History > 2008 > USA > Nature, Weather, Climate (II)

Paul Combs

The Tampa Tribune

Cagle

2.5.2008

Mississippi flooding

closes St. Louis to barges

Mon Jun 30, 2008
7:44am EDT
Reuters
By Lisa Shumaker

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Flooding on the Mississippi River has closed the St. Louis harbor to barge traffic, halting commercial traffic at an important junction of several major waterways, said the U.S. Coast Guard.

On Saturday, the Coast Guard closed the Mississippi River from mile marker 174 to 189, which includes the harbor. Vessels with two or fewer barges can travel during daylight hours. There was no estimate on when the harbor would reopen.

In addition, the Illinois River is closed from mile marker 0 to 24.

The upper Mississippi River has been closed to barge traffic since locks began shutting down on June 12, which has disrupted shipments of grain, coal and petroleum products.

The Missouri and Illinois rivers flow into the Mississippi River in the St. Louis area, making it a key point for barge traffic. The Mississippi River is the main channel for grain flowing from production areas in the Midwest to the export terminals at the Gulf. Between 55 and 65 percent of all U.S. corn, soybean and wheat exports leave from the Gulf.

The worst U.S. Midwest flooding in 15 years has begun to ebb, but floods have destroyed millions of acres of corn and soybeans, sending corn prices to record highs on fears of a small crop from the world's top grain exporter.
 

(Editing by John Picinich)

Mississippi flooding closes St. Louis to barges, R, 30.6.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN2745863920080630

Philadelphia

Set to Honor Darwin and Evolution

June 23, 2008
The New York Times
By JON HURDLE

PHILADELPHIA — In the long-running culture war between evolution and creationism, Philadelphia is firing the latest shot.

Nine academic, scientific and cultural institutions around the city are holding a Year of Evolution, a series of exhibitions, seminars and lectures to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin next February, and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his seminal work, “The Origin of Species.”

Events will include a talk by John E. Jones III, a federal judge who ruled in 2005 that teaching intelligent design — the belief that some aspects of nature are so complex that they must be the work of a higher power rather than of evolution — in public school science classes was unconstitutional.

The intent of the citywide event, said Janet M. Monge, one of the organizers, is to increase public understanding of evolution and science in general at a time when polls show that a majority of Americans believe God created man in his present form and that the number of people who accept the evolutionary model of human origins is declining.

“The strengths and weaknesses of evolution are the strengths and weaknesses of science,” said Dr. Monge, the curator of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. “You don’t get answers.”

She said the Philadelphia events were also intended to encourage people to consider the evolutionary alternative to the biblical account of the origins of man, as represented by the new Creation Museum in Petersburg, Ky., a $35 million institution that has attracted more than 400,000 visitors since it opened in May 2007.

Ken Ham, the president of the Creation Museum, said he expected to see more pro-evolution events as the Darwin anniversary approaches. Mr. Ham said that in response his museum was planning its own exhibits on the origins of life.

“The culture war is definitely heating up,” he said.

Mr. Ham, who also leads Answers in Genesis, a nonprofit group promoting a literal interpretation of the biblical creation story, defined the clash of ideas as “Christianity versus the relative morality of secular humanism” and said they were “two fundamentally different worldviews.”

He rejected the possibility that Christians could believe in evolution. “If you take Genesis as literal history, then of course the two are exclusive,” he said. “Christians who believe in evolution are being inconsistent.”

Creationists and their allies in the intelligent design movement suffered a setback when Judge Jones rejected a plan by the school board in Dover, Pa., to teach their ideas. Judge Jones sided with the American Civil Liberties Union and others who sued the school board, arguing that intelligent design was a religious rather than scientific concept and had no place in science classes.

The National Council for Science Education, which opposes creationism in schools, contends that creationists and intelligent design proponents have merely changed their tactics to avoid legal challenges in the wake of the Dover decision, and are now arguing that teachers should have a right to teach critiques of evolution.

“The creationists are resilient, and they have regrouped,” said Glenn Branch, deputy director of the council.

The council, which monitors creationist activity, said there had been 33 new cases of anti-evolution initiatives in schools or state legislatures this year, compared with 49 in 2007.

In Philadelphia, organizers of the Year of Evolution want to promote the concept in Darwin’s anniversary year but have no interest in picking a fight with Christians who do not accept it, said William Y. Brown, president of the Academy of Natural Sciences, a participating institution.

“We will try to find ways of persuading people that it’s not in conflict with their faith,” Dr. Brown said.

Philadelphia Set to Honor Darwin and Evolution, NYT, 23.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/us/23darwin.html

Arthur Galston,

Agent Orange Researcher,

Is Dead at 88

June 23, 2008
The New York Times
By JEREMY PEARCE

Arthur W. Galston, a Yale plant biologist who did early research that helped lead to the herbicide Agent Orange, then helped raise awareness of the military’s use of it in Vietnam in the 1960s and its devastating effects on river ecosystems, died on June 15 in Hamden, Conn. He was 88.

The cause was congestive heart failure, his family said.

In letters, academic papers, broadcasts and seminars, Dr. Galston described the environmental damage wrought by Agent Orange and traveled to South Vietnam to monitor its impact. From 1962 to 1970, American troops released an estimated 20 million gallons of the chemical defoliant to destroy crops and expose Viet Cong positions and routes of movement.

Dr. Galston asserted that harm to trees and plant species could continue for an untold period, and perhaps for decades. He pointed out that spraying Agent Orange on riverbank mangroves in Vietnam was eliminating “one of the most important ecological niches for the completion of the life cycle of certain shellfish and migratory fish.”

Then, in 1970, with Matthew S. Meselson of Harvard and others, he made a case that Agent Orange presented a potential risk to humans. The scientists lobbied the Department of Defense to conduct toxicological studies, which found that compounds in Agent Orange could be linked to birth defects in laboratory rats. The revelation led President Richard M. Nixon to order an immediate halt of spraying.

In later years, Dr. Galston tied his activism to his own early research. In the 1940s, at the University of Illinois, he had experimented with a plant growth regulator, triiodobenzoic acid, and found that it could induce soybeans to flower and grow more rapidly. But if applied in excess, he noted, the compound would cause the plant to catastrophically shed its leaves.

A colleague, Ian Sussex, a senior research scientist at Yale, said others used Dr. Galston’s findings in the development of the more powerful defoliant, Agent Orange, named for the orange stripe painted around steel drums that contained it. The chemical, produced by Dow, Monsanto and other companies, is now known to have contained dioxins, long-lived compounds associated with cancers, birth defects and learning disabilities.

In the 1980s, Dr. Galston helped introduce popular courses in bioethics for undergraduates at Yale and in the 1990s was instrumental in founding the Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics at the university. He explored the risks and rewards of genetically modified plants and crops, pesticides, stem-cell research, cloning and other issues as co-editor of two textbooks, “New Dimensions in Bioethics” (2000) and “Expanding Horizons in Bioethics” (2005).

In other important work in plant physiology, Dr. Galston experimented with the nutrient riboflavin and its role in enabling plants to absorb blue light, making a connection that he advanced and published in 1950 in the journal Science. He also wrote a book, “The Life of the Green Plant” (1961).

Arthur William Galston was born in Brooklyn. He graduated from Cornell and earned his doctorate in botany from Illinois in 1943.

After teaching at the California Institute of Technology, he moved to Yale in 1955 as a professor of plant physiology. At Yale, he was chairman of the department of botany in the 1960s and chairman of the department of biology in the 1980s. Dr. Galston was also a former director of the division of biological sciences at Yale. He retired in 1990 as a professor of botany emeritus.

Dr. Galston is survived by his wife of 66 years, Dale. He is also survived by a son, William, of Bethesda, Md.; a daughter, Beth, of Carlisle, Mass.; and a grandson.

In 2003, Dr. Galston reconsidered the arc of his research.

“You know,” he said, “nothing that you do in science is guaranteed to result in benefits for mankind. Any discovery, I believe, is morally neutral and it can be turned either to constructive ends or destructive ends.”

He concluded: “That’s not the fault of science.”

    Arthur Galston, Agent Orange Researcher, Is Dead at 88, NYT, 23.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/us/23galston.html

Years Later,

Climatologist Renews

His Call for Action

June 23, 2008
The New York Times
By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Twenty years ago Monday, James E. Hansen, a climate scientist at NASA, shook Washington and the world by telling a sweating crowd at a Senate hearing during a stifling heat wave that he was “99 percent” certain that humans were already warming the climate.

“The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now,” Dr. Hansen said then, referring to a recent string of warm years and the accumulating blanket of heat-trapping carbon dioxide and other gases emitted mainly by burning fossil fuels and forests.

To many observers of environmental history, that was the first time global warming moved from being a looming issue to breaking news. Dr. Hansen’s statement helped propel the first pushes for legislation and an international treaty to cut emissions of greenhouse gases. A treaty was enacted and an addendum, the Kyoto Protocol, was added.

Even as the scientific picture of a human-heated world has solidified, emissions of the gases continue to rise.

On Monday, Dr. Hansen, 67, plans to give a briefing organized by a House committee and say that it is almost, but not quite, too late to start defusing what he calls the “global warming time bomb.” He will offer a plan for cuts in emissions and also a warning about the risks of further inaction.

“If we don’t begin to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the next several years, and really on a very different course, then we are in trouble,” Dr. Hansen said Friday at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, which he has directed since 1981. “Then the ice sheets are in trouble. Many species on the planet are in trouble.”

In his testimony, Dr. Hansen said, he will say that the next president faces a unique opportunity to galvanize the country around the need for a transformed, nonpolluting energy system. The hearing is before the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.

Dr. Hansen said the natural skepticism and debates embedded in the scientific process had distracted the public from the confidence experts have in a future with centuries of changing climate patterns and higher sea levels under rising carbon dioxide concentrations. The confusion has been amplified by industries that extract or rely on fossil fuels, he said, and this has given cover to politicians who rely on contributions from such industries.

Dr. Hansen said the United States must begin a sustained effort to exploit new energy sources and phase out unfettered burning of finite fossil fuels, starting with a moratorium on the construction of coal-burning power plants if they lack systems for capturing and burying carbon dioxide. Such systems exist but have not been tested at anywhere near the scale required to blunt emissions. Ultimately he is seeking a worldwide end to emissions from coal burning by 2030.

Another vital component, Dr. Hansen said, is a nationwide grid for distributing and storing electricity in ways that could accommodate large-scale use of renewable, but intermittent, energy sources like wind turbines and solar-powered generators.

The transformation would require new technology as well as new policies, particularly legislation promoting investments and practices that steadily reduce emissions.

Such an enterprise would be on the scale of past ambitious national initiatives, Dr. Hansen said, like the construction of the federal highway system and the Apollo space program.

Dr. Hansen disagrees with supporters of “cap and trade” bills to cut greenhouse emissions, like the one that foundered in the Senate this month. He supports a “tax and dividend” approach that would raise the cost of fuels contributing to greenhouse emissions but return the revenue directly to consumers to shield them from higher energy prices.

As was the case in 1988, Dr. Hansen’s peers in climatology, while concerned about the risks posed by unabated emissions, have mixed views on the probity of a scientist’s advocating a menu of policy choices outside his field.

Some also do not see such high risks of imminent climatic calamity, particularly disagreeing with Dr. Hansen’s projection that sea levels could rise a couple of yards or more in this century if emissions continue unabated.

Dr. Hansen is a favorite target of conservative commentators; on FoxNews.com, one called him “alarmist in chief.” But many climate experts say Dr. Hansen, despite some faults, has been an essential prodder of the public and scientific conscience.

Jerry Mahlman, who recently retired from a long career in climatology, said he disagreed with some of Dr. Hansen’s characterizations of the climate problem and his ideas about solutions. “On the whole, though, he’s been helpful,” Dr. Mahlman said. “He pushes the edge, but most of the time it’s pedagogically sound.”

Dr. Hansen said he was making a new public push now because the coming year presented a unique opportunity, with a new administration and the world waiting for the United States to re-engage in treaty talks scheduled to culminate with a new climate pact at the end of 2009.

He said a recent focus on China, which has surpassed the United States in annual carbon dioxide emissions, obscured the fact that the United States, Britain and Germany are most responsible for the accumulation of greenhouse gases.

Dr. Hansen said he had no regrets about stepping into the realm of policy, despite much criticism.

“I only regret that we haven’t gotten the story across as well as it needs to be,” he said. “And I think we’re running out of time.”

    Years Later, Climatologist Renews His Call for Action, NYT, 23.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/science/earth/23climate.html

In Iowa,

Life’s Possessions Become Debris Piles

June 23, 2008
The New York Times
By SUSAN SAULNY

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa — Alice and Jon Galvin had waited patiently for the day that the water would recede and this flood-ravaged city would drop its barricades and let them go home again, only to find that there is no going home again.

The two-bedroom cottage where they spent the last several decades was not a match for the surging Cedar River, which crested at a record flood level 10 days ago, engulfing every part of the little house on Fifth Street Northwest but the tip of its roof. The Galvins are picking at the moldy ruins in stifling stench now, gingerly disinfecting a few items but consigning most of their possessions to a pile of debris on the curb — as are thousands of other families from here to Missouri.

After the sandbagging, the evacuations, the last-minute rescues and the days of anxious waiting for the water to go down comes the heart-wrenching return home, and the long road toward recovery.

“First you evacuate, and you deal with the worry and the unknown,” said the Galvins’ daughter, Mary Boyd. “Then you come back to find this — and it’s like, now what? Where do you start? This is a mess.”

A neighbor, Sharona Hyke, wiped a tear with her rubber cleaning gloves. “Our whole lives are sitting there on the side of the road, us and everyone else’s,” she said. “We’re not coming back again. I can’t take it.”

The flooding that has inundated much of the Midwest over the last few weeks is not over, as the Mississippi River, swollen by its northern tributaries, continues to threaten dozens of communities downstream in Illinois and Missouri. And floodwater is still standing as far north as Iowa City.

An estimated 35,000 people have been displaced by the floods, and 24 have been killed in what the federal government describes as the biggest disaster it has faced since Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Early estimates suggest that the extent of the cleanup will be unlike anything some of the flooded cities have experienced. And some of what the water left behind is toxic, experts said, possibly tinged with raw sewage or chemical runoff from agriculture.

In Cedar Rapids alone, it is estimated that the 4,200 flooded houses are producing about a ton of debris each, mostly heavy appliances, electronics and furniture. Beyond that, businesses, schools, hospitals, churches and government offices are flooded, bringing the city’s total flood-related garbage load to about 300,000 tons, officials estimated.

A typical garbage truck can handle about four tons of trash.

“We’re looking at 10 to 15 times as much garbage as we’ve ever dealt with, so this is huge,” said Mark Jones, the superintendent of the city’s solid waste and recycling division. Backup trucks are arriving from across the state. “As you could see, it would take us forever to do this,” he said.

At the moment, Mr. Jones said he was concerned with the immediate clearing but, after that, demolitions will begin. Several hundred buildings are expected to come down — including houses like the Galvins’, still standing but structurally unsound — and that will present another tremendous burden.

Statewide, officials said it was too early to predict how much clearing and cleaning would have to be done. Although Cedar Rapids was hardest hit, the flood ran through the core of the state, roughly from Mason City to Des Moines.

Even in some cities where the crest had passed, water was still 10 to 12 feet above flood level. “It’s taking a long time to recede,” said Barb Lynch, an official with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.

Total crop loss in Iowa — including hay and pasture — is most likely nearing $3 billion. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has already approved more than $16 million in grants for individuals and households in the state, an amount that will probably increase.

The emotional toll and the impact on physical health are beyond calculation. While there have been no outbreaks of specific diseases related to the flood, water contamination is a serious concern, and officials recommended that anyone working or living in the flooded zone get shots for hepatitis and tetanus.

