travel 70 miles through tunnels under the mountains to Denver’s taps. He admitted that he would love to have this water, which is pure snowmelt. To people in his job, snowmelt is the best source of water because it requires little chemical treatment to bring it up to federal drinking standards. But this water wasn’t available. Denver got here before him. And in Colorado, like most Western states, the rights to water follow a bloodline back to whoever got to it first.

One way to view the history of the American West is as a series of important moments in exploration or migration; another is to consider it, as Binney does, in terms of its water. In the 20th century, for example, all of our great dams and reservoirs were built — “heroic man-over-nature” achievements, in Binney’s words, that control floods, store water for droughts, generate vast amounts of hydroelectric power and enable agriculture to flourish in a region where the low annual rainfall otherwise makes it difficult. And in constructing projects like the Glen Canyon Dam — which backs up water to create Lake Powell, the vast reservoir in Arizona and Utah that feeds Lake Mead — the builders went beyond the needs of the moment. “They gave us about 40 to 50 years of excess capacity,” Binney says. “Now we’ve gotten to the end of that era.” At this point, every available gallon of the Colorado River has been appropriated by farmers, industries and municipalities. And yet, he pointed out, the region’s population is expected to keep booming. California’s Department of Finance recently predicted that there will be 60 million Californians by midcentury, up from 36 million today. “In Colorado, we’re sitting at a little under five million people now, on our way to eight million people,” Binney said. Western settlers, who apportioned the region’s water long ago, never could have foreseen the thirst of its cities. Nor, he said, could they have anticipated our environmental mandates to keep water “in stream” for the benefit of fish and wildlife, as well as for rafters and kayakers.

The West’s predicament, though, isn’t just a matter of limited capacity, bigger populations and environmental regulations. It’s also a distributional one. Seventy-five years ago, cities like Denver made claims on — and from the state of Colorado received rights to — water in the mountains; those cities in turn built reservoirs for their water. As a result, older cities have access to more surface water (that is, water that comes from rivers and streams) than newer cities like Aurora, which have been forced to purchase existing water rights from farmers and mining companies. Towns that rely on groundwater (water pumped from deep underground) face an even bigger disadvantage. Water tables all over the United States have been dropping, sometimes drastically, from overuse. In the Denver area, some cities that use only groundwater will almost certainly exhaust their accessible supplies by 2050.

The biggest issue is that agriculture consumes most of the water, as much as 90 percent of it, in a state like Colorado. “The West has gone from a fur-trapping, to a mining, to an agricultural, to a manufacturing, to an urban-centric economy,” Binney explained. As the region evolved, however, its water ownership for the most part did not. “There’s no magical locked box of water that we can turn to,” Binney says of cities like Aurora, “so it’s going to have to come from an existing use.” Because the supply of water in the West can’t really change, water managers spend their time looking for ways to adjust its allocation in their favor.

Binney knew all this back in 2002, when he took the job in Aurora after a long career at an engineering firm. Over the course of a century, the city had established a reasonable water supply. About a quarter of its water is piped in from the Colorado River basin about 70 miles away; another quarter is taken from reservoirs in the Arkansas River basin far to the south. The rest comes from the South Platte, a lazy, meandering river that runs north through Aurora on its way toward Nebraska. Binney says he believes that a city like his needs at least five years of water in storage in case of drought; his first year there turned out to be one of the worst years for water managers in recorded history, and the town’s reservoirs dropped to 26 percent of capacity, meaning Aurora had at most nine months of reserves and could not endure another dry spring. During the summer and fall, Binney focused on both supply and demand. He negotiated with neighboring towns to buy water and accelerated a program to pay local farmers to fallow their fields so the city could lease their water rights. Meanwhile, the town asked residents to limit their showers and had water cops enforce new rules against lawn sprinklers. (“It’s interesting how many people were watering lawns in the middle of the night,” Binney said.)

Water use in the United States varies widely by region, influenced by climate, neighborhood density and landscaping, among other things. In the West, Los Angelenos use about 125 gallons per person per day in their homes, compared with 114 for Tucson residents. Binney’s customers generally use about 160 gallons per person per day. “In the depths of the drought,” he said, “we got down to about 123 gallons.”

Part of the cruelty of a Western drought is that a water manager never knows if it will last 1 year or 10. In 2002, Binney was at the earliest stages of what has since become a nearly continuous dry spell. Though he couldn’t see that at the time, he realized Aurora faced a permanent state of emergency if it didn’t boost its water supplies. But how? One option was to try to buy water rights in the mountains (most likely from farmers who were looking to quit agriculture), then build a new reservoir and a long supply line to Aurora. Obvious hurdles included environmental and political resistance, as well as an engineering difficulty: water is heavy, far heavier than oil, and incompressible; a system to move it long distances (especially if it involves tunneling through mountains or pumping water over them) can cost billions. Binney figured that without the help of the federal government, which has largely gotten out of the Western dam-and-reservoir-building business, Aurora would be unwise to pursue such a project. Even if the money could be raised, building a system would take decades. Aurora needed a solution within five years.

Another practice, sometimes used in Europe, is to drill wells alongside a river and pull river water up though them, using the gravel of the riverbank as a natural filter — sort of like digging a hole in the sand near the ocean’s edge as it fills from below. Half of Aurora’s water rights were on the South Platte already; the city also pours its treated wastewater back into the river, as do other cities in the Denver metro area. This gives the South Platte a steady, dependable flow. Binney and the township reasoned that they could conceivably, and legally, go some 20 or 30 miles downstream on the South Platte, buy agricultural land near the river, install wells there and retrieve their wastewater. Thus they could create a system whereby Aurora would use South Platte water; send it to a treatment plant that would discharge it back into the river; go downstream to recapture water from the same river; then pump it back to the city for purification and further use. The process would repeat, ad infinitum. Aurora would use its share of South Platte water “to extinction,” in the argot of water managers. A drop of the South Platte used by an Aurora resident would find its way back to the city’s taps as a half-drop in 45 to 60 days, a quarter-drop 45 to 60 days after that and so on. For every drop the town used from the South Platte, over time it would almost — as all the fractional drops added up — get another.

Many towns have a supply that includes previously treated water. The water from the Mississippi River, for instance, is reused many times by municipalities as it flows southward. But as far as Binney knew, no municipality in the United States had built the kind of closed loop that Aurora envisioned. Water from wells in the South Platte would taste different, because of its mineral and organic content, so Binney’s engineers would have to make it mimic mountain snowmelt. More delicate challenges involved selling local taxpayers on authorizing a project, marketed to them as “Prairie Waters,” that would capitalize on their own wastewater. The system, which meant building a 34-mile-long pipeline from the downstream South Platte riverbanks to a treatment facility in Aurora, would cost three-quarters of a billion dollars, making it one of the most expensive municipal infrastructure projects in the country.

When Binney and I chatted at the reservoir outside Dillon, he had already finished discussions with Moody’s and Fitch, the bond-rating agencies whose evaluations would help the town finance the project. Groundbreaking, which would be the next occasion we would see each other, was still a month away. “What we’re doing now is trading high levels of treatment and purification for building tunnels and chasing whatever remaining snowmelt there is in the hills, which I think isn’t a wise investment for the city,” he told me. “I would expect that what we’re going to do is the blueprint for a lot of cities in California, Arizona, Nevada — even the Carolinas and the Gulf states. They’re all going to be doing this in the future.”

Water managers in the West tend to think in terms of “acre-feet.” One acre-foot, equal to about 326,000 gallons, is enough to serve two typical Colorado families for one year. When measurements of the Colorado River began near Lee’s Ferry in the early 1920s, the region happened to be in the midst of an extremely wet series of years, and the river was famously misjudged to have an average flow of 17 million acre-feet per year — when in fact its average flow would often prove to be significantly less. Part of the legacy of that misjudgment is that the seven states that divided the water in the 1920s entered into a legal partnership that created unrealistic expectations about the river’s capacity. But there is another, lesser-known legacy too. As the 20th century progressed, many water managers came to believe that the 1950s, which included the most severe drought years since measurement of the river began, were the marker for a worst-case situation.

But recent studies of tree rings, in which academics drill core samples from the oldest Ponderosa pines or Douglas firs they can find in order to determine moisture levels hundreds of years ago, indicate that the dry times of the 1950s were mild and brief compared with other historical droughts. The latest research effort, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters in late May, identified the existence of an epochal Southwestern megadrought that, if it recurred, would prove calamitous.

When Binney and I met at Dillon Reservoir, he brought graphs of Colorado River flows that go back nearly a thousand years. “There was this one in the 1150s,” he said, tracing a jagged line downward with his finger. “They think that’s when the Anasazi Indians were forced out. We see drought cycles here that can go up to 60 years of below-average precipitation.” What that would mean today, he said, is that states would have to make a sudden choice between agriculture and people, which would lead to bruising political debates and an unavoidable blow to the former. Binney says that as much as he believes that some farmers’ water is ultimately destined for the cities anyway, a big jolt like this would be tragic. “You hope you never get to that point,” he told me, “where you force those kinds of discussions, because they will change for hundreds of years the way that people live in the Western U.S. If you have to switch off agriculture, it’s not like you can get back into it readily. It took decades for the agricultural industry to establish itself. It may never come back.”

An even darker possibility is that a Western drought caused by climatic variation and a drought caused by global warming could arrive at the same time. Or perhaps they already have. This coming spring, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will issue a report identifying areas of the world most at risk of droughts and floods as the earth warms. Fresh-water shortages are already a global concern, especially in China, India and Africa. But the I.P.C.C., which along with Al Gore received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize earlier this month for its work on global-warming issues, will note that many problem zones are located within the United States, including California (where the Sierra Nevada snowpack is threatened) and the Colorado River basin. These assessments follow on the heels of a number of recent studies that analyze mountain snowpack and future Colorado River flows. Almost without exception, recent climate models envision reductions that range from the modest to the catastrophic by the second half of this century. One study in particular, by Martin Hoerling and Jon Eischeid, suggests the region is already “past peak water,” a milestone that means the river’s water supply will now forever trend downward.