“These floodwaters are all contaminated with Lord knows what — everything that’s been washed out of the sewer plants and garages, basements, businesses, manure,” said Doug Hawker, an environmental specialist with the Department of Natural Resources. “It’s bad. We honestly don’t know what all is in it, but it’s an absolute witch’s brew.”

In Missouri, where floodwaters swallowed homes and agricultural fields north of St. Louis, the authorities said it was too early to determine the full scope of the flood’s destruction.

“We haven’t had a chance to do damage assessment,” said Susie Stonner, a spokeswoman for Missouri’s emergency management agency.

“There’s no federal disaster assistance for this current round of flooding yet,” Ms. Stonner said. “We have to do damage assessment, but we can’t get in until the water recedes.”

The Mississippi River has yet to crest in Illinois, so damage reports there are preliminary, too. Levee breaches have inundated hundreds of houses and businesses and countless acres of farmland.

Eventually, many people there could be in a position similar to those in Cedar Rapids.

“It’s amazing what water can do,” said Lora Lee Edwards, who owns a poster business in downtown Cedar Rapids. “We really can’t clean; we need shovels and wheelbarrows. Everything is turned over and destroyed. It’s a huge, mucky mess. And the hardest part was coming in for the first time and seeing what had to be done.”

Downtown streets are dusty and gray from debris, deserted except for work crews in white environmental-protection suits and respirators, hacking away at office buildings and theaters and restaurants. City Hall, the courts and the sheriff’s office are all being aired out as the last of the water is pumped out of basements and mopped out of puddles in lobbies.

“We were only expecting 18 inches in our offices,” Ms. Edwards said. Instead, there was eight feet of water. “A lot of people are in shock, it’s numb. Maybe in another week it will sink in.”

In the neighborhoods near downtown along the river, the streets looked like passageways through canyons of debris that reached six and seven feet high.

Valari Rodriguez, whose bungalow faces the river, had water to her first floor ceiling, destroying a collection of antique art and Indian artifacts along with everything else that was not in her attic loft. The place looked torn apart.

“It’s like a whirlpool had gone in there,” Ms. Rodriguez said. “I thought, how in the heck did that happen with just water?”

Her friend, Rosetta Anderson, helped with the cleanup during the weekend, sorting things into piles to be salvaged or to be thrown away. The pile of what might be salvageable was tiny compared to the other. And every house had the same two or three piles, for blocks on end.

“I can’t even look to see what’s on the curb,” she said. “Everybody’s everyday items, their lives all exposed. When I drove by and I saw what I’ve seen, I cried. But you have to keep going.”

The 108-year-old house of Lisa Stanford collected three feet of water. Ms. Stanford and her daughter, Jessica Aiello, were mopping and scrubbing with bleach.

“I will never forget this smell,” Ms. Stanford said. “And we had to sledgehammer the furniture to get it out. We lost pretty much everything.”

Mr. Galvin, a retiree who worked in inventory for an appliance company, surveyed his own pile of garbage on the front lawn. “All I wanted was a home theater when we added the sun room,” he said, bending down to touch a flat-screen television and other electronics that rested face down in mud. “Well, here’s your home theater.”

A neighbor, Christian Carderas, sat in his car for a while just gazing at his house. The water line was at least six feet high. Wasn’t it time to start cleaning up?

“I just don’t have the energy,” he said. “Look at this. One day’s not going to make a difference.”
 

Christina Capecchi contributed reporting from Ryan, Iowa, and Malcolm Gay from St. Louis.

    In Iowa, Life’s Possessions Become Debris Piles, NYT, 23.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/us/23cleanup.html

As Sand Bubbles Up

Along an Illinois Levee,

So Do New Questions

June 23, 2008
The New York Times
By MALCOLM GAY

CAHOKIA, Ill. — Even as many found cheer that floodwaters along the Mississippi River here would fall well short of what had been predicted, residents and the authorities in this town discovered a stark reminder of what might lie ahead: a sand boil on the aged levee that protects the town, a telltale sign that the swollen river had begun eroding the structure from beneath.

“I didn’t even know what a sand boil was,” Mayor Frank Bergman said as he surveyed the waterlogged levee, referring to the mix of sand and water that bubbles up from the ground. “But it’s clearly time to upgrade our levees and keep our system safe.”

The flooding that has claimed 24 lives and forced thousands to evacuate across six states continued Sunday, as the Mississippi crested in the northern Missouri town of Canton. Just upriver from St. Louis, Winfield, Mo., and Grafton, Ill., continued battling rising waters. Forecasters from the National Weather Service predicted that floodwaters would begin receding in the St. Louis area later this week.

As the river at nearby St. Louis leveled out at around 12 feet below the record set during the 1993 flood and about two feet below what had been predicted for the weekend, investigators had identified and contained several more boils on the levee, and the marshland that sits just behind it had crept to within 100 yards of the village hall.

Last year, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, after consulting with the Army Corps of Engineers, found that the five-levee system that protects the metropolitan area of East St. Louis, Ill., did not meet its standards for flood protection.

“It’s not that we think these levees will fail,” said David Busse, chief of engineering and construction for the St. Louis district of the corps. “But in order for me to certify these levees, they’d have to meet today’s standards, and some of these levees have been here forever.”

The corps estimates that it would cost roughly $200 million to bring the 70-year-old levee system into compliance — quite a challenge for a region that is home to East St. Louis and several other deeply impoverished communities trying to attract development.

The assessment of the five-levee system is part of a nationwide effort to update FEMA’s flood maps. The levees’ failure to meet the agency’s standards means that when the updated maps are published in 2009, they will no longer show the levees as providing protection from a 100-year flood, according to Norbert Schwartz, the agency’s director of mitigation for the region.

Rather, the 195,000-acre region — comprising parts of Madison, Monroe and St. Clair Counties — will be considered an unprotected flood plain. Such a designation would require homeowners with federally backed mortgages to buy flood insurance, could raise flood-insurance rates and could affect the region’s economic development.

“It all goes hand in hand,” said Derrick Johnson, 47, a car salesman from East St. Louis. “If you only fix one thing, you’re going to suffer from the other. So I don’t care how nice a school you build, it won’t be so nice if it floods.”

Frank Smith, 62, a social worker from East St. Louis, said he was less convinced of the need to repair the levees before addressing other issues, adding that he believed that many of his neighbors could not afford flood insurance.

“We’ve got 3,000 families living without utilities,” Mr. Smith said. “We have sewers that are collapsing. And you’re going to put $200 million into our levee system? How could we afford it?”

But as cities, towns and farms north of here have yielded in the past few weeks to the Mississippi’s tremendous flooding, scientists have again emphasized a sharp increase in flooding in recent history. They say established communities like East St. Louis and neighboring Cahokia would be well advised to repair their levee systems.

“We have had two almost 100-year floods and two almost 500-year floods in a 35-year period,” said Nicholas Pinter, a professor who specializes in flood hydrology at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. “Flood levels all along this stretch of the Mississippi have climbed upward, not just by inches but by 8, 10, 12 feet — up to 18 feet over historical 100-year flood conditions. So the simple answer is that floods are higher and more frequent.

“But the underlying theme to everything that’s going on,” Dr. Pinter added, “is that the current estimates for flood frequency and intensity appear to be grossly underestimated.”

Dr. Pinter maintains that while climate change and levee construction have contributed to increased flooding in the St. Louis area, the real culprits are river modifications made to ease navigation, which put further stress on the levee systems.

“All of our analyses point, at least on this stretch of river, to the river navigation engineering as being the 800-pound gorilla in the system,” Dr. Pinter said. “These types of river-training structures are the major mechanisms that drive flooding rivers higher.”

Dr. Pinter and colleagues have presented their findings to the Army Corps, which so far has resisted the notion that navigational devices have increased flooding.

“All of the information I have seen, and I’ve been looking at this issue for a very long time, navigation structures do not increase flood heights — I’m very confident of that,” Mr. Busse said. “We have data that shows that the flows come in at stages that are the same or lower since we’ve put these projects in, and that’s just a fact.”

But city leaders whose communities are at risk of being in an unprotected flood plain are looking at a very different set of facts.

“You can name the people in this community who work on your fingers,” said Nathaniel O’Bannon, the mayor of Brooklyn, Ill. “But these low-lying areas? Those levees need to be repaired. We really need it done.”

    As Sand Bubbles Up Along an Illinois Levee, So Do New Questions, NYT, 23.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/us/23flood.html

Call for Change Ignored,

Levees Remain Patchy

June 22, 2008
The New York Times
By MONICA DAVEY

CANTON, Mo. — The levees along the Mississippi River offer a patchwork of unpredictable protections. Some are tall and earthen, others aging and sandy, and many along its tributaries uncataloged by federal officials.

The levees are owned and maintained by all sorts of towns, agencies, even individual farmers, making the work in Iowa, Illinois and Missouri last week of gaming the flood — calculating where water levels would exceed the capacity of the protective walls — especially agonizing.

After the last devastating flood in the Midwest 15 years ago, a committee of experts commissioned by the Clinton administration issued a 272-page report that recommended a more uniform approach to managing rising waters along the Mississippi and its tributaries, including giving the principal responsibility for many of the levees to the Army Corps of Engineers.

But the committee chairman, Gerald E. Galloway Jr., a former brigadier general with the Corps of Engineers, said in an interview that few broad changes were made once the floodwaters of 1993 receded and were forgotten.

“We told them there were going to be more floods like this,” said Dr. Galloway, now an engineering professor at the University of Maryland. “Everybody likes to go out and shake hands on the levee now and offer sandbags, but that’s not helpful. This shouldn’t have happened in the first place.”

While the committee’s recommendations certainly would not have prevented the Mississippi and its tributaries from rising to catastrophic levels, Dr. Galloway said they could have lessened the sense of helplessness and limited some of the damage.

Among the committee suggestions that Dr. Galloway said were largely overlooked: a more systematic approach to what the 1994 report described as “a loose aggregation of federal, local and individual levees and reservoirs” on these Midwestern rivers in which, that report said, “many levees are poorly sited and will fail again in the future.”

And after Hurricane Katrina destroyed levees protecting New Orleans in 2005, Congress passed a bill setting up a program to inventory and inspect levees, but it failed to provide enough money to carry that out, Dr. Galloway said. “We don’t even know where some of these levees are,” he said.

All along the bloated Mississippi last week, the odd nature of this collection of levees — autonomous but yet connected — played out in towns like this one, Canton, about 125 miles northwest of St. Louis.

Walking along the top of Canton’s earthen levee on Wednesday, water up to its brim, Richard Dodd barked instructions into a walkie-talkie and scanned for leaks and bulges in it, the only thing left between the river and the heart of this city.

Mr. Dodd, an alderman, was worried, too, about the levees he could not see — along hundreds of miles, up and down the river and its tributaries. A break in one could spare other towns, he said, or send water rushing in unexpected directions, including here.

Canton’s mayor, Joe Clark, looked across the river to Meyer, Ill., where one of more than 20 levees either broke or overflowed last week. “It would sure seem better to have this all under one jurisdiction,” Mr. Clark said, “but that’s just not the way it is.” As it happened, the overflowed levee across the river from Canton may have been what spared his town from damage.

Water levels here had risen again by Saturday, but were predicted to peak over the weekend and then begin dropping. Officials were cautiously optimistic. “We’re holding our own,” Mr. Dodd said Saturday afternoon.

In just one stretch along the Mississippi, based on federal data available on Friday, at least 13 levees were overwhelmed by the river this past week, offering a window into the system.

Three of the levees where water broke through or came over the top were built and owned by local people, towns or agencies, and were not certified as meeting federal standards, records show. Four others that overflowed and then had holes break were built and maintained by towns or drainage district boards, but had been certified by federal authorities as meeting their standards.

The Army Corps of Engineers built or helped reconstruct the other six, though local authorities now own them and are responsible for their upkeep.

“There is a patchwork quilt of levee responsibility when it comes to this,” said Butch Kinerney, a spokesman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “There is no federal agency which oversees levees. That doesn’t exist.”

For more than a century, people near this river have been trying to hold it back. Levees rise from these banks and the banks of its tributaries in all heights and shapes, many built decades ago by people, towns, groups of farmers.

Made of sand, clay, dirt and, in some cases, unknown materials, some levees guard towns, others protect farm fields. There are long, elaborate walls, like one here known as the Sny that runs more than 50 miles down the river. Others, tiny private levees, particularly those on the smaller tributaries of the Mississippi, have long ago been forgotten, and the federal authorities acknowledge that they are uncertain where all of them are.

People in the Upper Midwest have been wrestling with the “hodgepodge” of levees, as one Missouri geologist describes the situation, for decades, even as officials in the 1920s designed a more standardized system of protection south of here, along the Mississippi downriver of Cairo, Ill., and all the way to the Gulf of Mexico.

After an enormous flood in 1927, the southern stretch of the river was deemed part of a project area, and ordered to have levees designed by the Corps of Engineers. “Those were good levees, all built to a single standard,” said John M. Barry, who wrote “Rising Tide,” a book about the 1927 flood.

But the flood had not devastated the Upper Mississippi region to the degree it had in the south, and the political atmosphere, given the enormous price of levee building, left those to the north out of the equation, Mr. Barry said. So people here kept building on their own.

In the 1960s and ’70s, there were calls for improvements: In some cases, Corps officials built or rebuilt certain levees (including Canton’s in the 1960s), then handed them back to the local authorities. Federal authorities also inspect and certify some levees as meeting corps standards, a designation that allows communities to receive subsidies if their levees fail.

But such certification is not mandatory for all levees. Of more than 200 known levees in this region alone, more than 100, many of them in the Mississippi’s tributaries, have not been certified as meeting the federal standards; they may have poor construction, signs of stress, trees growing on them, animal burrows.

All of which has left an odd assortment of levees protecting these towns, even now.

“It’s still sort of ad hoc,” said Ron Fournier, of the Rock Island district of the Army Corps of Engineers.

Even as people here battled the rising waters last week, the disconnected nature of these levees played out in complicated ways.

All around, people tried to raise their levees just a little more, just enough, they hoped, to keep them above water. Atop the levees, they piled sandbags, stone, wood. Town to town, it seemed an arms-race-like battle to go higher. Here in Canton, carpenters spent days hammering a two-foot wooden frame addition to the top of their levee, then padded that with sandbags — tricks they learned from 1993.

But a topped-off levee in one town was not without effect on others along the river, some said.

“We always flood fight and raise levees during events like this with little or no coordination or regard for the impact it will have on people upstream or across the river,” said Paul A. Osman of the Illinois Office of Water Resources. “When you raise a levee, that water has to go somewhere.”

Many experts said it was impossible to know whether a comprehensive levee system might have changed things last week in the areas where water flowed over levees, in the endless corn and soybean fields near Meyer, Ill., or in the trailers and homes near Winfield, Mo. Many of the levees overflowed — as opposed to breaking up or splitting open first; they were simply overwhelmed by a huge amount of water. Some, along open lands, were always expected to overflow at such high water levels.

Still, Dr. Galloway said a broad, comprehensive flood management plan — the one presented 14 years ago — would have helped. “Some agricultural levees would still have overflowed,” he said. “But you would substantially have reduced the damage.”

    Call for Change Ignored, Levees Remain Patchy, NYT, 22.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/us/22midwest.html?hp

River rises again,

along with worries in Mo., Ill.

21 June 2008
USA Today
By Cheryl Wittenauer, Associated Press Writer

FOLEY, Mo. — Amid the battle to hold back the swollen Mississippi River, some towns in northeastern Missouri and Illinois got an unwelcome surprise Saturday as river levels rose higher than projected.

Recent levee breaks north of Canton, not far from the Iowa line, had allowed the river level to drop there and at other towns far north of St. Louis.

Officials knew it would rise again to expected crests during the weekend, but the amount of the increase caught them off guard.

The Mississippi reached 26.3 feet Saturday morning at Canton after dipping below 23 feet two days earlier, and it was expected to crest later in the day at 26.4 feet.

That's still more than a foot lower than the record set during the Great Flood of '93.