Climatologists seem to agree that global warming means the earth will, on average, get wetter. According to Richard Seager, a scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory who published a study on the Southwest last spring, more rain and snow will fall in those regions closer to the poles and more precipitation is likely to fall during sporadic, intense storms rather than from smaller, more frequent storms. But many subtropical regions closer to the equator will dry out. The models analyzed by Seager, which focus on regional climate rather than Colorado River flows, show that the Southwest will ultimately be subject to significant atmospheric and weather alterations. More alarming, perhaps, is that the models do not only concern the coming decades; they also address the present. “You know, it’s like, O.K., there’s trouble in the future, but how near in the future does it set in?” he told me. “In this case, it appears that it’s happening right now.” When I asked if the drought in his models would be permanent, he pondered the question for a moment, then replied: “You can’t call it a drought anymore, because it’s going over to a drier climate. No one says the Sahara is in drought.”

Climate models tend to be more accurate at predicting temperature than precipitation. Still, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that “something is happening,” as Peter Binney gently puts it. Everyone I spoke with in the West has noticed — less snow, earlier spring melts, warmer nights. Los Angeles this year went 150 days without a measurable rainfall. One afternoon in Boulder, I spent some time with Roger Pulwarty, a highly regarded climatologist at the National Oceanographic Atmospheric Administration. Pulwarty, who has spent the past few years assessing adaptive solutions to a long drought, has a light sense of humor and an air of optimism about him, but he acknowledged that the big picture is worrisome. Even if the precipitation in the West does not decrease, higher temperatures by themselves create huge complications. Snowmelt runoff decreases. The immense reservoirs lose far more water to evaporation. Meanwhile, demand increases because crops are thirstier. Yet importing water from other river basins becomes more difficult, because those basins may face shortages, too.

“You don’t need to know all the numbers of the future exactly,” Pulwarty told me over lunch in a local Vietnamese restaurant. “You just need to know that we’re drying. And so the argument over whether it’s 15 percent drier or 20 percent drier? It’s irrelevant. Because in the long run, that decrease, accumulated over time, is going to dry out the system.” Pulwarty asked if I knew the projections for what it would take to refill Lake Powell, which is at about 50 percent of capacity. Twenty years of average flow on the Colorado River, he told me. “Good luck,” he said. “Even in normal conditions we don’t get 20 years of average flow. People are calling for more storage on the system, but if you can’t fill the reservoirs you have, I don’t know how more storage, or more dams, is going to help you. One has to ask if the normal strategies that we have are actually viable anymore.”

Pulwarty is convinced that the economic impacts could be profound. The worst outcome, he suggested, would be mass migrations out of the region, along with bitter interstate court battles over the dwindling water supplies. But well before that, if too much water is siphoned from agriculture, farm towns and ranch towns will wither. Meanwhile, Colorado’s largest industry, tourism, might collapse if river flows became a trickle during summertime. Already, warmer temperatures have brought on an outbreak of pine beetles that are destroying pine forests; Pulwarty wonders how many tourists will want to visit a state full of dead trees. “A crisis is an interesting thing,” he said. In his view, a crisis is a point in a story, a moment in a narrative, that presents an opportunity for characters to think their way through a problem. A catastrophe, on the other hand, is something different: it is one of several possible outcomes that follow from a crisis. “We’re at the point of crisis on the Colorado,” Pulwarty concluded. “And it’s at this point that we decide, O.K., which way are we going to go?”

It is all but imposible to look into the future of the Western states without calling on Pat Mulroy, the head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority. Mulroy has no real counterpart on the East Coast; her nearest analog might be Robert Moses, the notorious New York City planner who built massive infrastructure projects and who almost always found a way around institutional obstructions and financing constraints. She is arguably the most influential and outspoken water manager in the country — a “woman without fear,” as Pulwarty describes her. Pulwarty and Peter Binney respect her willingness to challenge historical water-sharing agreements that, in Mulroy’s view, no longer suit the modern West (meaning they don’t suit Las Vegas). According to Binney, however, Nevada’s scant resources give Mulroy little choice. She has to keep her city from drying out. That makes hers the most difficult job in the water business, he told me.

Las Vegas is almost certainly more vulnerable to water shortages than any metro area in the country. Partly that’s a result of the city’s explosive growth. But the state of Nevada has the historical misfortune of receiving a smaller share of Colorado River water (300,000 acre-feet annually) than the other six states with which it signed a water-sharing compact in the 1920s. That modest share, stored in Lake Mead along with water destined for Southern California, Arizona and northern Mexico, now means everything to Las Vegas. I traveled to Lake Mead on a 99-degree day last June. The narrow, 110-mile-long lake, which at full capacity holds 28 million acre-feet of water (making it the largest reservoir in the United States), was at 49 percent of capacity. When riding into the valley and glimpsing it from afar — an astonishing slash of blue in the desert — my guide for the day, Bronson Mack of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, remarked that he had never seen it so low. The white bathtub ring on the sides of the canyon that marks the level of full capacity was visible about 100 feet above the water. “I have a photograph of my mother on her honeymoon, standing in front of the lake,” Mack, a Las Vegas native, said. That was in 1970. “It was almost that low, but not quite.”

Over the past year, it has become conceivable that the lake could eventually drop below the level of the water authority’s intake pipes, the straws that suck the water out for the Las Vegas Valley. The authority recently hired an engineering firm to drill through several miles of rock and create a deeper intake pipe near the bottom of the lake. To say the project is being fast-tracked is an understatement. The day after visiting Lake Mead, I met with Mulroy in her Las Vegas office. “We have everything in line to get it running by 2012,” she said of the new intake. But she added that she is looking to cut as much time off construction as possible. Building the new intake is a race against the clock, or rather a race against a lake that keeps going down, down, down.

Mulroy is not gambling the entire future of Las Vegas on this project. One catchphrase of the water trade is that water flows uphill toward money, which is another way of saying that a city with ample funds can, at least theoretically, augment its supplies indefinitely. In a tight water market like that of the West, this isn’t an absolute truth, but in many instances money can move rivers. The trade-off is that new water tends to be of lower quality (requiring more expensive purification) or far away (requiring more expensive transport). Thanks to Las Vegas’s growth — the metro area is now at 1.8 million people — cost is currently no object. The city’s cash reserves have made it possible for Mulroy to pay Arizona $330 million for water she can use in emergencies and to plan a controversial multibillion-dollar pipeline to east-central Nevada, where the water authority has identified groundwater it wants to extract and transport. Wealth allows for the additional possibility of a sophisticated trading scheme whereby Las Vegas might pay for a desalination plant on the Pacific Coast that would transform seawater into potable water for use in California and Mexico. In exchange, Nevada could get a portion of their Colorado River water in Lake Mead.

So money does make a kind of sustainability possible for Las Vegas. On the other hand, buying water is quite unlike buying anything else. At the moment, water doesn’t really function like a private good; its value, which Peter Binney calls “infinite,” is often only vaguely related to its price, which can vary from 50 cents an acre-foot (what Mulroy pays to take water from Lake Mead) to $12,000 an acre-foot (the most Binney has paid farmers in Colorado for their rights). Moreover, water is so necessary to human life, and hence so heavily subsidized and regulated, that it can’t really be bought and sold freely across state lines. (Enron tried to start a water market called Azurix in the late 1990s, only to see it fail spectacularly.) The more successful water markets have instead been local, like one in the late 1980s in California, where farmers agreed to reduce their water use and sell the savings to a state water bank. Mulroy and Binney each told me they think a true free-market water exchange would create too many winners and losers. “What you would have is affluent communities being able to buy the lifeblood right out from under those that are less well heeled,” Mulroy said. More practical, in her mind, would be a regional market that gives states, cities and farmers greater freedom to strike mutually beneficial agreements, but with protections so that municipalities aren’t pitted against one another.

More-efficient water markets might ease shortages, but they can’t replace a big city’s principal source. What if, I asked Mulroy, Lake Mead drained nearly to the bottom? Even if drought conditions ease over the next year or two, several people I spoke with think the odds are greater that Lake Powell, the 27-million-acre-foot reservoir that supplies Lake Mead, will drop to unusable levels before it ever fills again. Mulroy didn’t immediately dismiss the possibility; she is certain that the reduced circumstances of the two big Western reservoirs are tied to global warming and that Las Vegas is this country’s first victim of climate change. An empty Lake Mead, she began, would mean there is nothing in Lake Powell.

“It’s well outside probabilities,” she said — but it could happen. “In that case, it’s not just a Las Vegas problem. You have three entire states wiped out: Arizona, California and Nevada. Because you can’t replace those volumes with desalted ocean water.” What seems more likely, she said, is that the legal framework governing the Colorado River would preclude such a dire turn of events. Recently, the states that use the Colorado reached a tentative agreement that guarantees Lake Mead will remain partly full under current conditions, even if upstream users have to cut back their withdrawals as a result. The deal supplements a more fundamental understanding that dates to the 1920s. If the river is failing to carry a certain, guaranteed volume of water to Lee’s Ferry, which is just below Lake Powell, the river’s lower-basin states (Nevada, Arizona and California) can legally force the upper-basin states (Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico and Utah) to reduce or stop their water withdrawals. This contingency, known as a “compact call,” sets the lower-basin states against the upper, but it has never occurred; it is deeply feared by many water managers, because it would ravage the fragile relationship among states and almost certainly lead to a scrum of lawsuits. Yet, last year water managers in Colorado began meeting for the first time to discuss the possibility. In our conversations, Mulroy denied that there would be a compact call, but she pointed out that Las Vegas’s groundwater and desalination plans were going ahead anyway for precautionary reasons.

I asked if limiting the growth of the Las Vegas metro area wouldn’t help. Mulroy bristled. “This country is going to have 100 million additional people in it in the next 25 to 30 years,” she replied. “Tell me where they’re supposed to go. Seriously. Every community says, ‘Not here,’ ‘No growth here,’ ‘There’s too many people here already.’ For a large urban area that is the core economic hub of any particular area, to even attempt to throw up walls? I’m not sure it can be done.” Besides, she added, the problem isn’t growth alone: “We have an exploding human population, and we have a shrinking clean-water supply. Those are on colliding paths. This is not just a Las Vegas issue. This is a microcosm of a much larger issue.” Americans, she went on to say, are the most voracious users of natural resources in the world. Maybe we need to talk about that as well. “The people who move to the West today need to realize they’re moving into a desert,” Mulroy said. “If they want to live in a desert, they have to adapt to a desert lifestyle.” That means a shift from the mindset of the 1930s, when the federal government encouraged people to settle in the West, plant water-intensive crops and make it look like the East Coast. It means landscapes of parched dirt. It means mesquite bushes and palo verde trees for vegetation. It means recycled water. It means gravel lawns. It is the West’s new deal, she seemed to be saying, and I got the feeling that for Mulroy it means that every blade of grass in her state would soon be gone.

The first impulse when confronted with the West’s water problems may be to wonder how, as scarcity becomes more acute, the region will engineer its way back to health. What can be built, what can technology accomplish, to ease any shortages? Yet this is almost certainly the wrong way to think about the situation. To be sure, construction projects like a pipeline from east-central Nevada could help Las Vegas. But the larger difficulty facing Pat Mulroy and Peter Binney, as they describe it, is re-engineering the culture and conventions of the West before it becomes too late. Whether or not there is enough water in the region for, say, the next 30 or 50 years isn’t necessarily a question with a yes-or-no answer. The water managers I spoke with believe the total volume of available water could be great enough to sustain the cities, many farms and perhaps the natural flow of the area’s rivers. But it’s not unreasonable to assume that if things continue as they have — with so much water going to agriculture; with conservation only beginning to take hold among residents, industry and farmers; with supplies diminishing slowly but steadily as the Earth warms; with the population growing faster than anywhere else in the United States; and with some of our most economically vital states constricted by antique water agreements — the region will become a topography of crisis and perhaps catastrophe. This is an old prophecy, dating back more than a century to one of the original American explorers of the West, John Wesley Powell, who doubted the territory could support large populations and intense development. (Powell presciently argued that river basins, not arbitrary mapmakers, should determine the boundaries of the Western states, in order to avoid inevitable conflicts over water.) An earlier explorer, J. C. Ives, visited the present location of Hoover Dam, between Arizona and Nevada, in 1857. The desiccated landscape was “valueless,” Ives reported. “There is nothing there to do but leave.”

Roger Pulwarty, for his part, rejects the notion of environmental determinism. Nature, in other words, isn’t inexorably pushing the region into a grim, suffering century. Things can be done. Redoubling efforts to prevent further climate change, Pulwarty says, is one place to start; another is getting the states that share the Colorado River to reach cooperative arrangements, as they have begun to discuss, for coping with long-term droughts. Other parts of the solution are less obvious. To Peter Gleick, head of the Pacific Institute, a nonprofit based in Oakland, Calif., that focuses on global water issues, whether we can adapt to a drier future depends on whether we can rethink the functions, and value, of fresh water. Can we can do the same things using less of it? How we use our water, Gleick believes, is considerably more complex than it appears. First of all, there are consumptive and nonconsumptive uses of water. Consumptive use, roughly speaking, refers to water taken from a reservoir that cannot be recovered. “It’s embedded in a product like a liter of Coca-Cola, or it’s contaminated so badly we can’t reuse it,” Gleick says. In agriculture, the vast majority of water use is also consumptive, because it evaporates or transpires from crops into the atmosphere. Evaporated water may fall as rain 1,000 miles away — that’s how Earth’s water cycle works — but it is gone locally. A similar consumptive process characterizes the water we put on our lawns or gardens: it mostly disappears. Meanwhile, most of the water used by metropolitan areas is nonconsumptive. It goes down the drain and empties into nearby rivers, like Colorado’s South Platte, as treated wastewater.

Gleick calls the Colorado River “the most complicated water system in the world,” and he isn’t convinced it will be easy, or practical, to change the laws that govern its usage. “But I think it’s less hard to change how we use water,” he says. He accepts that climate change is confronting the West with serious problems. (He was also one of the country’s first scientists, in the mid-1980s, to point out that reductions in mountain snowpack could present huge challenges.) He makes a persuasive case, however, that there are immense opportunities — even in cities like Las Vegas, which has made strides in conservation — to reduce both consumptive and nonconsumptive demand for water. These include installing more low-flow home appliances and adopting more efficient irrigation methods. And they include economic tools too: for example, many municipalities have reduced consumption by making water more expensive (the more you use, the higher your per-gallon rate). The United States uses less water than it did 25 years ago, Gleick points out: “We haven’t even paid too much attention to it, and we’ve accomplished this.” To go further, he says he believes we could alter not only demand but also supply. “Treated wastewater isn’t a liability, it’s an asset,” he says. We don’t need potable water to flush our toilets or water our lawns. “One might say that’s a ridiculous use of potable water. In fact, I might say that. But that’s the way we’ve set it up. And that’s going to change, that’s got to change, in this century.”

Among Colorado’s water managers, Peter Binney’s Prairie Waters project is considered both innovative and important not on account of its technology but because it seems to mark a new era of finding water sources in the drying West. It also proves that the next generation’s water will not come cheap, or come easy. In late July, I went to Aurora to meet up again with Binney. It was the groundbreaking day for Prairie Waters, which had been on the local television news: Binney and several other officials grinned for the cameras and signed a section of six-foot steel pipe, the same kind that would transport water from the South Platte wells to the Aurora treatment facility. That evening, Binney and I had dinner together at a steakhouse in an Aurora shopping mall. When he remarked that we may have exceeded what he calls the “carrying capacity” of the West, I asked him whether our desert civilizations could last. Binney seemed dubious. “Not the way we’ve got it set up,” he said. “We’ve decoupled land use from water use. Water is the limiting resource in the West. I think we need to match them back together again.” There was a decent amount of water out there, he went on to explain, but it was a false presumption that it could sustain all the farms, all the cities, all the rivers. Something will have to give. It was also wrong to assume, he said, that cities could continue to grow without experiencing something akin to a religious awakening about the scarcity of water. Soon, he predicted, we would talk about our “water footprint” just as we now talk about our carbon footprint.

Indeed, any conversations about the one will in short order expand to include the other, Binney went on to say. Many water managers have known this for a while. The two problems — water and energy — are so intimately linked as to make it exceedingly difficult to tackle one without the other. It isn’t just the matter of growing corn for ethanol, which is already straining water supplies. The less water in our rivers, for instance, the less hydropower our dams produce. The further the water tables sink, the more power it takes to pump water up. The more we depend on coal and nuclear power plants, which require huge amounts of water for cooling, the larger the burden we place on supplies.

Meanwhile, it is a perverse side effect of global warming that we may have to emit large volumes of carbon dioxide to obtain the clean water that is becoming scarcer because of the carbon dioxide we’ve already put into the atmosphere. A dry region that turns to desalination, for example, would need vast amounts of energy (and money) to purify its water. While wind-powered desalination could perhaps meet this challenge — such a plant was recently built outside Perth, Australia — it isn’t clear that coastal residents in, say, California would welcome such projects. Unclear, too, is how dumping the brine that is a by-product of the process back into the ocean would affect ecosystems.

Similar energy challenges face other plans. In past years, various schemes have arisen to move water from Canada or the Great Lakes to arid parts of the United States. Beyond the environmental implications and construction costs (probably hundreds of billions of dollars), such continental-scale plumbing would require stupendous amounts of electricity. And yet, fears that such plans will resurface in a drier, more populous world are partly behind current efforts by the Great Lakes states to certify a pact that protects their fresh water from outside exploitation.

Just pumping water from the Prairie Waters site to Aurora will cost a small fortune. Binney told me this the day after the groundbreaking, as we drove north from Aurora to the site. Along the 45-minute journey, Binney narrated where his pipeline would go — along the edge of the highway here, over in that field there and so on. Eventually we turned off the highway and onto a small country road, and Binney slowed down so I could take in the surroundings. “Here’s where you see it all coming together and all of it coming into conflict,” he told me. To him, it was a perfect tableau of the West in the 21st century. There was a housing development on one side of the road and fields of irrigated crops on the other. Farther ahead was a gravel pit, a remnant of the old Colorado mineral-extraction economy.

He drove on, and soon we turned onto a dirt road that bisected some open fields. We rumbled along for a quarter mile or so, spewing dust and passing over the South Platte in the process. Binney parked by a wire fence near a sign marking it as Aurora property. We got out of the truck, hopped over a locked gate and walked into a farm field.

For miles along the highway, we passed barren acreage that formerly grew winter wheat but was now slated for new houses. The land we stood on once grew corn, but tangles of weeds covered it now. As we walked, Binney explained that the collection wells on the South Platte would soon be dug a few hundred yards away; that water would be pumped into collection basins on this field, where sand and gravel would purify it further. Then it would be pumped back to the chemical treatment plants in Aurora before being piped to residents. “We’re standing 34 miles from there,” Binney said.

It was a location as ordinary as I could have imagined, an empty place, far from anything, and yet Binney saw it as something else. Earlier, when we crossed over the gravel banks of the South Platte, I found the river disappointing: broad and shallow, dun-colored and slow-moving, its unimpressive flow somehow incorporating water Aurora had already used upstream. James Michener, in writing about this region years ago, was dead-on in calling it “a sad, bewildered nothing of a river.” Still, the South Platte was dependable. It was also Aurora’s lifeline, buying the city 20 or 30 years of time. “What I really like about it,” Binney said, smiling as we walked from the field back to his truck, “is that it’s wet.”

Jon Gertner is a contributing writer for the magazine.

    The Future Is Drying Up, NYT, 21.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/magazine/21water-t.html

No Backup if Atlanta's Faucets Run Dry

October 20, 2007
Filed at 2:20 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

ATLANTA (AP) -- With the South in the grip of an epic drought and its largest city holding less than a 90-day supply of water, officials are scrambling to deal with the worst-case scenario: What if Atlanta's faucets really do go dry?

So far, no real backup plan exists. And there are no quick fixes among suggested solutions, which include piping water in from rivers in neighboring states, building more regional reservoirs, setting up a statewide recycling system or even desalinating water from the Atlantic Ocean.