However, the new Saturday morning reading was "a full foot higher than we expected it to be," said emergency management spokeswoman Monica Heaton. "The levee's fine, but the river did another unexpected thing last night."

Forecasters said Saturday afternoon that the river would crest several inches higher than expected in Hannibal and at Quincy, Ill., where it was set to crest late in the day more than 2 feet below the '93 flood peak.

"We're confident we can hold that and not have any issues," said Adams County's emergency management chief, John Simon. "It'll be another sigh of relief, but it's not over yet. We're not out of the water yet, no pun intended. We have a while to go."

Hannibal emergency management director John Hark said the river was well above flood stage but still about 3 feet below the record set in 1993. Before a levee break north of Hannibal in Meyer, Ill., allowed some water to drain out of the river last week, Hannibal was expecting a crest at or near the record.

The crest was revised Saturday to 29.1 feet, set to arrive in Mark Twain's hometown sometime Sunday morning.

"We're keeping an eye on it," he said.

Downriver, near St. Louis, the latest federal forecast called for lower crests than predicted a day earlier. That was good news in hard-hit Lincoln County, where five levees had broken in the past three days.

At Foley, more than half of the homes in the town of 200 residents were under water, and townspeople were only beginning to decide whether to go back or move out.

Robert "Bobby" James, a union carpenter who moved to Foley a year ago, stayed after falling in love with the river. A few days ago, the handyman took out baseboards, flooring and carpet from his house as a pre-emptive move against the coming flood.

Even if the town floods again, he said, "I raise it 10 feet, put in new flooring, slap on five gallons of paint and I'm back in business."

National Weather Service meteorologist Ben Miller speculated that forecast models simply had been unable to account for the amount of water flowing into the Mississippi from the three rivers that saw major flooding in Iowa -- the Cedar, Iowa and Des Moines rivers.

"Honestly, the models didn't do well with it because it was so far out of the range of normal," Miller said.

Miller was unaware of any levees facing renewed danger because of the river's unexpected rise, but said river towns need to be aware that the flood is a long way from over.

"Obviously any town protected by a levee is still under risk," Miller said. "The longer you have levees that have water up against them, the better the chance you have a levee being compromised."

Flooding and widespread storms this month have forced thousands from their homes and inundated towns and cities along rivers in six states, killing 24 and injuring 148 since June 6.

But while the swollen Mississippi has topped or broken through levees for hundreds of miles above St. Louis, the flooding hasn't led to any deaths or significant injuries in Missouri or Illinois.

(This version CORRECTS the first paragraph to say northeastern Missouri instead of northwest Missouri.)

    River rises again, along with worries in Mo., Ill., UT, 21.6.2008, http://www.usatoday.com/news/topstories/2008-06-21-544975597_x.htm

Midwest floods continue

as region braces for more rain

 

20 June 2008
USA Today
By Christopher Leonard, Associated Press Writer

FOLEY, Mo. — For the second time in 15 years, Keith Aubuchon found himself packing his belongings and evacuating his home to escape a "100-year" flood of the Mississippi River.
He returned and remodeled his house after the flood of 1993. This time, he doesn't know if it will be worth coming back.

"This is my second flood. I don't think there will be a third," Aubuchon said as he drove a pickup loaded with a washing machine and other belongings out of his subdivision. Floodwaters rapidly filled the roads, yards and gullies behind him just hours after a levee breached north of Foley. Authorities estimate much of the small town will be flooded by the weekend.

Three Mississippi River levees broke Thursday in Lincoln County, sending a creeping wave of water toward Foley and causing more concern in nearby Winfield.

The river was overflowing 90% of the levees in eastern Lincoln County, and at least four more breaches were expected to aggravate the flooding overnight, said Lincoln County Emergency Management spokesman Andy Binder.

While the situation worsened in Lincoln County, it improved slightly elsewhere along the river after the National Weather Service significantly lowered crest predictions. The revisions came after several levee breaks in Illinois, including one on Wednesday near Meyer that potentially could inundate 17,000 acres of farmland with water that otherwise would have been flowing south.

That means many towns along the river won't see the record-level flood crests they expected. The new prediction shows St. Louis cresting at 37.3 feet on Friday, well short of the 49.58-foot mark in 1993.

But National Weather Service meteorologist Jim Kramper said river towns aren't safe yet.

"There will still be a lot of places with major flooding," Kramper said. "Even at the levels we're expecting now, a lot of places are threatened."

The weather might not help, with forecasters predicting showers and scattered thunderstorms in Missouri and Iowa both Friday and Saturday before the precipitation moves out Sunday.

The relief for some river towns came at a cost for communities where levees failed. The first levee breached in Lincoln County on Wednesday near Winfield, about 50 miles north of St. Louis, followed Thursday by the series of breaks that spilled water into sparsely populated areas, Binder said.

The southward flows were expected to put increasing pressure on a series of inland levees protecting the towns of Winfield and Elsberry. To help raise the levees an additional 2 feet, dozens of volunteers filled tens of thousands of sandbags in Winfield. The bags were piled onto pallets and shipped to the levees where roughly 150 National Guard members stacked them on top of the existing walls.

"It's about the most rewarding thing I've done in a long time," said David Hays, a computer programmer from Chesterfield, Mo., who took time off work to help fill sandbags. "I was filling sandbags until I couldn't move my arms. Then I held bags until my shoulders hurt. Then I became a supervisor."

In Iowa, where residents are mopping up after the deluge in Des Moines and Iowa City, President Bush surveyed the flood's aftermath on Thursday and assured residents and rescuers alike that he is listening to their concerns.

"Obviously, to the extent we can help immediately, we will help," said Bush, still mindful of criticism that the government reacted slowly to Hurricane Katrina three years ago.

"You'll come back better," the president said. "Sometimes it's hard to see it."

Bush was in Europe when tornadoes hit and heavy rains sent rivers surging over their banks, killing at least 24 people, the majority in Iowa. He made a point to try to show his concern while overseas and traveled to Iowa just two days after returning.

"I really don't have much of an opinion of his coming," said Lashawn Baker, 33, whose family was just starting to clean her flooded home in a southwest Cedar Rapids neighborhood. "It took him a long time to get to New Orleans and he didn't help any of those people, so I don't think he's going to do anything to help Cedar Rapids now that he's here."

At the briefing in Cedar Rapids, Bush, his shirt sleeves rolled up, told local officials that he came "just to listen to what you've got on your mind."

Noting that several hundred federal emergency workers were fanning across Iowa, he added: "That ought to help the people in the smaller communities know that somebody is there to listen to them."

The sluggish federal response when Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast in 2005 was judged woefully inadequate and brought heavy criticism of Bush and FEMA. It also brought sensitivity on the part of federal officials each time disaster has struck since to show that things were working better.

FEMA Administrator R. David Paulison accompanied Bush to Iowa on Air Force One and praised the "great coordination" between federal, state and local leaders.

Paulison said one thing FEMA was doing differently was working better with other partners — the Army Corps of Engineers and even Wal-Mart — to distribute supplies. The agency also was placing stocks of sandbags and other supplies in states or towns where flooding hadn't hit yet or material had not been requested, just to be ready, he said.

Contributing: Associated Press writers Cheryl Wittenauer, Betsy Taylor and Jim Salter in St. Louis, Henry C. Jackson in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and Natasha Metzler in Washington contributed to this report.

    Midwest floods continue as region braces for more rain, UT, 20.6.2008, http://www.usatoday.com/weather/floods/2008-06-20-midwest-floods_N.htm

For Bush, a New Town, a New Disaster,

but Always the Memory of New Orleans

June 20, 2008
The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

IOWA CITY — Try as he might, President Bush cannot escape the haunting memory of Hurricane Katrina.

Mr. Bush toured flood-stricken areas here on Thursday, the latest in a string of disaster-zone visits he has made in his role as comforter in chief.

As always, he gave solace and prayers and hopeful words; he called Iowans a “tough-minded people” who would “come back better.” As always, he met the governor and local mayors, pored over maps, dropped in on a shelter, promised federal aid. As always, he brought with him R. David Paulison, the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a man so skilled at Hurricane Katrina comparisons that he no longer has to be asked.

“I’m sorry we’re going through this,” the president said, against the backdrop of the swollen Iowa River, in a lovely middle-class neighborhood called Parkview Terrace near the University of Iowa, where homes were so submerged it looked as if they were accessible only by boat. “Tell people that oftentimes you get dealt a hand you didn’t expect to have to play, and the question is not whether you’re going to get dealt the hand; the question is how do you play it.”

An estimated 35,000 people have been displaced by the floods, and 24 have been killed, mostly in Iowa, said Mr. Paulison, who described the disaster as the biggest his agency has handled since Hurricane Katrina.

Mr. Bush’s tour took him to the hard-hit areas of Iowa City and Cedar Rapids; he was joined by two Democratic members of Iowa’s Congressional delegation, Senator Tom Harkin and Representative Dave Loebsack, a freshman who had only kind words for the president.

“I think he has a very good sense when he’s on the ground with people of what they’re going through,” Mr. Loebsack said.

One politician Mr. Bush did not see while in Iowa was Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, who on Thursday conducted his own tour of the soggy devastation of southeastern Iowa. The senator canceled his morning events, leaving most of his entourage, security and traveling press corps behind, while he inspected the flooded town of Columbus Junction, population 1,900, where the Iowa and Cedar Rivers meet.

“I know that I speak for all Americans,” Mr. McCain said. “We’ll do everything necessary to try and rebuild their lives.”

Mr. Bush is often at his best in such situations and is typically greeted warmly. Beverly Jones and her husband, Doug, a computer science professor at the university, stood outside their home in Parkview Terrace (“We call it Mosquito Flats,” Mr. Jones said) and watched Mr. Bush’s entourage down the street. In their front window was a big “O” sign, for the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, Senator Barack Obama. No matter.

“I’m impressed that he’s here,” Mrs. Jones said of Mr. Bush.

There is a sameness to these trips, with their requisite photo opportunities and helicopter aerial tours, and Thursday’s was not quite as emotional as some.

In Greensburg, Kan., a small town flattened by a tornado in May 2007, Mr. Bush was mobbed as he walked block by block to comfort the newly homeless. In California, he spoke of the “sadness and worry” he saw in people’s eyes, as a woman whose home was destroyed by wildfires cried on his shoulder. When a bridge collapsed on Interstate 35W in Minneapolis last August, he met with family members of those killed.

Always, the question of Hurricane Katrina hovers, with its enduring image of a seemingly detached Mr. Bush, peering out at the devastation from the window of Air Force One. “That was the biggest event of his presidency outside 9/11,” said John Feehery, a Republican strategist, “and he can no more escape Katrina than he can escape 9/11.”

Still, Mr. Bush and his advisers are trying. Mr. Paulison said it took as long as five hours for callers to get through to his agency during Hurricane Katrina; the response time now, he said proudly on Thursday, “is 12 seconds, and we’re answering 99.7 percent of the calls.”

Already, FEMA has sent 180,000 liters of water and two million sandbags to Missouri, a state that has not yet been hit hard by flooding, just in case.

Mr. Loebsack has been impressed. “So far, so good,” he said, clutching his packet of giveaways from Air Force One, including M&M candies in boxes that bear the presidential seal. But, fresh from the president’s hospitality, the congressman demurred on the question of whether Mr. Bush’s visit to his district could repair the damage done by Hurricane Katrina.

“I don’t want to get into that,” he said.

    For Bush, a New Town, a New Disaster, but Always the Memory of New Orleans, NYT, 20.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/20/us/20bush.html

Burst Levees Force a Town

to Consider Its Future

June 20, 2008
The New York Times
By MALCOLM GAY and MONICA DAVEY

WINFIELD, Mo. — First came the urgent news from a volunteer circling in a helicopter. The pounding Mississippi River had burst a 150-foot-wide hole in a levee, sending water gushing along a new path toward this small city and sweeping at least one empty house off its foundation.

Even as the gash widened to 550 feet, water ripped open two more holes, one after the next, in a nearby levee.

An inner levee, a second layer of protection, continued to guard much of Winfield on Thursday evening. But more than 250 homes in the region were flooded.

“I don’t know if we’re going to be able to save it,” Andy Binder, of the Lincoln County Emergency Operations Command, said of the northeast section of Winfield, population 877. “In some areas, I can’t even tell we have levees anymore.”

Water had swelled over the top of more than 20 levees along the Mississippi between Dubuque, Iowa, and St. Louis. The failures, officials said, mostly drenched tens of thousands of acres of agricultural land.

This time, the threatened levee was protecting small communities, precisely what officials here, who have devoted endless hours to tracking and reinforcing the scores of floodwalls along the river, had hoped to avoid.

“We’re going under as we speak,” Michael Moran, a resident of the Winfield subdivision, said Thursday afternoon as he hurried to stack his pickup with his possessions, the stove, the furnace, everything.

The water crept on to his patio. He was thinking of staying at his mother’s.

Mr. Moran, 52, a pipe installer, said he had no flood insurance for his one-story house, no certainty whether he will move back to his spot near the river.

“I need to think about it,” said Mr. Moran, who rebuilt after the flood of 1993. “I had two years before I could retire.”

In the cities and towns north of St. Louis, weary, blistered residents began to ask whether this all might soon be over. At different points, the river levels, closely watched by nearly everyone here, seemed to rise and fall by the hour. Then only more water.

Experts said the dips stemmed in part from levees breaking upriver followed by the swollen river hurtling south.

More rain began falling on Thursday in some areas, including Quincy, Ill., as workers tended their levee.

The federal government released a climate report predicting that more frequent and intense heavy rains were unavoidable in North America in a world warmed by increasing concentrations of heat-trapping gases.

Though no single period of flooding rains or other extremes can be ascribed to the growing global influence on climate, the odds are tipping toward a continent with more, and more intense, climate extremes, said Thomas R. Karl, director of the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., and a lead author of the report.

“To fully grasp the ramifications of the surge in extreme droughts and floods that is forecast in this report, one need only look at the widespread devastation across the Midwest,” said Richard H. Moss, head of the climate program of the World Wildlife Fund. “We need to start making substantial reductions in emissions to minimize how much and how quickly the climate changes, and, just as importantly, we need to begin a serious program of national preparedness to respond to these increasing threats.”

In the country around Winfield, hundreds of people had fled by Thursday night. People in at least eight houses refused to go.

Winfield was quiet, nearly empty in parts. A shelter opened at the high school.

Not far from here, in Foley, one man pitched a tent on his roof and fired up a generator, officials said, determined to wait out the flood.

Keith Abernathy, too, said he had no intention of leaving his trailer in Winfield.

“That water’s going to come down that street and take a left turn,” Mr. Abernathy, who drives a dump truck, said, pointing down a road. “I don’t usually drink beer, but I’m going to sit on the porch and pop a top because I’m in for a tough road ahead.”

Mr. Abernathy said he had nowhere to go and no way to haul his trailer now.

“I don’t have the money to move it,” he said. “I’m three months behind on my truck payments.”

Officials remained worried into the night. After at least four levee breaks here, another seemed imminent. Raised areas, known as boils, that signal stress from water pressure appeared in a protective wall nearby, said Kelly Hardcastle, director of emergency management for Lincoln County.

“That levee is so wet and under so much pressure that we’re not worried about it topping,” Mr. Hardcastle said, describing water flowing over a barricade. “We’re worried about it blowing.”

Malcolm Gay reported from Winfield, and Monica Davey from Quincy, Ill. Catrin Einhorn contributed reporting from Chicago, and Andrew C. Revkin from New York.

    Burst Levees Force a Town to Consider Its Future, NYT, 20.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/20/us/20flood.html?hp

Mississippi Surges

Over Nearly a Dozen Levees

June 20, 2008
The New York Times
By ANAHAD O’CONNOR and MONICA DAVEY

The swollen Mississippi River continued to spread destruction on Thursday, surging over nearly a dozen levees in the St. Louis area and flooding vast areas of farmland, as the region’s growing crisis pushed corn and soy prices toward record levels.