''It's amazing that things have come to this,'' said Ray Wiedman, owner of an Atlanta landscaper business. ''Everybody knew the growth was coming. We haven't had a plan for all the people coming here?''

Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue seems to be pinning his hopes on a two-pronged approach: urging water conservation and reducing water flowing out of federally controlled lakes.

Perdue's office on Friday asked a Florida federal judge to force the Army Corps of Engineers to curb the amount of water draining from Georgia reservoirs into Alabama and Florida. And Georgia's environmental protection director is drafting proposals for more water restrictions.

But that may not be enough to stave off the water crisis. More than a quarter of the Southeast is covered by an ''exceptional'' drought -- the National Weather Service's worst drought category. The Atlanta area, with a population of 5 million, is smack in the middle of the affected region, which extends like a dark cloud over most of Tennessee, Alabama and the northern half of Georgia, as well as parts of North and South Carolina, Kentucky and Virginia.

State officials warn that Lake Lanier, a 38,000-acre north Georgia reservoir that supplies more than 3 million residents with water, is already less than three months from depletion. Smaller reservoirs are dropping even lower, forcing local governments to consider rationing.

State water managers say there is more water available in the lake's reserves. But tapping into it would require the use of barges, emergency pumps and longer water lines. And some lawmakers fear if the lake is drained that low, it may be impossible to refill.

The Corps, which manages the water in the region, stresses there's no reason to think Atlanta will soon run out of water.

''We're so far away from that, nobody's doing a contingency plan,'' said Major Daren Payne, the deputy commander of the Corps' Mobile office. ''Quite frankly, there's enough water left to last for months. We've got a serious drought, there's no doubt about it, anytime you deplete your entire storage pool and tap into the reserve.''

But, he said, any calls to stockpile bottled water would be ''very premature.''

Still, some academics and politicians are proposing contingency plans in case the situation worsens.

Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin said the region should explore piping in additional sources of water -- possibly from the Tennessee or Savannah rivers. She even suggested desalinating sea water from Georgia's Atlantic coast.

''We need to look beyond our borders,'' she said.

Former Gov. Roy Barnes, a Democrat who was defeated in 2002, told reporters this week that he had planned to offer grants to fix leaks that waste millions of gallons of water each year. He also said he planned to build three new state reservoirs in north and west Georgia to help insulate the state from a future water crisis. But those plans died when he left office.

''Los Angeles added 1 million people without increasing their water supply,'' he told reporters. ''And if Los Angeles can do it, I'll tell you Georgia can.''

It seems the idea of building state reservoirs is gaining steam in the Legislature as Georgia's battle with the Corps over federal reservoirs heats up.

Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle said he favors building more regional reservoirs shared by multiple communities to harness the 50 trillion gallons of water that fall over Georgia each year.

''You can see that if we can just manage the rainfall and utilize that and make sure that we have abundant storage for it, we can take care of our needs well into the future,'' said Cagle, a Republican from Gainesville, the largest city on Lake Lanier.

Some academics say Georgia should start using more ''purple water'' -- waste water that is partially treated and can be used for irrigation, fire fighting and uses other than drinking. That would conserve lake water and help replenish the water-supply system.

Such measures could make Georgia ''drought-proof,'' said Todd Rasmussen, a professor of hydrology and water resources at the University of Georgia.

''People have got to start thinking in this direction,'' said Rasmussen. ''You can't wear out water. It's clearly an opportunity that needs to be explored.''

The drought has led to extreme conservation measures.

Virtually all outdoor watering across was banned across the northern half of the state, restaurants were asked to serve water only at a customer's request and the governor called on Georgians to take shorter showers. Carol Couch, the state's environmental director, said it's ''very likely'' new limits on water usage are needed.

Scorching summer temperatures and a drier-than-normal hurricane season fueled the drought. State climatologist David Stooksbury said it will take months of above average rainfall to replenish the system. He is now predicting the drought could worsen if ''La Nina'' conditions develop and bring little winter rainfall.

''I tell people we need 40 days and 40 nights,'' he said with a sigh.

------

On the Net:

Georgia Drought: http://www.georgiadrought.org

    No Backup if Atlanta's Faucets Run Dry, NYT, 20.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Southern-Drought.html

6 Die in Storms in Midwest, Wash. State

October 20, 2007
Filed at 2:17 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WILLIAMSTON, Mich. (AP) -- A couple spending their first night in a new house were among at least six people killed as unusually severe October storms destroyed homes, downed trees and knocked out power in several states, authorities said Friday.

The thunderstorms, some spawning tornadoes and high winds, destroyed homes in Michigan and Indiana and collapsed a trailer in Kentucky as they struck Thursday and early Friday.

In Washington state, where one person died, a floating bridge buffeted by powerful wind was closed, and tens of thousands of homes and businesses lost electricity.

The bodies of Duane Bentley and Susan Bentley, both in their 50s, were recovered Friday morning, hours after tornadoes, strong winds and oversized hail pushed through much of Michigan, overturning vehicles and destroying homes.

The Bentleys' home was ripped off its foundation and sent into a nearby pond in Ingham County's Locke Township, near Lansing, police said.

A 29-year-old man was killed when strong wind collapsed his home around him in Kalkaska County.

In Millington Township, a 14-month-old boy in a crib escaped injury after apparently being tossed about 40 feet by a tornado that destroyed a home early Friday, fire officials said.

A neighbor found the baby under a pile of debris, still in the crib.

''Sometimes miracles happen,'' firefighter Dan Detgen said.

National Weather Service officials in Gaylord believe as many as four tornadoes, plus a water spout over an area lake, may have touched down in Kalkaska, Cheboygan, Alpena and Mio. Tornadoes were confirmed in eight Michigan counties, and weather service crews were still evaluating the damage in some areas.

''This is extremely rare,'' said David Lawrence, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Gaylord. ''When you're this deep into the month of October, it's a very rare event.''

A line of thunderstorms that rumbled through Kentucky produced several tornadoes, smashing mobile homes and injuring at least 11 people in Owensboro. The most serious injury was a broken leg, said Richard Payne, Daviess County director of emergency management.

The storms forced officials to briefly close the Glover Cary Bridge, which carries traffic across the Ohio River between Indiana and Kentucky. A Kentucky Transportation Cabinet inspector was called to check the structure following an apparent tornado, but no damage was found, cabinet spokesman Keith Todd said.

In Indiana, authorities declared a state of emergency after a tornado hit Nappanee, about 20 miles southeast of South Bend. Police said five people were taken to hospitals with minor injuries and 200 to 250 buildings were damaged, half of them severely. Among the businesses damaged there were three recreation vehicle plants that are among the city's largest employers.

In rural northeastern Missouri, the state Highway Patrol said Kent Ensor, 44, and Kristy Secrease, 25, had sought refuge in Secrease's mobile home in Monroe County as a tornado approached. Their bodies were found about 400 feet from where the home had been.

The mobile home's frame was found three-quarters of a mile away, with debris as far as two miles away. The National Weather Service said the storm traveled a mile and had winds as high as 135 mph.

A tornado in Pensacola, Fla., sent mall shoppers and children at the Greater Little Rock Baptist Church's daycare center running for safety just before the twister hit Thursday morning, said Escambia County sheriff's spokesman Glenn Austin.

In western Washington, where wind gusts reached 66 mph Thursday, a woman was injured when the top of a tree hit her in the head in Kent, fire officials said. A Seattle police patrol boat, responding to an emergency call of a kite boarder being dragged north on Lake Washington, found a 44-year-old man floating face down off Kirkland on the east side of the lake, police said.

The wind resulted in a three-hour precautionary closure of State Route 104 across Hood Canal, which separates the Kitsap and Olympia peninsulas.

------

Associated Press writers David Aguilar and David Runk in Detroit, Alan Scher Zagier in Paris, Mo., Melissa Nelson in Pensacola, Fla., and Tom Coyne in Nappanee, Ind., contributed to this report.

    6 Die in Storms in Midwest, Wash. State, NYT, 20.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Severe-Weather.html

The Energy Challenge

Fight Against Coal Plants Is Creating Diverse Partnerships

October 20, 2007
The New York Times
By SUSAN MORAN

GREAT FALLS, Mont. — Richard D. Liebert turned his back against a hard wind the other day, adjusted his black cap and gazed across golden fields of hay. Explaining why he is against construction of a big coal-burning power plant east of town, Liebert sounded like one more voice from the green movement.

“The more I learn about global warming and watch the drought affect ranchers and farmers, I see that it’s wind energy, not coal plants, that can help with rural economic development. Besides, do we want to roll the dice with the one planet we’ve got?”

But Mr. Liebert, despite his sentiments, fits nobody’s stereotype of an environmentalist. He is a Republican, a cattle rancher and a retired Army lieutenant colonel who travels to South Korea to train soldiers to fight in Iraq.

He is also an example of a rising phenomenon in the West. An increasingly vocal, potent and widespread anti-coal movement is developing here. Environmental groups that have long opposed new power plants are being joined by ranchers, farmers, retired homeowners, ski resort operators and even religious groups.

Activists say the increasing diversity of these coalitions is making them more effective.

“You’re seeing a convergence of people who previously never worked together or even talked to each other,” said Anne Hedges, program director of the Montana Environmental Information Center, which is spearheading three lawsuits aimed at blocking construction of the power plant near Great Falls. “They’re saying these coal plants don’t make any sense, whether from an economic or environmental or property-rights standpoint.”

Power companies concede that anti-coal coalitions are indeed becoming more effective — and they describe that as a threat to the reliability of the nation’s electric grid. In their view, building more coal-burning power plants is the most realistic way to meet the rising demand for electric power.

“It’s clear new coal-fired generation is running into roadblocks,” said Rick Sergel, president and chief executive of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation. “I don’t believe we can allow coal-fired generation to become an endangered species. We simply must use all the resources we have.”

Natural gas is an alternative to coal for electricity generation. But Mr. Sergel said the industry worries about relying too heavily on gas because it is far more expensive, prices have become volatile and a share of the gas supply has to be imported.

New nuclear power plants are on the drawing board, but they are many years from completion. And although energy conservation and efficiency, as well as renewable energy, will play larger roles in the future, they are not enough to meet the nation’s growing appetite for electricity, Mr. Sergel said.

The collaboration of former strangers — even enemies in some cases — to fight coal development is largely a Western phenomenon. While medical groups, city officials, environmental groups and others have banded together to fight coal plants near cities east of the Mississippi, the power plants in the West are largely in rural areas and thus directly affect farmers and ranchers living on the plains, the prairies and near the Rocky Mountains.

Government projections suggest that coal, which provides 50 percent of the nation’s electricity and a quarter of its total energy, will continue to dominate the nation’s energy mix, despite its environmental problems. As of last May, the Energy Department projected that 151 coal-fired plants could be built by 2030 to meet a 40 percent rise in demand for electricity, largely from soaring populations in Western states.

“Coal is still very much alive,” said Jim Owen, a spokesman for the Edison Electric Institute, an industry group.

But opponents of coal plants are winning some battles. Reports from the government, the industry and environmental groups show that at least three dozen coal plants have been canceled or scaled back in the last two years.

Bruce E. Nilles, a lawyer who directs the Sierra Club’s national coal campaign, said his organization and collaborating groups had filed 29 lawsuits and administrative appeals against proposed coal plants. Aside from legal battles, the power industry said rising construction and labor costs and regulatory pressure were contributing to the cancellations.

Ranchers and farmers have featured prominently in several recent battles over power plants. In Jerome County, Idaho, for instance, Sempra Energy of San Diego had planned to build a large plant to burn pulverized coal. A coalition that included the Jerome County Farm Bureau, a dairy association, ski resort owners, other landowners, local politicians and environmental activists defeated Sempra. They also prompted a two-year statewide moratorium on such coal plants.

And in Iowa, a 77-year-old retired farmer living on the land his great-grandfather settled in 1879 has galvanized ranchers, farmers and environmentalists to fight plans by the LS Power Group of New Jersey to build a coal plant on his property.

In 2003, the farmer, Merle Bell, sold LS Power an option to buy his land. He said that even though he had doubts about the wisdom of coal plants, he thought he had little choice because the company was also purchasing an option on his neighbor’s land and said it would build the plant anyway. Mr. Bell later changed his mind. His coalition is pressing the Iowa Utilities Board to kill the plant, which also faces larger permitting hurdles.

“I grew up here,” Mr. Bell said from his home just east of Waterloo. “I rode ponies here. I farmed and raised cows, chicken and hogs here. A coal plant would be bad for the environment, and I don’t want to see it harm people living here and future generations.”

For many farmers and ranchers, protecting the land they till hardly means that they have become environmentalists. In fact, seeing environmentalists as potential allies and not enemies has been awkward for many of them.

C. J. Kantorowicz grows winter wheat on 6,000 acres near the proposed Highwood coal plant east of Great Falls. Last fall he joined other farmers in a zoning lawsuit against Cascade County commissioners to stop the plant. Until he went to an organizing meeting that another farmer, Robert Lassila, held at his house, Mr. Kantorowicz loathed environmentalists. So he winced when he was introduced to a pathologist who had started a local environmental group to fight the proposed plant. She came to talk about the public health and environmental risks.

“I think global warming is a hoax, and I hate to hitch my wagon to environmentalists,” Mr. Kantorowicz said recently in his living room after a hard day planting winter wheat. “I went to the meeting with the mind that I’d shoot holes in her story, her environmentalist’s view. But she and others convinced me they were right by being honest and answering our questions in detail about pollution and such.”

Robert Lassila’s son, Daryl, lives next door to his parents. He recalled some of the neighbors bristling when the meeting started.

“Many were looking at each other nervously and wondering who brought the environmentalists here and is there a back door to this place,” he said. “But they stayed put and here we are, together in this fight.”

For many farmers and ranchers, their aversion to coal is more pragmatic than philosophical. Their crops and livestock have been plagued by severe droughts and storms lately, and some wonder whether those are linked to global warming. Whether that proves to be the case, the strain on their finances has made them more interested in renewable-energy projects, like wind turbines, on their land.

Janyce and Leonard Harms, who grow wheat and millet in Hereford, Colo., near the Wyoming and Nebraska borders, last year agreed to allow eight towering wind turbines on their land. The turbines are part of the new 274-turbine Cedar Creek wind farm owned by BP, the huge energy company, and Babcock & Brown. The project is expected to churn out electricity for some 90,000 homes, mostly near Denver.

The Harmses, though a bit skeptical about coal plants, have not become involved in any battles. But they typify the fascination with wind energy that is sweeping rural America. They have received about $5,000 from the wind farm’s owners for leasing their land, and once the wind farm is fully operational by year’s end, they will receive at least $3,500 a year per turbine.

“We’re not environmentalists by any means,” Ms. Harms said as she gazed through her sliding glass door at the huge turbines spinning in the distance. “I see this as supplemental income. We’re getting older and we’d like to retire. This is a great deal, and the fact that it’s clean energy makes it even better.”

    Fight Against Coal Plants Is Creating Diverse Partnerships, NYT, 20.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/20/business/20coal.html

Severe Weather Slams Southeast and Plains

October 19, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:05 a.m. ET
The New York Times

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) -- Powerful thunderstorms and high winds that moved through much of the country sent a mobile home in Missouri flying, destroyed homes in Michigan and collapsed a trailer in Kentucky. Six people were killed.

In Washington state, where one of the deaths occurred, a floating bridge buffeted by powerful wind was closed, and tens of thousands of homes and businesses lost electricity.

The Midwest storms, unusually strong for October, left downed trees, power outages and debris in their paths as they struck Thursday and early Friday. But conditions were expected to transition into cooler temperatures and clear skies on Friday.

The storms spawned a tornado in Pensacola, Fla., that sent mall shoppers and children at a day care center running for cover. Downtown Chicago was pelted with hail during rush hour and tornadoes touched down in Kentucky and Michigan, officials said.

Children at the Greater Little Rock Baptist Church's daycare center were moved to safety just before the twister hit Thursday morning, said Escambia County sheriff's spokesman Glenn Austin. The pastor and an employee at the center said they had little time to react.

''The phone call I received simply said, 'Pastor, it looks like the roof of the church is in the parking lot,''' Pastor Lonnie D. Wesley III told NBC's ''Today'' on Friday. ''As soon as I made it to the church, the first words out of my mouth were, 'My Lord.'''

Eddie English Jr., a department store stock manager, said he heard the wind outside the store suddenly speed up and get louder. Then mall security guards entered the store and ordered 200 to 300 employees and shoppers into the basement.

In rural northeastern Missouri, the state Highway Patrol said Kent Ensor, 44, and Kristy Secrease, 25, had sought refuge in Secrease's mobile home in Monroe County as a tornado approached. Their bodies were found about 400 feet from where the home had been.

The mobile home's frame was found three-quarters of a mile away, with debris as far as two miles away. The National Weather Service said the storm traveled a mile and had winds as high as 135 mph.

Ensor and Secrease had been dating for about a year, friends and family said.

''Everybody knows everybody here,'' said Jim Lovelady, who moved to the Paris area in 1994. ''This hurts.''

Four people were hurt when a mobile home in Sebree, Ky., collapsed because of strong winds, but their injuries appeared to be minor, Webster County Sheriff Frankie Springfield told The Gleaner of Henderson.

''The mobile home was all in pieces,'' Springfield told the newspaper. Thunderstorms injured four others in a mobile home west of Louisville, said Capt. Jeff Jones of the Daviess County Sheriff's Office.

In Indiana, authorities declared a state of emergency after an apparent tornado hit Nappanee, about 20 miles southeast of South Bend. Police said several people were taken to hospitals with minor injuries as a strong line of thunderstorms moved through the state.

A line of storms ripped through Michigan, destroying several homes and overturning vehicles, including a semi-trailer. A 29-year-old man was killed when strong wind collapsed his home around him, and a man and woman were found dead after their home was knocked off its foundation into a pond, officials said.

In Millington Township, a year-old baby in a crib escaped injury after apparently being tossed about 40 feet by a tornado that destroyed a home early Friday, fire officials said.

A neighbor found the baby in the crib under a pile of debris.

''Sometimes miracles happen,'' said firefighter Dan Detgen.

A sudden downpour belted downtown Chicago just as people left work, sending commuters scurrying into buildings to avoid strong winds, hail and horizontal rain.

An 11-year-old boy was in stable condition after being struck by lightning, said Chicago Fire Department spokesman Larry Langford.

In western Washington, where wind gusts reached 66 mph Thurdsay, a woman was injured when the top of a tree hit her in the head in Kent, fire officials said. A Seattle police patrol boat, responding to an emergency call of a kite boarder being dragged north on Lake Washington, found a 44-year-old man floating face down off Kirkland on the east side of the lake, police said.

The wind resulted in a three-hour precautionary closure of State Route 104 across Hood Canal, which separates the Kitsap and Olympia peninsulas. High wind can cause the concrete pontoons to move and high waves splash passing cars. The current floating bridge is a replacement for one that sank during a storm in 1979.

------

Associated Press writers Alan Scher Zagier in Paris, Mo., Melissa Nelson in Pensacola, Fla., and David Aguilar in Detroit contributed to this report.

    Severe Weather Slams Southeast and Plains, NYT, 19.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Severe-Weather.html

Home Insurers Canceling in East

October 16, 2007
The New York Times
By PAUL VITELLO

GARDEN CITY, N.Y., Oct. 15 — It is 1,200 miles from the coastline where Hurricane Katrina touched land two years ago to the neat colonial-style home here where James Gray, a retired public relations consultant, and his wife, Ann, live. But this summer, Katrina reached them, too, in the form of a cancellation letter from their home-insurance company.

The letter said that “hurricane events over the past two years” had forced the company to limit its exposure to further losses; and that because the Grays’ home on Long Island was near the Atlantic Ocean — it is 12 miles from the coast and has been touched by rampaging waters only once, when the upstairs bathtub overflowed — their 30-year-old policy was “nonrenewed,” or canceled.