The runaway river claimed its latest Missouri town late Wednesday night when it broke a levee in Winfield, just outside of St. Louis, leaving a 150-foot hole, deluging the small community and sending a surge of water downstream toward the next levee. Crews of firefighters spent the night evacuating residents, in some cases by boat, as workers fought to contain the river further south.

With weather forecasters calling for as many as two inches of rain in some parts of Missouri on Thursday, crews of emergency responders, sandbags in hand, were preparing for the worst.

St. Louis is the next major city in the path of the surging river, which is expected to crest at 40 feet there on Saturday. Because the river widens at St. Louis and connects with several tributaries, damage there is expected to be minimal. Still, the threat was great enough to prompt the city to relocate its annual Independence Day fair and festival for the first time. Concerns were also raised about levees on the opposite side of the river in East St. Louis, Ill.

President Bush began a tour of the region today in Cedar Rapids, where the waters have receded but 25,000 people have been left homeless. He met with Chet Culver, the governor of Iowa; Kay Halloran, the mayor of Cedar Rapids; and emergency management officials at a local emergency center, located at Kirkwood Community College, before a planned helicopter tour of flood-stricken areas.

Mr. Bush said he had come to listen. “Obviously, to the extent we can help immediately, we want to help,” he said, adding that he particularly wanted people in small towns to know that they were not forgotten.

“The good news is the people of Iowa are tough-minded people,” he said. “You’ll come back better. Sometimes it’s hard to see it.”

Since the flooding began, 20 levees have been breached — 11 of them in the St. Louis area — and as many as 30 more remain in peril. Estimates of the damage to farmland throughout the Midwest ranged from 2 million to 5 million acres of crops, pushing corn prices close to a record price of $8 a bushel. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is said to be planning a thorough review of the damage later this month.

On Wednesday, the surging river was gruesome news for the farmers and residents — about 100, the authorities said — near the tiny hamlet of Meyer in western Illinois. Around the small community, part of a region of endless fields of soybeans, corn and cattle, state conservation police officers rode door to door in boats to ensure that everyone had left, and flew over in a helicopter, scanning for anyone stranded.

So it went all along the Mississippi this week, through Iowa, Illinois and Missouri, north of St. Louis: People marching along levees and flood walls, scanning for the slightest puddle or hint of pressure in the sand, waiting for what might come. In Quincy, Ill., local officials raced to reinforce a levee they were worried about south of town; at stake were 100,000 acres of farmland and access to the Mark Twain Bridge. And federal authorities said they were closely monitoring more than 20 other levees they view as vulnerable, as the waters continue to rise downstream in the coming days.

Around Meyer, farmers were devastated. “That’s all been lost, and it’s not going to be replanted this season,” said Gerald Jenkins, general manager of Ursa Farmers Cooperative, not far from Meyer. One of the cooperative’s grain elevators, in Meyer, was swamped, Mr. Jenkins said, another at risk.

Worse, Mr. Jenkins said he feared that so many fields under water would mean not much grain for the cooperative to sell come the fall harvest. “It’s a very sickening feeling,” he said.

Still, the breached levees were a guilty relief for others, here in Canton and in the other towns on the Missouri side of the river or downstream, who had watched the water rise and rise, and hoped that a breach somewhere else might mean less flooding where they were.

“It’s too bad for them, but that’s the way it is,” Joe Clark, the mayor of Canton, said on Wednesday. Throughout the town, hundreds of workers scrambled to raise a three-mile-long levee still higher, with two-foot-tall wooden boards and piles upon piles of sandbags. So far, the levee here was winning, but the river’s crest — only inches short of the highest ever here — was not expected until early Thursday. Mr. Clark said he was hopeful that the town’s levee would hold, and its empty, shuttered downtown would be spared. “Now it’s a matter of waiting,” he said.

A few miles south, the waters crept waist high in some parts of LaGrange, Mo. Still, the levee failures elsewhere might lessen the blow, even in LaGrange. “Everything that’s broken other places is helping us,” said Pat Ryan, who continued to pile sandbags around his house, despite the rising waters.

In towns throughout the area, roads closed, train cars sat empty on flooded tracks, and bridges over the river were barricaded. Everywhere, sore, sweaty volunteers filled sandbags — more than 12.8 million of them have been issued so far during this flooding, by the United States Army Corps of Engineers.

Despite several days of mostly dry weather here, the sheer volume of water already in the tributaries of the Mississippi had led, inevitably, to flooding along the Mississippi itself. More rain, though, may be on the way: a storm system was forecast to roll over some of the flooded areas on Thursday and Friday, bringing scattered thunderstorms, up to an inch of rain and even the possibility of large hail in parts. The storms were not expected to raise flood levels significantly, though.

South of here, in Clarksville, the water that had already swamped some homes rose nine more inches by Wednesday.

“You just see it creeping up,” Tommy Beauchamp, a volunteer firefighter, said on Wednesday.

There was one piece of good news, though: the water was expected to crest about three inches lower than had been predicted, perhaps, in part, because of upstream levee breaks. To Mr. Beauchamp, the difference did not seem measly. “We celebrate every inch that we can get,” he said.

Anahad O’Connor reported from New York and Monica Davey from Canton, Mo. Catrin Einhorn contributed reporting from Chicago and Sheryl Gay Stolberg contributed reporting from Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

    Mississippi Surges Over Nearly a Dozen Levees, NYT, 20.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/20/us/20Floodcnd.html?hp

Bush visits Iowa,

billions in flood aid available

Thu Jun 19, 2008
4:14pm EDT
Reuters
By Tabassum Zakaria


CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa (Reuters) - President George W. Bush got a close-up view of damage from the worst Midwest flooding in 15 years on Thursday as his administration promised funding from a multibillion-dollar disaster relief fund.

The price tag from the slow-rolling calamity mounted as flood waters surged over and through levees along the surging Mississippi River.

The cost of the flooding across the U.S. corn belt will be felt by consumers worldwide in terms of higher food prices, and in business losses yet to be toted up.

"I know a lot of farmers and cattlemen are hurting right now," Bush said at an emergency center in Cedar Rapids, among the cities hit hardest by this week's flooding. "It's a tough time," he said before taking a helicopter tour of flooded areas with Iowa Gov. Chet Culver.

Near the Cedar River, which jumped its banks and flooded several square miles (kms) of Cedar Rapids, Bush toured a construction company used as a staging area and saw a wall of sandbags stained brown by the river.

During the trip to Cedar Rapids with Bush, Federal Emergency Management administrator David Paulison said the $4 billion currently in FEMA's Disaster Relief Fund should be "more than enough" to provide federal aid.

White House Budget Director Jim Nussle, a former Iowa congressman, said Bush would not announce new aid immediately, but was keeping an eye on the U.S. House of Representatives debate on a war funding bill that included $2.65 billion to replenish the disaster relief fund.

In a sign of the political importance of heartland states, the Republican hoping to succeed Bush in the White House, John McCain, paid a visit to Columbus Junction, downstream on the Iowa River from Iowa City, where Bush was to visit.

McCain praised the effort to minimize the flooding, and said he was confident an aid package will move quickly through Congress.

Earlier this week, likely Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama helped on a sandbag line on the Mississippi River in Illinois.

COST COULD RISE

Culver has said he anticipated $2 billion in federal aid. Ultimately, the cost of the disaster may end up rivaling that of 1993 Midwest floods that caused more than $20 billion in damage and 48 deaths.

Twenty-four deaths have been blamed on flooding and violent storms since late May as rivers overflowed their banks. Another 40,000 people have been forced from their homes.

The high cost of recovery might warrant more federal help, some local residents said. "It might behoove the government to consider spending $5 billion or $6 billion less on foreign wars and invest that money on helping out people here instead," said Dave Spitaleri, owner of the Railsplitter Inn in Hull, Illinois, along the Mississippi River.

U.S. government disaster aid would help with repairing or replacing washed-out roads and rail lines and with the largely uninsured cost of damage to businesses and homes inundated by the flood waters.

Union Pacific Corp, the No. 1 U.S. railroad, said on Thursday it had reopened an East-West track through Iowa, allowing limited traffic. A pair of lock and dams reopened on the Mississippi River, though more than 240 miles of the vital waterway remain closed, stranding scores of barges.

Days without rain have allowed rivers and creeks to recede in Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana, revealing the scope of the multibillion-dollar flood disaster. Scattered rainstorms were forecast, but nothing like the deluges that dumped a foot (0.3 meter) of rain on parts of the region earlier this month.

The final destination for all that flood water was the Mississippi River, which had breached or over-topped 23 levees along its North-South route.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said 48 levees protecting more than 285,000 acres of cropland from Dubuque, Iowa, to St. Louis, Missouri, were overflowing or at high flood risk.

The latest to be overtopped was close to the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, north of St. Louis.

Thousands of people filled sandbags and bulldozers pushed piles of sand to patch up leaking levees, as the raging current sought an outlet underneath, over or through the earth and sand embankments.

Corn prices retreated on Thursday, after setting a record high above $8 a bushel on the flooding that has submerged or stunted crops on millions of acres (hectares). According to crop analysts, 5 million acres of cropland mostly planted to corn and soybeans have been ruined.

"If we get good weather we could still have decent crops," said Vic Lespinasse, analyst for GrainAnalyst.com.

"The levees are still breaking and it's tragic for the people involved," he said. "But if we have another weather problem, we could take off like a rocket," he said.
 

(Additional reporting by Nick Carey in Hull, Lisa Shumaker and Sam Nelson in Chicago; writing by Andrew Stern; Editing by Jackie Frank)

    Bush visits Iowa, billions in flood aid available, R, 19.6.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSN1346134820080619

This Land

A Hand-to-Hand Struggle

With a Raging River

June 19, 2008
The New York Times
By DAN BARRY

CANTON, Mo.

They sandbag by moonlight. The school superintendent and the judge, the police sergeant and the mechanic, the Amish man in a straw hat and the young man in a Budweiser T-shirt, they lay down sandbags as if making peace offerings to a vexed god called the Mississippi.

The only sounds on Tuesday night: the whine of all-terrain vehicles climbing up the levee to deliver more sandbags; the rustle of bags being lifted; the calling mmmf! of those tossing bags into the air and the answering ooof! of those catching them in the chest; the thump of bags dropped into strategic place; and, ever so faintly, a distant aaahhh of rushing, roiling water.

“You sit here and listen,” Jim Crenshaw, a local emergency management official says with an awe just inches short of horror. “Normally you never hear it like that.”

Behind him, the swollen moon sends a charged lightness skimming across the river’s black surface and onto the white sandbags. Each bag tossed and each bag laid seems now to glow, as if containing something more than mere river sand. Mmmf! Ooof! Aaahhh...

And here, along the lip of the town’s levee, remain the torn, whitish remnants of sandbags lifted, tossed and stacked before the disastrous flood of 1993, when the people of Canton somehow managed, almost against the odds, to hold back the river.

The men and boys catching the sandbags of 2008, then, are standing on the successful offerings of the past.

There is something almost too simple, even primitive, about sandbagging. In an age when anyone can receive a satellite photograph of where they’re standing with the click of an iPhone, and when the river’s southward swell can be tracked like a tagged animal lumbering along a worn path, we still heavily depend on a basic, communal practice: shovel sand in bag, place bag on ground, pray it works, as it often does.

The Army Corps of Engineers offers an appreciation for sandbags on its Web site; sandbags, it says, are “a steadfast tool for flood fighting.” And by now, people along the Mississippi know the very specific instructions — fill bags to little more than half-way; start downstream and work up; layer bags just so — as well as the irony that their bags are often filled with sand dredged from the very river they are fending off.

But there is an ingredient just as necessary as sand: people. In the small towns along Highway 79, which meanders for dozens of miles alongside the river, people gather at firehouses, garages and street corners to participate in a ritual that combines hope and earth.

In Clarksville, for example, some inmates from the women’s prison in Vandalia spend these days shoveling and packing while under the gaze of corrections officers in sunglasses. In white shirts stamped with “WR” — for work release — they form an assembly line that snakes away from a diminishing mound of sand toward the growing river, whose threat unites them with all those who will not be traveling 40 miles by van back to a prison.

Here are Sandra Miller, 48, and Thalisia Ervin, 40, basking in sweat and in the appreciation of Clarksville. Ms. Miller, who has already served 13 years for “being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” as she puts it, says the weight of another bag caught sometimes knocks the wind out of her, but then she thinks to herself:

“This is for the good. This is for our good.”

Still, Ms. Miller looks around, sees the water higher and closer than it was the day before, and she questions that good. “It makes me wonder,” she says. “Does it help?”

“It does, it does,” her sister inmate reassures her. “It’s slowing it down.”

The story is the same in other communities. Inmates and Mennonites, children who should be playing and retirees who should be resting, all answering the mayday calls, all racing against the lowering sun and the rising water. All sandbagging.

Tuesday had begun with the rise of another deceptive sun over Canton, a farming and college town of 2,500. The halcyon days of mere weeks ago, when the Mississippi River was content to be a vehicle of commerce and recreation, were gone; now its greedy waters had consumed the riverside park and a good chunk of the active rail line, and were still agitating for more, rapping against the town’s three-mile-long levee.

The town’s emergency management director, Jeff McReynolds, had issued a statement “highly, highly” recommending that residents east of Seventh Street sleep somewhere other than their homes until further notice. He had also called for all able-bodied men to report for sandbagging and levee duties.

This would explain, then, why a visitor driving through the high ground of Canton at evening time finds tidy homes, the tidy campus of Culver-Stockton College — and almost no people. That is because many of them are downtown, near the river, sandbagging: able-bodied and otherwise; men, women and children, including Dalton, an 11-year-old boy with a dirt-smeared face who keeps pestering local officials with, “What can I do now, huh? What can I do?”

They smile and point him back to the sandbags.

With the moon rising, getting brighter, Mr. Crenshaw, one of the local officials, patrols the levee, swatting away bugs, overseeing the sandbagging operation he helped put together. One night last week he and another man drove about six hours round-trip to Davenport, Iowa, to collect 250,000 empty bags from the Corps of Engineers. They arrived at 5:15 in the morning; by 7, sand-filled bags were being stacked.

First, he says, workers dug a shallow trench along the levee, hammered in stakes, put up a short wooden wall called a “batter board,” laid some plastic sheeting — at this point Mr. Crenshaw is interrupted by the boy named Dalton, looking again for something to do.

“Hang tight, little buddy,” the man says to the boy. Pointing to a cluster of young Mennonite women filling bags at a large sand pile, he says, “Can you help them load over there?”

The boy runs to the pile, and Mr. Crenshaw picks up where he left off, saying that Canton has gone through about 850,000 bags. And they need more in this battle of inches, of guessing how far above 27 feet or so the river will rise.

The absence of the sun lends menace to the river. The sandbagging normally stops at 9 at night, for safety reasons. But few sandbaggers stop; few think they have the time. They’re still there — the civic leaders and local nobodies, those young Amish and Mennonite men tossing 50-pound bags around like pillows, that boy named Dalton.

In the hours to come, well into early morning, workers will race from wet spot to wet spot along the northern stretch of the levee, laying down sandbags to shore up what little separates a river from a people. The shoosh of shovel blade into sand, the rustle of bags, the exhalations of breath, under bright moonlight.

Another day will dawn with disaster averted, and by Wednesday afternoon there will be 50,000 sandbags. “Idle and waiting to be used,” Mr. Crenshaw says, as if confirming that each bag contained more than river sand.

    A Hand-to-Hand Struggle With a Raging River, NYT, 19.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/19/us/19land.html?hp

Along the Mississippi,

Wary Eyes on Rising Water

June 18, 2008
The New York Times
By MONICA DAVEY and ANAHAD O’CONNOR

CANTON, Mo. — The Mississippi River washed over two levees in western Illinois early Wednesday, forcing people out of their homes, destroying countless acres of crops, and bringing the number of levees that have given way to the river this week to nearly 20.