The Grays signed with a new company, but their case attracted the attention of consumer advocates and, in turn, the New York insurance commissioner, Eric R. Dinallo.

Mr. Dinallo’s sharp rebuke last month of the Grays’ company, Liberty Mutual Fire Insurance Company, reflected a shift in how public officials view a new reality in the homeowners’ insurance business, advocates say.

In the last three years, more than three million homeowners have received letters like the Grays’ as insurance companies, determined to avoid another $40 billion Katrina bill, have essentially begun to redraw the outline of the eastern United States somewhere west of the Appalachian Trail.

Public officials in Southern states from Florida to Texas have been fighting insurance carriers for years over rising rates and withdrawal of services, but officials in the Northeast have only recently joined the fray.

Companies including Allstate, State Farm and Liberty Mutual have “nonrenewed” policies not only in hurricane-battered places like Florida and Louisiana, but in New York and other Northern states that have not seen hurricanes in years. Since last year, those three companies and others have turned down all new homeowners’ insurance business in New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maryland, Massachusetts and the eight downstate counties of New York.

An independent insurance agents’ group puts the Grays among about 50,000 residents of the New York metropolitan area — and about one million homeowners in the Mid-Atlantic and New England states — whose policies have been canceled since 2004. While most homeowners have been able to find coverage with other major insurers, or with smaller companies, in most cases it is at higher rates and with larger deductibles.

The companies say they are obliged to avoid undue risks where they see them, and to remain solvent. “Considering what happened between 2003 and 2005,” said Robert P. Hartwig, president of the Insurance Information Institute, an industry lobbying group, “and considering that the best meteorological minds are telling us that for the next 15 to 20 years hurricane activity will be heavier than normal, if we didn’t do something to reduce our exposure, we’d be out of business.”

In response to a growing torrent of complaints, state officials and lawmakers have lately begun to push back, if gingerly, against the industry, which they see as overreacting to the hurricane threat in the Northeast. “My concern is that this situation is being manipulated by the insurance companies in order for them to get higher rates,” said State Senator Kenneth P. LaValle, who calls the cancellation of policies in his eastern Long Island district “more than a problem — it is a crisis.”

Mr. Dinallo, the commissioner, has focused his attention on the law: It was a single line in the Liberty Mutual letter sent to the Grays that prompted him to issue his rebuke. The line noted that one consideration in dropping their policy was that they did not have car insurance with the company.

That, Mr. Dinallo said, is illegal. Predicating one policy on another, or so-called “tie-in business,” is a violation of state insurance law, he said. Liberty Mutual said the tie-in was a secondary issue, but in response to Mr. Dinallo’s warning, Liberty Mutual, State Farm and the largest insurer in the state, Allstate, agreed to stop the practice.

Earlier this year, Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut attorney general, also challenged insurers’ tactics, subpoenaing records from nine insurance companies that were requiring homeowners to install storm shutters if they wanted to keep their policies. “The insurers are making record profits,” Mr. Blumenthal said in an interview, “and the dire predictions of disastrous hurricanes, fortunately, have been very wrong — fortunately for everyone, including the insurers.”

Meanwhile, heated public hearings were held this year in the Rhode Island General Assembly about the lack of homeowners’ insurance in coastal areas, which include most of the state.

In Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York, lawmakers and regulators this year proposed requiring all insurance companies doing business in the states to set aside billions of dollars to help defray losses from future catastrophic storms.

At a public hearing of the New York Senate Insurance Committee last Tuesday, Senator Charles J. Fuschillo Jr. said the retreat of major home insurers had hurt the housing market. (Home insurance is required by all banks that make home loans.)

“We have people who cannot buy a house because they can’t find insurance,” he said.

Amy Bach, executive director of United Policyholders, a California-based consumer advocacy group, has watched the situation in the East with both professional and personal interest, since the policy on her parents’ Long Island home was recently canceled. Crisis or not, she said, the pattern is familiar.

“Wide-scale nonrenewal has been the knee-jerk reaction of the big insurance companies after every major disaster: hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfires,” she said.

Florida set the pattern for states in picking up the risk shed by major carriers. Its state-created Citizens Property Insurance Corporation, the insurance pool for those unable to find home insurance anywhere else, has become the state’s largest homeowners’ insurer, with 1.3 million policies.

But Massachusetts, last hit by a moderate hurricane in 1991, has also found itself in the insurance business. Its high-risk pool has doubled in size in the last five years, reaching 200,000 policies this year, which makes it the largest single homeowners’ insurance carrier in the state. On Cape Cod, 44 percent of homeowners are covered by the plan.

In New York, Connecticut and New Jersey, the number of people covered by state insurance pools has remained relatively low. The New York plan, known as the New York Property Insurance Underwriting Association, carries about 70,000 policies, most for homes in coastal areas; this year, officials said, the state pool was expecting 10,000 more.

To some extent, insurance brokers in the New York metropolitan area have closed the gap left by the major carriers by finding policies with subprime insurers, also known as the excess and surplus market. Figures provided by the Excess Line Association of New York, a group representing those insurers, show that 7,689 such policies were sold last year, and almost as many, 7,456, in the first seven months of 2007.

Robert J. Hunter, director of insurance for the Consumer Federation of America, said the extent of the retreat by major insurers “will depend a lot on what happens this year, hurricane-wise.”

Insurance companies have condensed their projections of risk, he said.

“They used to project 20 years in the future, but now it is more like 4 or 5,” Mr. Hunter said, a practice that has driven the current pull-back along the Northeast coast, where a big hurricane is overdue, according to computer analysis.

Mr. Hartwig, of the Insurance Institute, said it was more complicated than that. “What insurers are worried about is not just a hurricane in New York, but hurricanes in New York and Florida at the same time,” he said.

Betty Clark, a retired waitress living on a fixed income in a modest house where she raised her children in Eastham, Mass., on Cape Cod, said she had no idea how the tussle between insurance companies and public officials would play out. But after years of paying $742 a year, her home insurance doubled last year, to $1,440, which she would not be able to afford if not for some help from her children.

“I’ve never made a claim in all these years,” she said by telephone. “And yet, here it’s possible I’ll lose my home,” she said.

And not to a hurricane, she added.

    Home Insurers Canceling in East, NYT, 16.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/16/nyregion/16insurance.html?hp

Drought-Stricken South Facing Tough Choices

October 16, 2007
The New York Times
By BRENDA GOODMAN

ATLANTA, Oct. 15 — For the first time in more than 100 years, much of the Southeast has reached the most severe category of drought, climatologists said Monday, creating an emergency so serious that some cities are just months away from running out of water.

In North Carolina, Gov. Michael F. Easley asked residents Monday to stop using water for any purpose “not essential to public health and safety.” He warned that he would soon have to declare a state of emergency if voluntary efforts fell short.

“Now I don’t want to have to use these powers,” Mr. Easley told a meeting of mayors and other city officials. “As leaders of your communities, you know what works best at the local level. I am asking for your help.”

Officials in the central North Carolina town of Siler City estimate that without rain, they are 80 days from draining the Lower Rocky River Reservoir, which supplies water for the town’s 8,200 people.

In the Atlanta metropolitan area, which has more than four million people, worst-case analyses show that the city’s main source of water, Lake Lanier, could be drained dry in 90 to 121 days.

The hard numbers have shocked the Southeast into action, even as many people wonder why things seem to have gotten so bad so quickly.

Last week, Mayor Charles L. Turner of Siler City declared a water shortage emergency and ordered each “household, business and industry” to reduce water use by 50 percent. Penalties for not complying range from stiff fines to the termination of water service.

“It’s really alarming,” said Janice Terry, co-owner of the Best Foods cafeteria in Siler City. To curtail water use, Best Foods has swapped its dishes for paper plates and foam cups.

Most controversially, it has stopped offering tap water to customers, making them buy 69-cent bottles of water instead. “We’ve had people walk out,” Ms. Terry said. “They get mad when they can’t get a free glass of water.”

For the better part of 18 months, cloudless blue skies and high temperatures have shriveled crops and bronzed lawns from North Carolina to Alabama, quietly creating what David E. Stooksbury, the state climatologist of Georgia, has dubbed “the Rodney Dangerfield of natural disasters,” a reference to that comedian’s repeated lament that he got “no respect.”

“People pay attention to hurricanes,” Mr. Stooksbury said. “They pay attention to tornadoes and earthquakes. But a drought will sneak up on you.”

The situation has gotten so bad that by all of Mr. Stooksbury’s measures — the percentage of moisture in the soil, the flow rate of rivers, inches of rain — this drought has broken every record in Georgia’s history.

Mayor Shirley Franklin of Atlanta, at a news conference last week, begged people in her city to conserve water. “Please, please, please do not use water unnecessarily,” Ms. Franklin said. “This is not a test.”

Others wondered why the calls to conserve came so late.

“I think there’s been an ostrich-head-in-the-sand syndrome that has been growing,” said Mark Crisp, an Atlanta-based consultant with the engineering firm C. H. Guernsey. “Because we seem to have been very, very slow in our actions to deal with an impending crisis.”

Mr. Crisp is among a chorus of experts who have warned for years that Atlanta is asking too much of Lake Lanier, a situation quickly being compounded by an absence of rain.

Many had hoped that hurricane season, as it has in the past, would bring several soaking storms to the Southeast to replenish reservoirs that are at or near all-time lows. But the longed-for rains never materialized, and now in October, traditionally the driest month, significant rainfall remains out of the picture.

“We’re in a stressful situation now,” Mr. Crisp said, “but come next spring, if we don’t have substantial rainfall this winter, these reservoirs are not going to refill.”

That would leave metro Atlanta dry in the summer, which traditionally has the highest water use of the year.

Others pointed to the Southeast’s inexperience with drought and to explosive growth in population as complicating factors.

“In the West, people expect that it’s dry, and you’re going to have drought situations,” said Michael J. Hayes, director of the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “In the Southeast, people think of it as being wet, and I think that mindset makes it tougher to identify worst-case scenarios and plan to that level.”

“Here’s the fly in the ointment,” Mr. Hayes added. “The vulnerability in the Southeast has changed. Population shifts, increased competition and demand for water has increased, so that’s made this drought worse than it might have been.”