The latest breaks occurred overnight near the small town of Meyer on the western border of Illinois and Missouri, deluging roads and farmland and prompting the authorities to force about 50 people to leave their homes. The river was expected to crest early this afternoon farther downstream in Quincy, Ill., a town of about 40,000 people perched on the banks of the Mississippi.

The rising waters further strained some of the country’s most fertile farmland, pushing corn prices near record highs. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, the flooding thus far has left about 12 percent of Midwestern crops in poor to very poor condition, lifting corn prices to $8 a bushel and soybeans to $15.96 a bushel. Those prices were expected to climb as the flooding continued.

Here in Canton, a town of 2,500 in eastern Missouri, people were bracing for the Mississippi to crest by Thursday morning.

Workers on four-wheel ATVs zipped up and down the town’s earthen levee carting an extra layer of protection: 1.3 million sandbags to sit atop a two foot wall that they have built — in less than a week — atop the levee. Looking out from the levee on Wednesday, the Mississippi was only feet away from the top. Farmland, a road, and the welcome sign for Canton were under about 12 feet of water.

Still, officials here say they hope the levee will protect the town. Every time a sign of water slipped through the top — or a puddle appeared in sandbags, more ATVs raced to the spot to shore it up. “We think this is going to hold,” said Richard Dodd, an alderman here, as he drew on his experience in 1993 and directed traffic and ordered more sand bags in different spots. “We were green in ’93, but now we know,” he said, referring to the last enormous flood here, a year when the level crept only a few inches higher than is expected by morning.

As the overflowing waters of tributaries began to recede in Iowa and Wisconsin this week, they had nowhere to go but here, into the legendary Mississippi, a river that was growing mightier by the hour. On Wednesday, in parts of Iowa, Illinois and Missouri, all eyes were on this river, which was expected to reach record levels in some areas before cresting later this week.

Law enforcement officials and residents were focused on the patchwork of levees that protect these shores, and altogether officials were closely monitoring at least 27 levees for the possibility the waters might flow over them.

In Clarksville, another quaint town not far away, the residents have been struggling these past few days to keep the river at bay. Already, the new riverfront park is out of sight, under water. Disappearing slowly is the antique mall, the bank, the church, the American Legion hall, the oldest house in town. And the Mississippi River is only getting started.

“You patch one thing and something else falls apart,” Jo Anne Smiley, the mayor of this town of 490, said on Tuesday as a giant water pump churned outside her City Hall door and word of new woes — a sewerage system failure — arrived. “We’ve been through what the Mississippi can do. But I don’t know this time. The fear is if it all goes under.”

On Tuesday, at least four breaks were reported among scores of levees, officials said, three of them in Missouri north of St. Louis. Near Gulfport, Ill., a levee gave way before dawn, allowing the river to surge through a hole that soon grew to 300 feet wide.

That town and thousands of acres of farmland were flooded, and the Great River Bridge, connecting Illinois to Burlington, Iowa, had to be closed, the Henderson County Sheriff’s office said. Four hundred people were evacuated, several by helicopter and boat. By evening, several other levees were showing signs of vulnerability known as sand boils, ant-hill-like formations produced by extreme water pressure.

Elsewhere, some highways and bridges along the Mississippi were closed. Evacuations were suggested, shelters were opened, and free tetanus shots were being dispensed. National Guard members, volunteers and inmates feverishly sandbagged homes, levees and, in towns like Clarksville, nearly everything else that was not already under water.

Water teased at the ankles of Pam Myers, 45, and her three sons as they rushed on Tuesday to surround their house in Meyer with the mound of sand town officials had dumped in her yard. Ms. Myers pointed grimly at the line on her house — hip high — where officials had told her water would probably reach, but said she had no plans to go anywhere, even when the waters are expected to crest here near the end of the week.

“I’ll stay and fight her,” she said of the Mississippi. “I’ve got river in my blood.”

Monica Davey reported from Clarksville, Mo., and Catrin Einhorn from Chicago. Anahad O’Connor reported from New York.

    Along the Mississippi, Wary Eyes on Rising Water, NYT, 18.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/us/18cnd-flood.html?hp

Mississippi overflows levees,

crops threatened

Wed Jun 18, 2008
2:57pm EDT
Reuters
By Nick Carey

FORT MADISON, Iowa (Reuters) - The swollen Mississippi River ran over the top of at least 11 more levees

on Wednesday as floodwaters swallowed up more U.S. farmland, adding to billion-dollar losses and feeding global food inflation fears.

Volunteers and aid workers were piling sandbags up and down the most important U.S. inland waterway to try to protect more levees and thousands of acres of prime crop land threatened as the river's crest moves south after last week's torrential rains.

"Their misfortune had been our fortune. I'd rather it hadn't come at the expense of others. But it is what it is," Steve Cirinna of the Lee County Emergency Management Agency said of the levee breaches, which lowered the river.

The slow-rolling disaster, the worst flooding in the Midwest in 15 years, has swamped vast sections of the U.S. farm belt and forced tens of thousands of people from their homes.

The cost of the disaster may end up rivaling that of 1993 Midwest floods that caused more than $20 billion in damage and 48 deaths. This month's flooding has caused few deaths, with Iowa hardest hit. But the damage has yet to be fully assessed.

The prospects of smaller crops have already jolted commodity markets, food producers and exporters. Chicago Board of Trade corn prices traded at a record $8.07 a bushel.

The floods will mean more food inflation, not only for U.S. consumers, but also for dozens of countries that buy American grain. The United States exports 54 percent of the world's corn, 36 percent of its soybeans and 23 percent of its wheat.
 

RIVER FLOODING MOVES SOUTH

LeRoy Lippert, chairman of emergency management committee for Des Moines County, Iowa, said volunteers and aid workers in the town of Burlington filled 2.5 million sandbags in the past week before the river crested.

"All systems are holding right now. We're in a watch and wait mode with our levees. The situation has stabilized in the last 24 hours," Lippert said.

"The best news is that we're not getting any rain, that would be utterly devastating if we got heavy rain now."

The Army Corps of Engineers, which operates river locks and dams, said 19 levees along the Mississippi had failed with the latest levee breaks near Meyer, Illinois, and north of St. Louis, Missouri.

"They were lower level agricultural levees," said St Louis district Corps spokesman Alan Dooley. "We're also watching another seven levees that may overtop in the next couple of days ... all agricultural levees."

The Corps has identified 26 levees protecting about 285,000 acres of cropland that were already under water or at high risk of flooding. Another seven were seen as potential risks.

Among the most fertile farms in Iowa and Illinois have land that lies in the Mississippi River's vast flood plain.

"Some of the richest farmland is to be found between the river and the bluff and we aim to protect it," said Lippert.

Estimates are that 5 million acres across the Midwest have been ruined and will not produce a crop this year.

Iowa and Illinois usually produce one-third of all U.S. corn and soybeans. Expectations of reduced crops from the main sources of livestock feed, renewable fuels like ethanol, starch and edible oils has sent commodity prices to record highs.

"We continue to get news of more acreage losses because of the flooding and that continues to support the market," said Mario Balletto, Chicago-based grains analyst for Citigroup.

The worst flooding has struck Iowa but evacuations have also affected flooded sections of Indiana, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Minnesota.

Weather forecasters said thunderstorms may return to Iowa and Illinois on Thursday.

(Additional reporting by Lisa Shumaker, Peter Bohan and Christine Stebbins in Chicago; Debbie Charles in Washington; Writing by Andrew Stern; Editing by Chris Wilson)

    Mississippi overflows levees, crops threatened, R, 18.6.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSN1346134820080618

FACTBOX:

Some major floods in the United States

Mon Jun 16, 2008
2:30pm EDT
Reuters

(Reuters) - Overflowing rivers in Iowa and other Midwest U.S. states forced evacuations and disrupted the region's economy on Friday with fears of worse to come from fragile levees and more rain.

Following are some major floods to hit the United States:

* In June 2006, floods killed at least 16 people in the eastern United States. Authorities ordered hundreds of thousands of people evacuated in New Jersey, New York, Maryland and Pennsylvania. Damage estimates exceeded $1 billion.

* In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans and devastated the Gulf Coast, causing more than 1,800 deaths. The $125 billion in damage made it the most expensive natural disaster in U.S. history.

* In 1998, flooding and deadly tornadoes swept through central, southern and eastern Texas, causing 31 deaths and prompting the evacuation of 14,000 people. Flooding was reported in 60 counties -- about one-fourth of the state. Damage estimates exceeded $1 billion.

* In 1993, floods ravaged nine Midwestern states, killing 48 people and leaving nearly 70,000 people homeless. The cost of flood damage was estimated at $21 billion. The Mississippi River on August 1 crested in St. Louis at a record 49.4 feet.

* In 1972, Tropical Storm Agnes dumped 8 inches to 16 inches of rain over a large portion of upstate New York, Pennsylvania and Maryland, with some locations receiving nearly 20 inches of rain in three days. The storm killed 122 people and caused over $3 billion in damage.

* In 1969, Hurricane Camille's torrential rains struck mountainous west and central Virginia. Sixty-seven people were reported dead and 106 missing after floods virtually washed out towns in the mountains.

* In 1927, levees built to contain the Mississippi River broke, and a wall of water pushed its way across Midwestern farmlands. The flood covered 27,000 square miles (69,920.000 sq km), an area about the size of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Vermont combined. The flood killed about 1,000 people and displaced some 700,000 more. At a time when the entire federal budget was barely $3 billion, it caused an estimated $1 billion in damage.

* In 1889, more than 2,200 people died in Johnstown, Pennsylvania when the South Fork dam broke after days of heavy rain. The town was destroyed within minutes by a wall of water that rushed down a narrow valley.

Sources: Reuters/National Climatic Data Center/ www.AccuWeather.com / www.2facts.com / www.pbs.org/   www.usnews.com/www.pubs.usgs.gov

(Writing by Paul Grant, Washington Editorial Reference Unit)

    FACTBOX: Some major floods in the United States, R, 16.6.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSN1321057020080616

In Midwest Floods,

a Broad Threat to Crops

June 16, 2008
The New York Times
By SUSAN SAULNY

NEWHALL, Iowa — Here, in some of the best soil in the world, the stunted stalks of Dave Timmerman’s newly planted corn are wilting in what sometimes look more like rice paddies than the plains, the sunshine glinting off of pools of collected water. Although time is running out, he has yet to plant all of his soybean crop because the waterlogged soil cannot support his footsteps, much less heavy machinery.

Mr. Timmerman’s small farm has been flooded four times in the past month by the Wildcat Creek, a tributary of the Cedar River which overflowed its banks at a record 31 feet last week, causing catastrophic damage in nearby Cedar Rapids and other eastern Iowa towns and farmsteads.

“In the lean years, we had beautiful crops but they weren’t worth much,” Mr. Timmerman said, surveying his farm, which his family has tended since his great-great-grandfather. “Now, with commodity prices sky high, mother nature is throwing us all these curve balls. I’m 42 years old and these are by far the poorest crops I’ve ever seen.”

And he added, “It’s going downhill by the day.”

As the floodwaters receded in some areas, they rose in others.

On Sunday, residents in Iowa City — where the Iowa River was nearing its projected crest and rising downstream — were struggling with the waters, which submerged part of the University of Iowa’s campus and sent workers scrambling to move books and paintings from the university’s Arts Campus.

“Certainly Iowa City has never seen anything like this before,” said Linda Kettner, a university spokeswoman. “A lot of people have been displaced. It’s a very poignant time. And at the University of Iowa, we’ve never faced a challenge like this.”

In Cedar Rapids — where the Cedar River crested at 31 feet on Friday — the water receded Sunday, but most of the downtown streets were still flooded.

But officials were worried that worse might lie ahead as the rain-gorged tributaries spill into the Mississippi River system, threatening scores of communities. The Mississippi is expected to crest by midweek or days later.

For Mr. Timmerman and the thousands of other farmers who have seen their fields turn to floodplains, the rain and flooding could not have struck at a worse time, and their plight extends far beyond the Midwest.

Last week, the price of corn rose above $7 a bushel on the commodities market for the first time, and soybeans rose sharply, too, reacting to the harsh weather hampering crop production across the Midwest. In addition to Iowa, the farming states of Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin and Minnesota have suffered an unusual level of flooding this year.

Soaring global demand in addition to the increased use of corn for ethanol, an alternative fuel, have shrunk the worldwide supply of staples that are the core of practically every continent’s diet.

Meanwhile, the price of oil has jumped, raising the cost of producing crops and feeding livestock and causing an increase in grocery bills here and abroad, sparking riots and protests in at least two dozen countries.

At a moment when corn should be almost waist-high here in Iowa, the country’s top-producing corn state, more than a million acres have been washed out and destroyed.

Beyond that, agriculture experts estimate that 2 million acres of soy beans have been lost to water, putting the state’s total grain loss at 20 percent so far, with the threat of more rain to come.

“The American farmer, we feed the world,” Mr. Timmerman said. “We’re going to be short on corn and we’re going to be short on soybeans.”

He continued, “It’s heart-wrenching.”

While Mr. Timmerman feels the weight of the situation on his own bottom line — he had just saved enough to upgrade from a 6-row planter to a 16-row version and splurged on his first new tractor — he also feels the weight of the world as he ponders his output under the wide skies of Benton County, an idyllic landscape that could rival a movie set with its picture-perfect backdrops of big red barns.

Jim Fawcett, a crop specialist at the Iowa State University’s agricultural extension service, has been hosting emergency meetings with farmers around the state. With standing water comes concerns about manure storage, pollution, livestock safety, soil erosion, mold and fungus and other plant diseases.

“We know there’s going to be less of a crop now than there could have been months ago,” he said. “There will be some fields where there’s no crop. If the flooding continues, we won’t have any growing season to work with. For corn, time has run out.”

And the flooding has continued. The rain hardly stops for long. As Mr. Timmerman prepared Saturday to leave his house in suburban Cedar Rapids for his fields in Benton County, a thunderstorm pounded the ground with hail. But before he reached the fields, gray skies gave way to blinding sunshine. The light produced an odd effect on the drenched fields, causing them to shimmer.

“What kills me is that it’s beautiful, then it rains, it’s beautiful, then it rains,” said Mr. Timmerman’s wife, Rachelle. “Huge rain drops. Just pouring.”

The ground does not have time to dry before more rain adds to the already saturated earth. And unseasonably cool temperatures have not helped. In May, there were some 30-degree nights. Iowa’s growing season is notoriously productive because it is usually long and warm.

“Tessa kept asking, ‘When is spring coming, Mommy?’ “ Mrs. Timmerman said, referring to the youngest of her four children. “She’s 4, and she was learning about the seasons, so she wondered where spring was.”

The temperatures have finally warmed, but, Mr. Timmerman said, “We’ve been about a month behind in our weather all year.”

If the corn sprouts do not mature enough before the deep heat of summer hits, there will be more problems ahead.

The bad news keeps on coming. On Wednesday, a burst of high wind, perhaps a tornado, ripped apart one of Mr. Timmerman’s storage sheds, depositing splintery wooden debris over some of his puny soybeans. The bean sprouts should be mid-shin height by now but they barely reach to the top of Mr. Timmerman’s flip-flop.

“In years like this, you hope you can pay your bills,” he said. “Our family has roots in farming, and even when times are tough, you stay with it.”

They have certainly known the tough times. There were many years when Mr. Timmerman did not make enough money to have to pay income taxes. He used nothing but second-hand farm equipment — some of it decades old — and rented his house. He worked a full-time job off the farm, and still managed to produce bumper crops of hundreds of bushels of corn an acre.

“I knew that one day we’d see good times,” he said. Those days began to come just a few years ago. Corn prices inched up, then leaped, and suddenly he had enough money to buy a five-bedroom house, new trucks and a $90,000 combine. Their family grew with another baby, Tessa.