Within two weeks, Carol Couch, director of the Georgia Environmental Protection Division, is expected to send Gov. Sonny Perdue recommendations on tightening water restrictions, which may include mandatory cutbacks on commercial and industrial users.

If that happens, experts at the National Drought Mitigation Center said, it would be the first time a major metropolitan area in the United States had been forced to take such drastic action to save its water supply.

“The situation is very dire,” Mr. Hayes said.

    Drought-Stricken South Facing Tough Choices, NYT, 16.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/16/us/16drought.html

Bison Rebound in Yellowstone Park

October 15, 2007
Filed at 11:48 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) -- Yellowstone National Park's bison herd has bounced back to near-record levels following the slaughter of more than 1,000 animals two winters ago to guard against the spread of disease, park administrators said Monday.

An estimated 4,700 bison now roam the park, up from 3,600 last year. They make up the largest bison herd in the world.

During the winter of 2005-2006, after the population hit a record 4,900 animals, more than 1,000 bison migrated outside the park in search of food. They were captured and killed to prevent the spread of brucellosis, which can cause female bison and cattle to abort their calves and is considered endemic in the Yellowstone herd.

Following a public outcry and congressional hearing over the slaughter, only two bison were killed last winter. Park administrators and the Montana Department of Livestock instead concentrated on moving migrant animals back into the park, to keep them from interacting with cattle.

Whether the same dilemma will be faced with this year's larger population remains to be seen, said Glenn Plumb, Yellowstone's chief of natural resources.

Amy McNamara with the Greater Yellowstone Coalition said the brucellosis issue goes beyond population levels and is likely to hang over the Yellowstone herd until the disease can be eradicated.

''In bad winters, they're going to seek out forage (at lower elevations), and they're going to do this whether there's 400 or 4,000 bison,'' she said.

Other large animals, including elk, also carry brucellosis.

    Bison Rebound in Yellowstone Park, NYT, 16.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Yellowstone-Bison.html

Gore and U.N. Panel Win Peace Prize for Climate Work

October 13, 2007
The New York Times
By WALTER GIBBS

OSLO, Oct. 12 — The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded today to Al Gore, the former vice president, and to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for its work to alert the world to the threat of global warming.

The award immediately renewed calls from Mr. Gore’s supporters for him to run for president in 2008, joining an already crowded field of Democrats. Mr. Gore, who lost the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush, has said he is not interested in running but has not flatly rejected the notion.

Mr. Gore “is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted,” the Nobel citation said, referring to the issue of climate change. The United Nations committee, a network of 2,000 scientists that was organized in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program, has produced two decades of scientific reports that have “created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming,” the citation said.

Mr. Gore, who was traveling in San Francisco, said in a statement that he was deeply honored to receive the prize and planned to donate his half of the prize to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a nonprofit climate group where he is chairman of the board.

“We face a true planetary emergency,” Mr. Gore said in his statement. “The climate crisis is not a political issue; it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity. It is also our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level.”

Kalee Kreider, a spokeswoman for Mr. Gore, said he received the news with his wife, Tipper, early this morning in San Francisco, where he spoke on Thursday night at a fund-raising event for Senator Barbara Boxer of California, a fellow Democrat.

Ms. Kreider said Mr. Gore would hold strategy meetings with the Alliance for Climate Protection in San Francisco today and return to his home in Nashville over the weekend.

In New Delhi, Rajendra K. Pachauri, an Indian scientist who leads the United Nations committee, said the award was “not something I would have thought of in my wildest dreams.”

In an interview in his office at the Energy and Resources Institute, Dr. Pachauri cast the award as a vindication of science over the skeptics on climate change.

“The message that it sends is that the Nobel Prize committee realized the value of knowledge in tackling the problem of climate change and the fact that the I.P.C.C. has an established record of producing knowledge and an impartial and objective assessment of climate change,” he said

Dr. Pachauri said he thought the award would now settle the scientific debate on climate change and that governments would now take action.

He said it was “entirely possible to stabilize the levels of emissions but that climate change and its impact will continue to stalk us.”

“We will have to live with climate change up to a certain point of time but if we want to avoid or delay much more serious damage then its essential that we start mitigation quickly and to a serious extent,” he said.

The Nobel award carries political ramifications in the United States, which the Nobel committee tried to minimize after its announcement today.

The chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Ole Danbolt Mjoes, addressed reporters after the awards were announced and tried to dismiss repeated questions asking whether the awards were a criticism — direct or indirect — of the Bush administration.

He said the committee was making an appeal to the entire world to unite against the threat of global warming.

"We would encourage all countries, including the big countries, to challenge all of them to think again and to say what can they do to conquer global warming,” he said. “The bigger the powers, the better that they come in front of this.”

He said the peace prize is only a message of encouragement, adding, “the Nobel committee has never given a kick in the leg to anyone.”

In this decade, the Nobel Peace Prize has been given to prominent people and agencies who differ on a range of issues with the Bush administration, including former President Jimmy Carter, who won in 2002, and the United Nations’ nuclear monitoring agency in Vienna and its director, Mohamed ElBaradei, in 2005.

In Washington, a White House spokesman, Tony Fratto, was quoted by Reuters as saying: “Of course we’re happy for Vice President Gore and the I.P.C.C. for receiving this recognition.”

Global warming has been a powerful issue all this year, attracting more and more public attention.

The film documenting Mr. Gore’s campaign to increase awareness of climate change, “An Inconvenient Truth,” won an Academy Award this year. The United Nations committee has issued repeated reports and held successive conferences to highlight the growing scientific understanding of the problem. Meanwhile, signs of global warming have become more and more apparent, even in the melting Arctic.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee said global warming “may induce large-scale migration and lead to greater competition for the earth’s resources.”

“Such changes will place particularly heavy burdens on the world’s most vulnerable countries,” it said. “There may be increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states."

The Bay Area has been the staging area for an online movement to draft Mr. Gore to mount another campaign for the White House. A Web site, www.Draftgore.com, claims more than 165,000 signatures and comments on an online petition, including several placed early this morning congratulating Mr. Gore on his win.

The same group also placed a full-page advertisement in The New York Times on Wednesday, pleading with Mr. Gore to rectify his bitter defeat in 2000, when he won the national popular vote but lost the electoral college after the Supreme Court ended a recount in Florida.

“I’ll actually vote for you this time,” wrote one signee, Joshua Kadel of Virginia, on the Web site this morning. “Sorry about 2000!”

The Gores keep an apartment in San Francisco, where their daughter Kristin lives. The city is also the headquarters of Current TV, Mr. Gore’s Emmy-award winning television and online news venture.

Others dedicated to the fight against global warming said the winners were at the head of efforts to investigate and draw attention to the issue.

Michael Oppenheimer, an atmospheric scientist who has participated in the periodic climate assessments since the early days of the I.P.C.C. panel, described the work of the committee, which includes both scientists and government officials, as “a beautiful example of a largely successful experiment in people coming together to improve government.”

“The reward reminds us that expert advice can influence people and policy, that sometimes governments do listen to reason, and that the idea that reason can guide human action is very much alive, if not yet fully realized,” added Dr. Oppenheimer, who is now at Princeton University and previously worked for Environmental Defense, a private advocacy group.

Yvo de Boer, the executive secretary of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is based in Bonn, Germany, and oversaw negotiations that led to the Kyoto Protocol, said recent moves by political leaders around the world to find ways of reducing emissions would have been hard to imagine without the contributions made by both the I.P.C.C. and Mr. Gore.

“We can recommend ways for policy makers to move forward, but without the I.P.C.C. data being there, this would be next to impossible,” Mr. de Boer said. He said Mr. Gore could use his enhanced stature from winning the Peace Prize to focus on parts of the developing world where politicians need support to spread knowledge about the dangers of climate change. “It’s very difficult to advance on these issues without support from the general public,” he said.

Jan Egeland, a Norwegian peace mediator and former senior United Nations official for humanitarian affairs, called climate change more than an environmental issue.

"It is a question of war and peace," Mr. Egeland, now director of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs in Oslo, told the Associated Press. "We’re already seeing the first climate wars, in the Sahel belt of Africa." He said nomads and herders were in conflict with farmers because the changing climate had brought drought and a shortage of fertile lands.

From the 1980s onward, many scientists and international affairs experts considered the prospect that long-lived gases from human activities could warm the earth to be a threat to global security as well as the environment.

The first large scientific meeting on the issue, the Conference on the Changing Atmosphere, was held in Toronto in 1988. It was also the first meeting to bring together scientists and government officials on a large scale to discuss research pointing to dangerous warming from a buildup of greenhouse gases.

The conference concluded with a statement saying: “Humanity is conducting an unintended, uncontrolled, globally pervasive experiment whose ultimate consequences could be second only to a global nuclear war.”

Its “call to action” included a recommendation that the main heat-trapping gas, carbon dioxide, to be cut by 2005 to 20 percent below 1988 levels — a target far more ambitious than anything later discussed in United Nations climate-treaty talks and missed long ago.

The intergovernmental climate panel’s four reports, the first published in 1990, have provided the underpinning for international negotiations leading to the first climate treaty, with only voluntary terms, in 1992 and the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the first accord with binding terms, but with limited support and a 2012 expiration date.

Jesse McKinley contributed reporting from San Francisco, Somini Sengupta from New Delhi, Andrew C. Revkin from New York, and James Kanter from Paris.

    Gore and U.N. Panel Win Peace Prize for Climate Work, NYT, 12.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/13/world/13nobel.html?hp

Firm Pays $4.6B to Settle Acid Rain Case

October 9, 2007
Filed at 1:08 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A big power company accused of spreading smog and acid rain across a dozen states agreed Tuesday to pay at least $4.6 billion to cut chemical emissions in what the government called the nation's largest environmental settlement.

The agreement with American Electric Power Co. ends an eight-year legal battle over reducing smokestack pollution that drifted across Northeast and mid-Atlantic states, chewing away at mountain ranges, bays and national landmarks.