But he has had to leave the new 16-row planter next to the barn on what should have been planting days. He is spending two or three times as much on seed, fertilizer and diesel fuel — some $1,500 a month on that alone. And the processing companies where he needs to send 17 truckloads of last year’s stored corn are under water in Cedar Rapids.

Mr. Timmerman has five plots of land adding up to 760 acres. He is glad that he diversified his land, but even the land that has not been flooded has soaked up too much rain and the stalks are not anything like what he knows they could be.

An optimist at heart and a pragmatist with German roots, Mr. Timmerman grew more dejected as he drove around Benton County from Van Horne to Vinton to Keystone taking a close look at his fields for the first time since the major flooding began.

“I’m a little more depressed than I was earlier because I’m seeing dark spots that I know aren’t going to produce,” he said. “This is looking worse than I thought. It really gets to you.”

But there are bright moments even at times like this. Mr. Timmerman’s only son John, 7, recently brought home his first-grade journals.

“Yesterday, I rode the combine with my dad,” the little boy wrote, Mr. Timmerman said, bursting with pride. He has already outfitted John with miniature versions of all the major farm equipment.

“Farmers are optimistic,” Mr. Timmerman said. “We got to be, to go out and plant and rely on mother nature.”

Catrin Einhorn contributed reporting.

    In Midwest Floods, a Broad Threat to Crops, NYT, 16.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/16/us/16midwest.html?hp

36,000 Iowans homeless

as floodwaters recede

15 June 2008
USA Today
By Alan Gomez, Marisol Bello and Judy Keen

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa — Marie Welton figures her daughter will have to bulldoze her flooded home here. She worries about the survival of her own business, a children's hair salon, as people recover from epic flooding that put 1,000 blocks underwater.

"They say we're going to be resilient. They say we'll overcome this," Welton, 52, said Sunday, but Iowans' can-do spirit "is going to keep going down before it comes up."

Floodwaters began to recede Sunday in Iowa's two largest cities, Des Moines and Cedar Rapids, and the Iowa River crested in Iowa City after swamping part of the University of Iowa, but many communities face daunting cleanup and recovery efforts as the waters still threaten communities elsewhere in the region. Downstream Iowa communities such as Wapello, Burlington and Keokuk are braced for record flooding. Davenport put out an urgent call Sunday for volunteers to fill sandbags to reinforce two levees.

The National Weather Service predicts record flooding on the Mississippi River on Wednesday and Thursday at Canton, Hannibal and Louisiana, Mo., and Quincy, Ill. Authorities in Alexandria and Canton called for voluntary evacuations Sunday. Workers rushed to add 3 feet of sandbags to Canton's 27.5-foot levee. The river is forecast to crest there at 28 feet — 14 feet above flood stage.

"We're preparing for crests that are coming Wednesday through Friday that will rival the all-time records of 1993," Missouri Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder said.

For a week, relentless storm systems that spawned tornadoes and dumped torrents of rain have flooded huge portions of the upper Midwest. Flooded rivers and breached levees forced tens of thousands of people to evacuate, caused millions of dollars of damage, covered vast stretches of farmland and strained the patience of people across the region.

Iowa, hit hardest through the weekend, got more rain Sunday. Brian Pierce, meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Davenport, said the next three or four days will be generally dry.

About 36,000 Iowans in 11 counties are homeless, Gov. Chet Culver said Sunday. In Cedar Rapids, 25,000 people were forced from their homes. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is taking applications for disaster assistance.

"This is far over record flooding. It is of historic proportions," David Miller, administrator of the Iowa Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, said at a briefing. Eighty-three of Iowa's 99 counties have been declared state disaster areas. Three deaths were attributed to flooding.

In Cedar Rapids, in blocks where the water had receded, residents waited in line for a chance to grab a few things from their homes with police escorts. City spokesman Dave Koch said initial estimates of property damage total $1 billion.

When Kaleen Large left her house Thursday, water was rising and TVs were floating. She grabbed the cedar chest her late grandmother had left her. It was a 1939 graduation gift filled with photo albums, family heirlooms and Large's childhood stuffed duck.

Large, Welton's daughter, pushed it halfway up the stairs to the second floor before police ordered her out. "It's frustrating, of course," said Large, 33, "but everybody's in the same boat. Well, not really."

David Eberle was angry as he waited at one of 10 checkpoints. "The longer they make us wait, the more trouble we're going to be in," said Eberle, 48. "We should be able to save our homes." He could have been cleaning out mold-causing muck, he said.

Cedar Rapids Police Chief Greg Graham said he understood the frustration. It's important, he said, to maintain a secure perimeter around flooded neighborhoods to prevent looting and to ensure that nobody walks into a house with structural or electrical problems.

"If we start losing control, we'll never get it back," Graham said.

Steve Daringer had no reason to line up. His home was still underwater. He's still paying off the government loan he used to repair his house from a 1993 flood and doesn't know what to expect when he finally can go home. "We have no idea what's left," he said.

Sharon Hicks did get a look at her house. After taking a few steps in, she looked down at the water-soaked floor and said, "I don't want to look. It's a disaster."

Hicks left with a bag full of wet clothes and pictures of her late mother and late sister that hung unharmed above the flood level. The house was a muddy mess. Her collections of Elvis Presley mementos and Native American art were scattered on the floor. A cabinet was on the wrong side of the room.

"I was going to get my clothes, but my dresser's upside down," said Hicks, 66, a retired nurse's aide. One of her daughters, Marsha Hicks, couldn't even reach her basement apartment. When she pulled open the door, water was still up to the top step.

"Everything I owned was down there," said Marsha Hicks, 48. "I need some air. I can't breathe." She had left Thursday to run errands and came back 90 minutes later to find the basement completely flooded.

"It was like an Alfred Hitchcock movie with the water coming up behind me," she said.

The National Weather Service said the flow on the Cedar River through Cedar Rapids peaked at 149,500 cubic feet per second Friday, more than doubling the previous record of 73,000 in 1961.

The river fell to 24.6 feet Sunday, a drop of more than 5 feet from Friday's crest of 31.1 feet.

The town of Palo, which has fewer than 1,000 residents, is still unreachable, said Linda Langston, chairwoman of the Linn County Board of Supervisors.

She said teams have gone in to assess damage. They want to secure two floating propane tanks and check other hazards before letting people return. "They're not going to like what they see," she said.

'Flood of epic proportions'

The Iowa River crested in Iowa City on Sunday at 31.5 feet, earlier and 18 inches lower than projected. The river is expected to remain at that level through today.

"It's a flood of epic proportions for us," said Mike Sullivan, a spokesman for the Johnson County Office of Emergency Management. He said 5,000 people were displaced in the county of 111,000. The worst flooding was in Iowa City and neighboring Coralville.

"The escalation of this event has hopefully stopped," Iowa City manager Michael Lombardo said. He said it could take five to 10 days for the water to begin to recede.

"This is the worst flooding event in the history of Iowa City," Lombardo said. In 1993, the previous record flood, it took more than a month for water to recede. At least 200 homes have been flooded and 600 people evacuated.

Brian Mara fled his second-floor apartment in Coralville on Friday as water streamed in under the door. He left so quickly, he forgot his wallet with his ID and bank card. He paddled back on an air mattress later Friday to retrieve his wallet.

"I'm homeless," Mara said. "Everything I own was in there. I don't know what I'm going to do."

On Sunday, wearing the T-shirt, beige cargo shorts and flip-flops he wore when he fled, Mara, 40, a carpet installer, helped his co-workers and boss salvage merchandise from a flooded warehouse. "Ugh," he said, scraping muck off his feet on a patch of grass. "There's no clean water here anywhere."

The basement showroom of Randy's Carpets and Interiors flooded almost to the top, while its one-story warehouse nearby flooded up to 3 feet deep.

Sullivan said the county is trying to protect six power substations that supply electricity to hundreds of thousands of people. Four are surrounded by water, but temporary levees were holding Sunday.

Sixteen University of Iowa buildings, including the art museum and a recital hall, were flooded. The university suspended summer classes and told non-essential workers to stay away. Art treasures by Pablo Picasso and Jackson Pollock had been removed.

"We are not through this by any means," university President Sally Mason said. "The water is very, very high. If the buildings take on more water, they could become unstable. It is a very volatile situation."

'We've been through it before'

In Des Moines's capital, the Des Moines River broke through a levee Saturday after volunteers, city workers and Iowa National Guard troops worked for days to shore it up. More than 200 homes, a high school and three dozen businesses were inundated.

Leane Hartney and Rebekah Dunlap awoke at a motel to see television images of their home engulfed by floodwaters. A day earlier, they thought it would be safe. "When I saw that, I was just sick," Hartney said.

Kathy and John Essex reopened their restaurant, Mr. Bibbs, 18 weeks after the floods of 1993 with $60 borrowed from a relative in the cash register. They had used all their savings to clean and repair their north Des Moines restaurant. "The first time was the worst. It broke my heart," said Kathy Essex. "This time, we knew it was going to happen. We've been through it before; we'll be able to do it again."

In Columbus Junction, where the Cedar and Iowa rivers meet, crews spent Friday building a temporary levee. It gave way Saturday night, flooding the town of 2,000.

Councilman Hal Prior said the bowling alley, senior center, grocery store and medical offices were flooded to their roofs. The water treatment plant is flooded and inoperable. Two 18-wheelers of bottled water were delivered by the state, county and National Guard.

Officials worked to hook up 3,000-foot hoses from their water system to one operated by a Tyson's chicken plant on the outskirts of town to supply residents with water for bathing and flushing toilets. The town is trucking in portajohns until the city can supply sufficient running water.

"The good news is that the crest has passed and the water dropped 4 inches in the last half-hour," Prior said Sunday. "We think we've passed the crisis." The bad news: Floodwaters are unlikely to recede fully for at least a week, he said.

The region's economy will feel the flood's effects long after the water retreats. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has closed a 315-mile stretch of the Mississippi River to barge traffic, starting at Bellevue, Iowa, and ending at Winfield, Mo.

Corps spokesman Alan Dooley said that during the last two weeks of June 2007, 1,881 barges carrying more than 2 million tons of commodities passed through the locks at Winfield. More than half of that cargo was agricultural commodities such as corn; the rest was coal, petroleum products, chemicals and construction supplies, he said.

Iowa business, farm and government leaders said losses are likely to exceed the $2.1 billion in damages and lost business in 1993. In the short term, though, the rebuilding of homes, businesses and infrastructure could create an uptick in Iowa's economy. "We're talking 2 to 3 billion to get this place back on its feet," said Lee Clancey, president of the Cedar Rapids Area Chamber of Commerce.

Agriculture losses could have global implications. The U.S. Department of Agriculture recently lowered forecasts for this season, which if accurate will mean higher prices for food, livestock and ethanol. "This is a disaster that's growing in size every day," said Craig Lang, president of the Iowa Farm Bureau. "I am deeply, deeply concerned that there will be farmers who simply won't survive this."

Missouri might take the next hit. Many levees in the region have been improved since the 1993 floods, but those in northeastern Missouri aren't as high as those around St. Louis, Dooley said. Many levees north of St. Louis have as much as a 12.5% chance of being inundated in any given year, he said.

This is likely to be one of those years. "We are confident that there are levees up there that will be overtopped," Dooley said.

Bello reported from Iowa City, Keen from Chicago.

Contributing: Matt Kelley and Bob Swanson in McLean, Va.; The Des Moines Register

    36,000 Iowans homeless as floodwaters recede, UT, 15.6.2008, http://www.usatoday.com/weather/floods/2008-06-15-floods_N.htm

No relief for flooded crops,

more rains coming

Fri Jun 13, 2008
12:02pm EDT
Reuters

CHICAGO (Reuters) - More rains pummeled parts of the U.S. Midwest crop belt in the past day, offering no relief to flooded crop fields or swollen rivers after days of storms, a forecaster said Friday.

Up to 2 inches of rain fell in eastern Iowa on Thursday and an inch in northern Missouri. Rains in the eastern Midwest favored southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois where 0.3 to 2.5 inches fell.

"There seems to be more concern about farmers not being able to finish soybean planting as it's getting late," said Mike Palmerino, forecaster with DTN Meteorlogix.

"There's also corn acreage that will not get planted and won't get replanted," he said.

Roughly 17 million acres of soybeans have yet to be planted as of Sunday, based on the government's weekly crop progress report. This week's rains offered little opportunity for farmers to finish planting.

This is especially worrisome for U.S. farmers because they were counting on big corn and soybean crops to meet the world's demand for grains for food and feedstocks to produce biofuels.

More rains will move through the Midwest over the next week.

Central Missouri was forecast to get 0.25 to 1.0 inch of rain, locally heavier, on Friday. In the eastern belt, rains of 0.5 to 2.5 inches were forecast, with the central to southern portions of Illinois, Indiana and Ohio getting the most.

Moderate to heavy showers return on Sunday. From 0.25 to 1.0 inch, locally heavier, were forecast for the western belt for Sunday. The east should see similar amounts Sunday to Monday, Palmerino said.

Additional rains of 0.25 to 1.5 inch, locally heavier, were expected for Tuesday to Wednesday.

Temperatures will be below normal, with highs in mid-70s to mid-80s degrees Fahrenheit the next seven days in the western Corn Belt.

The eastern Midwest will be warmer through Sunday as highs reach the upper 70s to mid-80s. Then it will turn cooler, with highs in the mid-70s to low 80s through Thursday.

"The cool temperatures continue to slow crop development and emergence," Palmerino said.

The Meteorlogix six- to 10-day Midwest outlook, Wednesday to Sunday, called for normal to below-normal temperatures and normal to above-normal rainfall.
 

(Reporting by Christine Stebbins; Editing by John Picinich)

    No relief for flooded crops, more rains coming, R, 13.6.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN1344684920080613

Waters in Flooded City in Iowa

Likely to Crest Soon

June 12, 2008
The New York Times
By CHRISTOPHER MAAG and MIKE NIZZA

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa — A city already deluged by record-breaking floods was pummeled with more rain overnight, swelling the Cedar River enough to require the evacuation of a local hospital and the closing of a major highway. Forecasters predicted that the water would crest by the end of the day and begin to slowly recede over the weekend.

Officials at Mercy Medical Center hospital, fearing they would lose power, decided to send its 176 patients, including babies in intensive care and nursing home residents, to other facilities. On Thursday morning, the hospital had switched to backup generators, which were threatened by floodwaters hours later.

“Our hope was to continue to operate and serve our patients as we always have,“ Tim Charles, the hospital’s president, said in a statement. “Unfortunately, this has become a disaster of unpredictable and potentially catastrophic proportions.” Volunteers played a major role in the evacuation.

To the south of the city, the rising Cedar River covered Interstate 80, severing the coast-to-coast link. A day earlier, Amtrak had canceled service to Chicago on its California Zephyr line after tracks were submerged.

While the cresting of the floodwaters was good news for Cedar Rapids, the city was expected to stay wet for a while. The National Weather Service said the river would not return to its previous record depth of 20 feet, set in 1851, until Thursday. More rain may fall over the weekend, according to forecasts.

“We’ve got serious problems,” said Justin Shields, a Cedar Rapids City Council member. “And we’ve got a long way to go yet.”

Water was in short supply, and only one of six wells in the city was functioning properly. “If we lost that one we would be in serious trouble,” Dave Koch of the Cedar Rapids fire department told The Associated Press. “Basically we are using more water than we are producing.”

The Linn County Emergency Management Agency warned that the water shortage could last weeks. “It’s not conserve water because the world is going to be better because of it,” Dustin Hinrichs, a spokesman for the agency, told The Gazette. “It’s conserve water because we might not have any tomorrow.”

Power failures reduced the capacity of the local water treatment plant to 25 percent. At 6 p.m. on Thursday, emergency management officials announced that Cedar Rapids residents would be required to use water only for drinking until further notice.

By Friday morning, the Cedar River was about 31 feet deep, or 19 feet above flood stage, according to the National Weather Service. The water was expected to rise another seven inches by Friday afternoon, and reach a record crest.