AEP, based on Columbus, Ohio, maintains it never violated Clean Air Act rules to curb emissions, and had already spent or planned to pay $5.1 billion on scrubbers and other equipment to reduce its pollution.

''Plans change,'' said acting Assistant Attorney General Ron Tenpas, announcing the settlement filed in U.S. District Court in Columbus, where a trial against AEP originally was scheduled to begin Tuesday. ''And obviously there is a big difference between a company saying it has plans to do something in the future and a company being bound by an order of the court to take those steps.''

Failure to comply with the settlement could result in daily penalties of hundreds of thousands of dollars, government attorneys said. Additionally, AEP must pay a $15 million civil fine and $60 million in cleanup and mitigation costs to help heal polluted land in the Shenandoah National Park and waterways including the Chesapeake Bay.

In all, the costs and civil fines will far exceed any company payout in an environmental case, the attorneys said. The 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill, by contrast, yielded $1 billion in restoration and restitution costs, although Exxon Mobil Corp. estimates it has so far spent $3.5 billion and faces an additional $2.5 billion in criminal penalties.

The case against AEP began in 1999 when eight states and about a dozen environmental groups joined the Environmental Protection Agency's crackdown on energy companies accused of rebuilding coal-fired power plants without installing pollution controls as required. In states like New York, officials complained that acid raid linked to sulfates and nitrates from coal-fired plants were eating away at landmarks, including the Statue of Liberty.

AEP has more than 5 million customers in 11 states. It has countered that the work in at least some of its plants was routine maintenance that didn't fall under federal requirements for pollution controls.

In a statement Tuesday, chief executive officer Michael G. Morris said the company still believes that, noting that the settlement did not find AEP guilty of violating the Clean Air Act. ''But we have also said that we would be willing to consider ways to reasonably resolve these issues,'' he said.

As part of the settlement, AEP will clean up 46 coal-fired operations in 16 of the plants in Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia. Morris also noted the risk of AEP paying a far greater fine if the company had fought the case in court and lost.

''While we would have preferred that the agreement not include a civil penalty -- a position we argued vigorously during our discussions with the plaintiffs -- this settlement is an excellent outcome for our shareholders,'' he said.

AEP said it has paid nearly $2.6 billion since 2004 on equipment to cut emission in coal-fired plants in Kentucky, Ohio, Virginia and West Virginia and will be spending an additional $1.6 billion for environmental controls in two more plants. Both costs are part of the company's $5.1 billion plan reduce the emissions of its eastern region by 2010.

The states involved in the lawsuit were: Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont. Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal called the settlement ''huge and historic.''

''Clean air enforcement is alive and well despite Bush administration efforts to gut the Clean Air Act,'' said Blumenthal, a Democrat.

Thirteen environmental groups joined the lawsuit as well. They included the Sierra Club, whose executive director on Tuesday accused AEP of for years evading the law.

''The massive reductions in smog, fine soot and acid rain from these plants will profoundly benefit both public health and the environment, said Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope.

In all, the government brought eight lawsuits against polluters accused of violating the Clean Air Act. Four are still ongoing, and AEP was considered the largest polluter of the bunch, government attorneys said. Tuesday's settlement will reduce pollution by 1.6 billion pounds each year through 2018, said EPA assistant administrator Grant Nakayama. By contrast, government enforcement efforts has led to emissions reductions of about one billion pounds or less annually over the last three years, he said.

The crackdown should also lead savings of an estimated $32 billion in annual health costs to treat lung and respiratory problems caused by the pollution, Nakayama said.

''That is just huge when you talk about the amount of emission reduction,'' he said.

------

On the Net:

American Electric Power: http://www.aep.com/

Justice Department: http://www.usdoj.gov/
 
Environmental Protection Agency: http://www.epa.gov/

(This version CORRECTS SUBS lede to rework; SUBS 12th graf, bgng 'AEP said....' to correct amount that company has already spent to $2.6 billion, sted $1.6 billion. )

    Firm Pays $4.6B to Settle Acid Rain Case, NYT, 9.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Clean-Air-Lawsuit.html

Melting Ice Pack Displaces Alaska Walrus

October 7, 2007
Filed at 2:22 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) -- Thousands of walrus have appeared on Alaska's northwest coast in what conservationists are calling a dramatic consequence of global warming melting the Arctic sea ice.

Alaska's walrus, especially breeding females, in summer and fall are usually found on the Arctic ice pack. But the lowest summer ice cap on record put sea ice far north of the outer continental shelf, the shallow, life-rich shelf of ocean bottom in the Bering and Chukchi seas.

Walrus feed on clams, snails and other bottom dwellers. Given the choice between an ice platform over water beyond their 630-foot diving range or gathering spots on shore, thousands of walrus picked Alaska's rocky beaches.

''It looks to me like animals are shifting their distribution to find prey,'' said Tim Ragen, executive director of the federal Marine Mammal Commission. ''The big question is whether they will be able to find sufficient prey in areas where they are looking.''

According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder, September sea ice was 39 percent below the long-term average from 1979 to 2000. Sea ice cover is in a downward spiral and may have passed the point of no return, with a possible ice-free Arctic Ocean by summer 2030, senior scientist Mark Serreze said.

Starting in July, several thousand walrus abandoned the ice pack for gathering spots known as haulouts between Barrow and Cape Lisburne, a remote, 300-mile stretch of Alaska coastline.

The immediate concern of new, massive walrus groups for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is danger to the animals from stampedes. Panic caused by a low-flying airplane, a boat or an approaching polar bear can send a herd rushing to the sea. Young animals can be crushed by adults weighing 2,000 pounds or more.

Longer term, biologists fear walrus will suffer nutritional stress if they are concentrated on shoreline rather than spread over thousands of miles of sea ice.

Walrus need either ice or land to rest. Unlike seals, they cannot swim indefinitely and must pause after foraging.

Historically, Ragen said, walrus have used the edge of the ice pack like a conveyor belt. As the ice edge melts and moves north in spring and summer, sea ice gives calves a platform on which to rest while females dive to feed.

There's no conveyor belt for walrus on shore.

''If they've got to travel farther, it's going to cost more energy. That's less energy that's available for other functions,'' Ragen said.

Deborah Williams -- who was an Interior Department special assistant for Alaska under former President Bill Clinton, and who is now president of the nonprofit Alaska Conservation Solutions -- said melting of sea ice and its effects on wildlife were never even discussed during her federal service from 1995 to 2000.

''That's what so breathtaking about this,'' she said. ''This has all happened faster than anyone could have predicted. That's why it's so urgent action must be taken.''

Walrus observers on the Russian side of the Chukchi Sea have also reported more walrus at haulouts and alerted Alaska wildlife officials to the problems with the animals being spooked and stampeded.

If lack of sea ice is at the heart of upcoming problems for walrus, Ragen said, there's no solution likely available other than prevention.

''The primary problem of maintaining ice habitat, that's something way, way, way beyond us,'' he said. ''To reverse things will require an effort on virtually everyone's part.''

------

On the Net:

U.S. Marine Mammal Commission: http://www.mmc.gov/ 

    Melting Ice Pack Displaces Alaska Walrus, NYT, 7.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Sea-Ice-Walrus.html

Lake Superior

Sets Record for Low Water

October 1, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 6:24 a.m. ET
The New York Times

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. (AP) -- Drought and mild temperatures have pushed Lake Superior's water level to its lowest point on record for this time of year, continuing a downward spiral across the Great Lakes.

Preliminary data show Superior's average water level in September dipped 1.6 inches beneath the previous low for that month reached in 1926, Cynthia Sellinger, deputy director of NOAA's Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, said Sunday.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which uses a different measuring technique, calculated the September level at 4 inches below the record, said Scott Thieme, chief of hydraulics and hydrology for the Detroit district office.

It's the first time in 81 years that the biggest and deepest of the lakes has reached a new monthly low, Sellinger said. The Army Corps recorded Superior as also setting a record by a half-inch in August. But the NOAA lab had the lake at slightly above its record level then.

Either way, the lake has plummeted over the past year and has dipped beneath its long-term average level for a decade -- the longest such period in its known history.

''I've been here since 1959 and this is the lowest I've seen it,'' said Joel Johnson, owner of Lakehead Boat Basin in Duluth, Minn.

Some areas had so little water last spring and summer that recreational boats couldn't reach docking slips, although other marina operators managed to operate normally.

Commercial shippers, who haul iron ore and coal across the lakes to manufacturing centers such as Detroit, have been unable to fill cargo holds to capacity for fear of scraping bottom in shallow channels.

''Light loading has been just creaming the industry this year,'' said Glen Nekvasil, spokesman for the Lake Carriers Association.

All the Great Lakes, which together make up about 20 percent of the world's fresh surface water, have been in decline since the late 1990s.

Lakes Huron and Michigan are about 2 feet below their long-term average levels, while Lake Superior is about 20 inches off. Lake Ontario is about 7 inches below its long-term average and Lake Erie is a few inches down.

The NOAA lab bases its statistics on measurements taken by a gauge near Marquette. The Army Corps averages the numbers from several gauges around the lake.

Levels typically fluctuate through the year. Superior, a feeder for the other lakes, rises in spring and summer as melted snow flows into its headwaters, then recedes in fall and winter.

But precipitation is well below normal in the Lake Superior watershed, and unusually mild winters have reduced the winter ice cap, boosting evaporation.

The region got some badly needed rain in September -- up to 5 inches in some places.

Bill Duckwall, a fishing and boating outfitter in Marquette, said the big lake seemed a bit higher lately.

''I think it's definitely coming back a little bit,'' he said.

But with Superior at its all-time low point for the beginning of fall -- when the lake usually begins its annual drop-off -- prospects for quick improvement wouldn't seem good.

Scientists point to a number of possible causes for the low water, including historical cycles, weather patterns and global warming.

''Is this going to continue? That's the big question and we don't know,'' Sellinger said.

------

On the Net:

NOAA's Great Lakes laboratory: http://www.glerl.noaa.gov/data/now/wlevels/levels.html

Army Corps of Engineers: http://www.lre.usace.army.mil/

    Lake Superior Sets Record for Low Water, NYT, 1.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Lake-Superior.html