“Usually if you break a record, you only do it by an inch or two,” said Jeff Zogg, a hydrologist for the Weather Service in Davenport, Iowa. “But breaking it by six feet? That’s pretty amazing.”

On Thursday, the white T-shirt worn by Chuck Johnson, 56, was soaked to the neckline after he waded though floodwaters to his house to retrieve garbage bags packed with clothes. “We all thought this was a good place to live because it would never flood,” Mr. Johnson said.

Most of downtown Cedar Rapids was underwater. That includes City Hall, the county courthouse and jail, all of which, in acts of civic hubris, were built on an island in the middle of the river.

“Well, the island is part of the river now,” said Mike Goldberg, the administrative services director for Linn County.

About 8,000 people have evacuated their homes, Mr. Koch said. And 5,500 were without electricity. Those whose power has been lost should expect to go without for a week or more as utility companies struggle to prevent further damage to their critical infrastructure, said Scott Drzycimski, a spokesman for Alliant Energy.

“We’ve lost most of the battles at this point,” Mr. Goldberg said. “At this point we’re just waiting for the water to crest so we can get started on recovery efforts.”

    Waters in Flooded City in Iowa Likely to Crest Soon, NYT, 12.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/12/us/13cnd-flood.html?hp

East Coast Heat Wave Bakes Wide Area

June 10, 2008
The New York Times
By JOHN HOLUSHA

The East Coast continued to bake on Tuesday with temperatures in the upper 90s for the fourth straight day, but weather forecasters say relief is on the way.

A cool front is expected to move through the region this evening, dropping daytime temperatures to the 80s. However, the National Weather Service warned that the new front could touch off thunderstorms, possibly with heavy rain and damaging winds. The danger of severe storms was said to be greatest in eastern Pennsylvania and upstate New York.

Meanwhile heat watches and advisories were in effect from southern New England to North Carolina. Temperatures rose to 99 degrees on Monday at New York’s LaGuardia Airport and 96 degrees at Central Parks. Newark Liberty International Airport reported 99 degrees.

Tuesday’s highs were expected to approach that level.

As a result, schools around the region were expected to send students home early before classrooms without air-conditioning become unbearable. The closings are likely to be spotty, because most of the decisions are being made by the superintendents of individual school districts.

Despite heat and demand for power, no widespread power failures were reported in the area. Consolidated Edison reported scattered outages in the city, involving a few hundred customers in each of the boroughs.

In Northern New Jersey, about 75,000 customers lost power on Monday after a fire at a switching station, but it was restored by early Tuesday.

Meanwhile, large areas of the Midwest including Iowa, Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin remained underwater as emergency crews piled up sand bags to restrain rising rivers.

Engineers in Wisconsin were checking the state of dams in the southern and western part of the state after an embankment failure on Monday drained an artificial lake in the state’s Dells vacation area.

So much farmland in the nation’s agriculture center has been rendered useless that prices for food are starting to rise. The price of corn for July delivery jumped to a record of nearly $7 a bushel on the Chicago Board of Trade Monday, up from about $4 a bushel about a year ago.

The Agricultural Department reported Tuesday its estimate for this years corn crop was down three percent due to the poor farming conditions and said prices for corn, wheat, and soybeans were expected to be at record levels this year. Higher priced feed will translate into lower production, and likely higher prices for meat.

    East Coast Heat Wave Bakes Wide Area, NYT, 10.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/10/us/10cnd-weather.html?hp

Scorching Heat Blankets East Coast

June 10, 2008
The New York Times
By JOHN HOLUSHA

Scorching heat and stifling humidity gripped much of the east coast on Monday, with the National Weather Service issuing heat advisories as temperatures were expected to exceed 100 degrees in many areas.

The heat wave was expected to last into Tuesday and prompted officials in Philadelphia and Connecticut to send students in public and parochial schools home early both days and cancel evening programs, The Associated Press reported. The heat caused power failures that interrupted some subway service in New York.

New York’s Office of Emergency Management said it would open cooling centers for people who do not have air conditioning, and other cities were making similar arrangements. Officials urged relatives and neighbors to check in on elderly, housebound people, who are most in danger during hot spells.

The hot weather extended from New England down through the Middle Atlantic states into the Carolinas.

Weather officials said heat waves are not just uncomfortable, they are dangerous. “Heat is the number one weather-related killer,” the weather service said. “On average, more than 1,500 people in the U.S. die each year from excessive heat.”

That is more than the deaths attributed to tornadoes, hurricanes, floods and lightening combined, the agency said.

In New York City, service on the F and G lines in Brooklyn was disrupted during Monday’s rush hour because Con Ed lines that power the subway systems signals failed. Officials of New York City Transit said generators were being sent to the affected areas so service could be resumed.

Paul Fleuranges, a spokesman for the transit system, said the problem was relatively minor, but critical. “We have third-rail power. That hasn’t been affected. So we can move trains, but without signals we can’t operate safely, which is why we have to bring in generators.”

Sunday’s high temperature in Central Park was 93 degrees, just shy of the 95-degree record for the date.

    Scorching Heat Blankets East Coast, NYT, 10.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/10/us/09cnd-weather.html?hp

Indiana residents coping with flood disaster

9 June 2008
USA Today
By Judy Keen

SPENCER, Ind. — Jessica Westgate came to the Red Cross shelter at Spencer Elementary School on Monday because, she said, "I really don't know what to do."

She was living in a camper after evacuating her 100-year-old home on the White River on Saturday afternoon. The driveway was flooded and so was the road when she left, and she assumes the entire house is filled with water. She spent Saturday night at her son's home, but on Sunday he was ordered to evacuate, too.

There was a half-foot of water inside the house during the last flood here in 2005. The river crested that year at 25 feet. This time, it crested at almost 29 feet — more than 10 feet above flood stage.

On Monday, entire sections of this city of 18,500 were still under water. Officials are worried about the Lake Amazon dam north of town because its top edge was damaged, Owen County emergency management director Jack White said. They also were worried about the forecast of up to 3 inches more rain Monday night.

Westgate was worried about where she'll live. She recently paid off the bills for remodeling after the 2005 flood and doesn't think she can afford to repair the house again.

"I know we're doomed," said Westgate, who works at Boston Scientific, a manufacturer of medical devices. "We didn't have flood insurance."

Across central Indiana, where dozens of cities and towns were flooded after up to 11 inches of rain fell Friday night and Saturday, Monday was devoted to assessing damage and trying to get back to normal.

Four residents of Greenbriar, an apartment complex for senior citizens, were relieved that their homes weren't damaged, but after spending two nights on cots in the elementary school gym, they were eager to go home — even though there was no phone service and no power. The White River swallowed a soybean field behind their apartments, engulfed an electrical transformer and crept near their doors.

On Saturday afternoon, the 30 residents were told, "Get out now," said Marilyn Dougherty, 72. On Monday morning, Dougherty and her neighbors Maxine Miller, 78, George Kent, 61, and Netta Stroud, 76, packed up. "We're going home today," Dougherty said.

They were a little less certain of that plan when Deputy Marshal Richard Foutch of the Spencer Police Department arrived to update them. He promised power would be restored as soon as it was safe to do so, then warned them that the expected rain could force them out again. "Have a little bag packed in case you need to get out again," he said.

White said several county roads were damaged and at least 400 people in Spencer were displaced. A small dam burst, destroying four homes. On Sunday, a Coast Guard helicopter was called in to rescue 10 people stranded at a remote camping site.

Nineteen people spent Sunday night at the elementary school emergency shelter, American Red Cross official Maria Carrasquillo said, and dozens more spent part of the weekend there. Red Cross volunteers on the scene included people from Michigan and Mississippi.

"The needs are going to be here for a long time," Carrasquillo said.

    Indiana residents coping with flood disaster, UT, 9.6.2008, http://www.usatoday.com/weather/floods/2008-06-09-spencer-indiana-flood_N.htm

Water-Starved California

Slows Development

June 7, 2008
The New York Times
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

PERRIS, Calif. — As California faces one of its worst droughts in two decades, building projects are being curtailed for the first time under state law by the inability of developers to find long-term water supplies.

Water authorities and other government agencies scattered throughout the state, including here in sprawling Riverside County, east of Los Angeles, have begun denying, delaying or challenging authorization for dozens of housing tracts and other developments under a state law that requires a 20-year water supply as a condition for building.

California officials suggested that the actions were only the beginning, and they worry about the impact on a state that has grown into an economic powerhouse over the last several decades.

The state law was enacted in 2001, but until statewide water shortages, it had not been invoked to hold up projects.

While previous droughts and supply problems have led to severe water cutbacks and rationing, water officials said the outright refusal to sign off on projects over water scarcity had until now been virtually unheard of on a statewide scale.

“Businesses are telling us that they can’t get things done because of water,” Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, said in a telephone interview.

On Wednesday, Mr. Schwarzenegger declared an official statewide drought, the first such designation since 1991. As the governor was making his drought announcement, the Eastern Municipal Water District in Riverside County — one of the fastest-growing counties in the state in recent years — gave a provisional nod to nine projects that it had held up for months because of water concerns. The approval came with the caveat that the water district could revisit its decision, and only after adjustments had been made to the plans to reduce water demand.

“The statement that we’re making is that this isn’t business as usual,” said Randy A. Record, a water district board member, at the meeting here in Perris.

Shawn Jenkins, a developer who had two projects caught up in the delays, said he was accustomed to piles of paperwork and reams of red tape in getting projects approved. But he was not prepared to have the water district hold up the projects he was planning. He changed the projects’ landscaping, to make it less water dependent, as the board pondered their fate.

“I think this is a warning for everyone,” Mr. Jenkins said.

Also in Riverside County, a superior court judge recently stopped a 1,500-home development project, citing, among others things, a failure to provide substantial evidence of adequate water supply.

In San Luis Obispo County, north of Los Angeles, the City of Pismo Beach was recently denied the right to annex unincorporated land to build a large multipurpose project because, “the city didn’t have enough water to adequately serve the development,” said Paul Hood, the executive officer of the commission that approves the annexations and incorporations of cities.

In agriculturally rich Kern County, north of Los Angeles, at least three developers scrapped plans recently to apply for permits, realizing water was going to be an issue. An official from the county’s planning department said the developers were the first ever in the county to be stymied by water concerns. Large-scale housing developments in Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo Counties have met a similar fate, officials in those counties said.

Throughout the state, other projects have been suspended or are being revised to accommodate water shortages, and water authorities and cities have increasingly begun to consider holding off on “will-serve” letters — promises to developers to provide water — for new projects.

“The water in our state is not sufficient to add more demand,” said Lester Snow, the director of the California Department of Water Resources. “And that now means that some large development can’t go forward. If we don’t make changes with water, we are going to have a major economic problem in this state.”

The words “crisis” and “water” have gone together in this state since the 49ers traded flecks of gold for food. But several factors have combined to make the current water crisis more acute than those of recent years.

An eight-year drought in the Colorado River basin has greatly impinged on water supply to Southern California. Of the roughly 1.25 million acre-feet of water that the region normally imports from that river toward the 4.5 million acre-feet it uses each year, 500,000 has been lost to drought, said Jeff Kightlinger, the general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.

Even more significant, a judge in federal district court last year issued a curtailment in pumping from the California Delta — where the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers meet and provide water to roughly 25 million Californians — to protect a species of endangered smelt that were becoming trapped in the pumps. Those reductions, from December to June, cut back the state’s water reserves this winter by about one third, according to a consortium of state water boards.

The smelt problem was a powerful indicator of the environmental fallout from the delta’s water system, which was constructed over 50 years ago for a far smaller population.

“We have bad hydrology, compromised infrastructure and our management tools are broken,” said Timothy Quinn, the executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies. “All that paints a fairly grim picture for Californians trying to manage water in the 21st century.”

The 2001 state water law, which took effect in 2002, requires developers to prove that new projects have a plan for providing at least 20 years’ worth of water before local water authorities can sign off on them. With the recent problems, more and more local governments are unable to simply approve projects.

“Water is one of our most difficult issues when we are evaluating large-scale projects,” said Lorelei Oviatt, the division chief for the Kern County Planning Department. In cases where developers are unable to present a long-term water plan, “then certainly I can’t recommend they approve” those developments, Ms. Oviatt said.

As the denied building permits indicate, the lack of sufficient water sources could become a serious threat to economic development in California, where the population in 2020 is projected to reach roughly 45 million people, economists say, from its current 38 million. In the end, as water becomes increasingly scarce, its price will have to rise, bringing with it a host of economic consequences, the economists said.

“Water has been seriously under-priced in California,” said Edward E. Leamer, a professor at the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles. “When you ration it or increase its price, it will have an impact on economic growth.”

The water authority for Southern California recently issued a rate increase of 14.3 percent, when including surcharges, which was the highest rate increase in the last 15 years. In Northern California, rates in Marin County increased recently by nearly 10 percent, in part to pay an 11 percent increase in the cost of water bought from neighboring Sonoma County.

Interest groups that oppose development have found that raising water issues is among the many bats in their bags available to beat back projects they find distasteful.

“Certainly from Newhall Ranch’s standpoint, water was a key point that our opponents were focused on,” said Marlee Lauffer, a spokeswoman for Newhall Ranch, a large-scale residential development in the works is Santa Clarita, north of Los Angeles. The City of Los Angeles, among others, has opposed the development.

To get around the problem, Newhall Ranch’s planners decided to forgo water supplied through the state and turn instead to supplies from an extensive water reclamation plant as well as water bought privately. Other developers, like Mr. Jenkins, have changed their landscaping plans to reduce water needs and planned for low-flow plumbing to placate water boards.

Mr. Schwarzenegger sees addressing the state’s water problem as one of his key goals, and he is hoping against the odds to get a proposed $11.9 billion bond for water management investments through the Legislature and before voters in November.

The plans calls for water conservation and quality improvement programs, as well as a resource management plan for the delta. Among its most controversial components is $3.5 billion earmarked for new water storage, something that environmentalists have vehemently opposed, in part because they find dams and storage facilities environmentally unsound and not cost effective.

The critics also point out that the state’s agriculture industry, which uses far more water than urban areas, is being asked to contribute little to conservation under the governor’s plans. As more building projects are derailed by water requirements, the pressure on farmers to share more of their water is expected to grow.

    Water-Starved California Slows Development, NYT, 7.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/07/us/07drought.html?hp

Governor Declares Drought in California

and Warns of Rationing

June 5, 2008
The New York Times
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

LOS ANGELES — Its reservoir levels receding and its grounds parched, California has fallen officially into drought, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said Wednesday, warning that the state might be forced to ration water to cities and regions if conservation efforts did not improve.

The drought declaration — the first for the state since 1991 — includes orders to transfer water from less dry areas to those that are dangerously dry. Mr. Schwarzenegger also said he would ask the federal government for aid to farmers and press water districts, cities and local water agencies to accelerate conservation. Drought conditions have hampered farming, increased water rates throughout California and created potentially dangerous conditions in areas prone to wildfires.

The declaration comes after the driest California spring in 88 years, with runoff in river basins that feed most reservoirs at 41 percent of average levels. It stops short of a water emergency, which would probably include mandatory rationing.

Efforts to capture water have also been hampered by evaporation of some mountain snowpacks that provide water, an effect, state officials say, of global climate change.

A survey this year found that the state’s snowpack water content was 67 percent of average, and the Colorado River Basin, from which California draws some water, is coming off a record eight-year drought, contributing to the drop in reservoir storage.

The drought declaration, made when reservoir levels are far higher than they were when Gov. Pete Wilson issued a similar statement in 1991 — is as much a political statement as a practical one. Mr. Schwarzenegger is pressing the Legislature to approve an $11.9 billion water bond as part of the state budget to pay for water storage and to fix the state’s aging water delivery systems.

The governor, a Republican, has said that addressing California’s seemingly omnipresent water shortage is one of his most urgent priorities, but his ideas have not passed muster with the Legislature in the past.

“This drought is an urgent reminder of the immediate need to upgrade California’s water infrastructure,” Mr. Schwarzenegger said Wednesday in a prepared statement. “There is no more time to waste because nothing is more vital to protect our economy, our environment and our quality of life.”

A bill to require Californians to cut water use 20 percent recently passed the Assembly. The bill, which requires Senate approval, puts most of the onus on residents, and little on the agriculture industry, underscoring tension over conservation between city dwellers and farmers, who consume most of the state’s water.

Across the state, many districts and municipalities are instituting or considering recycling, rationing and higher fees for excessive use. For instance, Los Angeles officials recently announced their intentions to begin using heavily cleansed sewage to increase drinking water supplies.

The East Bay Municipal Utility District and the Long Beach Water Department, serving districts at opposite ends of the state, have made water rationing mandatory.

“Some cities and regions are rationing, some are doing nothing and a group of people are in the middle,” the director of California’s Department of Water Resources, Lester A. Snow, said in a telephone interview. “The governor thought it was important to step out in front and get ahead of this. It is in part to avoid an emergency.”

In a telephone interview later, Mr. Schwarzenegger said, “Water is like our gold, and we have to treat it like that.”

    Governor Declares Drought in California and Warns of Rationing, NYT, 5.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/05/us/05drought.html

Op-Ed Contributors

A Wilderness, Lost in the City

May 29, 2008
The New York Times
By WILLIAM C. THOMPSON Jr. and ROBERT F. KENNEDY Jr.

MANY people are astounded to learn that there is a teeming wildlife preserve in New York City. Ridgewood Reservoir on the Brooklyn-Queens border is an oasis where an amazing range of plant and animal species thrive in a verdant landscape of steep hills and narrow valleys amid the city’s paved sidewalks.

But what’s more astounding, the city’s Parks Department could wind up destroying it.

Ridgewood is an accidental wilderness, tucked alongside the Jackie Robinson Parkway. Built in 1858 to provide drinking water to Brooklyn, the reservoir was abandoned in 1989.

As the 50 acres reverted to wetlands, meadows and forests, tens of thousands of plants and trees took root and flourished. Turtles, fish, frogs and millions of insects moved in. Songbirds nested in the glades, transforming the area into a migratory rest stop. According to the National Audubon Society, 137 species of birds use the reservoir, including eight rare species. It is a place as close to unspoiled nature as you’re likely to find anywhere within city limits.

Yet, the New York City Parks Department is considering a $50 million “renovation” project that would cover more than 20 acres of the reservoir with athletic fields and facilities.

This plan flies in the face of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s widely hailed environmental blueprint, which bemoans the loss of the city’s natural areas. The Parks Department’s own scientific consultants have warned against disturbing the reservoir, an area they call “highly significant for the biodiversity of New York City and the region.”

The parks commissioner has said the city needs the athletic fields to combat childhood obesity. This is an important objective, but the money that would be used to destroy this extraordinary natural habitat could be better spent improving Highland Park, next to Ridgewood Reservoir. Highland Park has plenty of ball fields to serve its neighborhood, but they are in such deplorable condition that few people use them.

Ridgewood’s natural preserve is a great place for people of all ages to walk and hike. Its trails should be upgraded with benches and rest areas as well as markers pointing out unique flora and fauna. The Parks Department should also open areas of the reservoir for guided nature walks, a great educational tool.

Ridgewood Reservoir offers visitors a rare chance to lose themselves in a forest, to hear bird song, to touch wilderness and to sense the divine. The city shouldn’t let that slip away.

William C. Thompson Jr. is the comptroller of the City of New York. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a lawyer for Riverkeeper, an environmental group.

    A Wilderness, Lost in the City, NYT, 29.5.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/opinion/29kennedy.html

Powerful Storms Kill 8

in Iowa and Minnesota

May 26, 2008
Filed at 11:49 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) -- Powerful storms packing large hail, heavy rain and tornadoes made for a deadly Memorial Day weekend across the nation's midsection, killing at least seven people in Iowa and a 2-year-old child in Minnesota.

Iowa Homeland Security administrator Dave Miller said seven people were killed Sunday by a tornado in northeast Iowa -- five from Parkersburg, a town of about 1,000 some 80 miles northeast of Des Moines -- and two from nearby New Hartford. At least 50 injuries were reported.

''It's been a long time since we've had those kinds of injuries and deaths reported,'' Miller said.

Witnesses reported parts of Parkersburg -- particularly the town's south side -- were reduced to rubble, including most of the town's high school. The Des Moines area had heavy rain and lightning Sunday night with wind gusts of 70 mph.

Warning sirens sounded early enough to give residents time to seek shelter, said Parkersburg Mayor Bob Haylock.

''Without that, we would have a tremendous amount of injuries and loss of life,'' Haylock said. ''People were down in their basements and waiting it out.''

Iowa Gov. Chet Culver issued a disaster proclamation for Black Hawk, Buchanan and Butler counties, a move that helps coordination between state and local authorities.

The storms came after three days of violent weather elsewhere across the nation. Rural Oklahoma was battered Saturday and storms in Kansas a day earlier killed at least two people.

Tim Halback, of the National Weather Service in Romeoville, Ill., said the storms were caused by a huge warm air mass that had been centered over the southern and western great Plains several days ago. When it began moving northward into Minnesota and Canada, a cold high followed in its wake, sparking severe storms.

The weather system stretched from western Kansas to northwestern Minnesota early Monday and was headed through Illinois toward Wisconsin and Indiana. As much as 4 inches of rain may have fallen overnight in extreme southern Illinois, the weather service said Monday.

In Minnesota, a violent storm that struck the St. Paul suburb of Hugo killed a 2-year-old child and critically injured a sibling of the victim, Washington County Sheriff Bill Hutton said. The children's parents also were hospitalized, as were three other adults and another child.

Washington County, Minn., Sheriff Bill Hutton said Monday that 40 to 50 homes were uninhabitable in Hugo and 150 to 200 others were damaged to some extent. Gov. Tim Pawlenty planned to tour the storm-ravaged town Monday.

Power had been restored Monday to most of the more than 15,500 customers blacked out in the area, primarily in Hugo and Forest Lake to the northeast, Xcel Energy spokeswoman Patti Nystuen.

Hugo Public Works Director Chris Petree said his family took shelter in their basement, huddling against a foundation wall, before the storm lifted his house off the ground and completely wiped out the second floor.

''I put my daughter down first, my wife on top of her and then I bear-hugged on top of them,'' Petree said.

''All you hear is glass breaking and wood tearing and breaking in half,'' Petree said.

Farther south, at least three weak tornadoes touched down Sunday in the Texas Panhandle. No injuries or building damage were reported in the sparsely populated region, meteorologist Jason Jordan said.

About 100 people have been killed by U.S. twisters so far this year, the worst toll in a decade, according to the weather service, and the danger has not passed yet. Tornado season typically peaks in the spring and early summer, then again in the late fall.

------

Associated Press writers Joshua Freed in Hugo, Minn.; F.N. D'Alessio in Chicago; and Dinesh Ramde in Milwaukee contributed to this report.

------

On the Net:

http://www.weather.gov/

    Powerful Storms Kill 8 in Iowa and Minnesota, NYT, 26.5.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Severe-Weather.html?hp

USA's drought begins to ease

20 May 2008
USA Today
By William M. Welch

Heavy rainfall in the Southeast and record snowpack in the Rockies have eased dramatically the nation's worst drought in more than a century.

Drought conditions are the least severe since January 2006. A quarter of the USA is suffering some form of drought today, down from 65% last summer, federal agencies said.

In the Southeast, where drought has been most severe, the area in drought has plummeted from 86% in August to 40% today.

"We've had some big improvements because of heavy rainfall over the region" of the Southeast, Ed O'Lenic, senior meteorologist at the federal Climate Prediction Center, said Tuesday. "Going forward, if things are pretty normal or close to that through the growing season, we'll be OK."

Much of the Southeast has received 10-20 inches of rain in the past three months, prompting Georgia's governor to permit the filling of swimming pools and hand watering of plants.

The U.S. Drought Monitor, run by the federal departments of Agriculture and Commerce, reports only 8% of the region is now classified as in "extreme" drought and none in "exceptional" drought, the worst category.

"There has been really dramatic improvement in the interior Southeast," said Brad Rippey, agriculture meteorologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He cautioned that there remains a "very big risk" of crop failure if it turns hot and dry this summer.

In Florida, where growers depend on irrigation, rain has permitted easing of emergency water restrictions though conservation measures are still in place, said Alan Peirce of the Florida Fruit & Vegetable Association in Tallahassee. "The rainfalls have helped, and they've lowered irrigation demand," he said.

Dry conditions remain a concern in South Florida. The vast and shallow Lake Okeechobee, the reservoir for most the region, is below normal levels, Peirce said. Some citrus crops are smaller because of dry conditions "but people have been able to get by thus far," he said.

Lake Okeechobee's average water level is at 9.84 feet, which is well below the average of 13.31 feet, and "getting close to its all-time low of 8.8 feet," said David Miskus, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Meanwhile, in much of the Rockies, this spring has seen a longer run of cold temperatures that has resulted in a late snowmelt and heavy amount of water content in the remaining snow, said Tom Perkins of the National Water and Climate Center in Portland, Ore. A late snowmelt helps give water time to saturate the ground, he said.

In the upper headwaters of the Colorado River, a cold late season has put the snowpack at 155% of average, Perkins said. Runoff prognostications for the Colorado River and Lake Powell are at 120%. "In some places, we have almost three times as much snow as usual," he said.

While that is bringing an end to drought in some parts of the West, dry conditions remain in California, Nevada, Southern Utah, Arizona and New Mexico, Perkins said.

Mark Svoboda, climatologist with the National Drought Mitigation Center, warns drought is taking hold in northern and southern plains.

"It's still here. I wouldn't want to relay a false sense of security," Svoboda said.

Contributing: Doyle Rice; AP

    USA's drought begins to ease, UT, 20.5.2008, http://www.usatoday.com/weather/drought/2008-05-20-drought_N.htm

Winds Fan California Wildfires

April 29, 2008
The New York Times
By ANAHAD O’CONNOR

Strong gusts on Monday threatened to fan the flames of intense wildfires that have burned through hundreds of acres of dry brush near Los Angeles for several days.

Hundreds of firefighters struggled to gain ground against the blaze, with helicopters and air tankers dropping tons of water and fire retardant from the sky. Fire officials in Sierra Madre, the town about 15 miles northeast of Los Angeles where the wildfire began, said on Monday that they had much of the blaze contained, but that powerful winds threatened to reverse some of those gains.

Schools throughout Sierra Madre were closed on Monday and residents — hundreds of whom have already evacuated — were warned to seek safe ground. Fire officials estimated that it could be another five to seven days before the flames were fully contained.

“It’s very steep, inaccessible terrain, and it’s very heavy brush,” Tim Davis, a battalion chief with the U.S. Forest Service, said late Sunday. “It’s very difficult and arduous labor for these crews. You can’t get bulldozers into the majority of where these fingers of fire run.”

The fire began in the foothills of Sierra Madre early Saturday and spread quickly, burning more than 400 acres of brush and forcing the evacuation of more 550 homes over the weekend. About 500 firefighters have worked to contain the blaze, the cause of which is still unknown. Mr. Davis of the forest service said the fire was aided by dry brush and shrubs, which were particularly vulnerable because the area had not experienced a wildfire in more than 30 years.

Firefighters were concerned on Monday that the flames were creeping toward the Los Angeles National Forest. Marc Peebles of the Sierra Madre fire department said that residents with allergies or sensitivity to smoke who were still in the area were being cautioned to stay inside with their air conditioners on, or go to a place with cleaner air.

    Winds Fan California Wildfires, NYT, 29.4.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/29/us/28cnd-wildfire.html?hp

Strongest quake in 40 years rattles Midwest

Fri Apr 18, 2008
6:25pm EDT
Reuters
By Andrew Stern

CHICAGO (Reuters) - A 5.2 magnitude earthquake centered in southeast Illinois that was the strongest in the Midwest in 40 years startled residents before dawn on Friday, but officials reported no injuries and only minor damage.

The quake, the strongest since a 5.4 magnitude quake in November 1968, could be felt as far west as Kansas, as far east as Georgia and as far north as Michigan's Upper Peninsula, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

"Earthquakes of comparable size are felt over greater distances in the East than those occurring in the West," noted USGS seismologist Harley Benz.

Experts say soil conditions in the central United States are such that shocks in the region tend to travel farther and be felt in wider areas than in places such as California where they would be more quickly absorbed.

Friday's quake, classified as "moderate" by the USGS, was centered five miles northeast of Bellmont, Illinois, in the southeastern part of the state along the Indiana border in an area near Kentucky.

Some bricks were knocked from a building in Louisville, Kentucky, and residents near the epicenter reported being awakened by several seconds of shaking strong enough to knock pictures off walls. Many others slept through it.

A tower at O'Hare International Airport swayed, with one controller telling the Chicago Tribune newspaper it felt like "being on the end of a fishing pole."

The quake was felt in downtown Chicago buildings, and the city fire department said that while there was no damage reported it asked operators of construction cranes to check that they were still firmly anchored before resuming work.

The quake struck at a shallow depth of 7.2 miles, according to the USGS. The agency initially said the quake had a magnitude of 5.4 but later revised it to 5.2.

The temblor occurred in the Wabash Valley seismic zone, which produces quakes fairly frequently. It is adjacent to the New Madrid fault zone that in the winter of 1811-1812 produced three of the strongest earthquakes ever to strike the continental United States.
 

(Additional reporting by Michael Conlon and Vicki Allen; Editing by Eric Walsh)

    Strongest quake in 40 years rattles Midwest, R, 18.4.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN1830290520080418

Storms Hit Already - Soaked Arkansas

April 10, 2008
Filed at 10:13 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

BENTON, Ark. (AP) -- Powerful storms brought hail, heavy rain and possible tornadoes to Arkansas, Texas, and Oklahoma, causing flooding and power outages for thousands of customers Thursday morning and at least one death. Arkansas was bracing for more severe weather later in the day.

Hail and high winds moved into Arkansas, a state already contending with three weeks of flooding and 10 tornadoes that hit last week. Most of the state was under a flash flood warning and forecasts said the new round of storms Thursday could include tornadoes later in the day. Roads were flooded and people were being told to stay home.

''It's just getting worse,'' sheriff's dispatcher Nola Massey said. ''We're just trying to get everybody to stay home and not get out in it.''

Some residents in the small north Arkansas town of Leslie were being evacuated because of flooding and the threat of mudslides. Workers were sandbagging in places to keep flood waters at bay.

The severe weather began in the region Wednesday. An apparent tornado with winds of up to 70 mph moved through west Texas, tearing shingles from roofs, shattering glass and flipping vehicles.

At least 180,000 homes and businesses lost electricity in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and more than 11,000 customers were without power in Oklahoma Thursday morning. Flooding in Oklahoma forced about a dozen state highways to close, and some schools called off classes for the day.

In Oklahoma, where some parts of the state had more than 4 inches of rain, a woman died when her car skidded off the road during downpours Wednesday. Three people were treated for minor injuries in Texas.

Red Cross spokeswoman Anita Foster says no injuries were reported from the high winds and heavy rain in the Dallas-Fort Worth areas. Two shelters were set up for residents who may need them, she said.

One hangar at Addison Airport, in the Dallas area, lost part of its roof.

The storm pelted the city with quarter-sized hail just after midnight with winds of up to 70 mph, said Hector Guerrero, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. The service received reports of cars and a tractor trailer flipped over. At least one building downtown was damaged, Guerrero said.

Shortly after, the storm system moved out of the area, Guerrero said. San Angelo is about 110 miles southeast of Midland.

In Arkansas' Saline County, residents spent a week picking up blown-off shingles and cleaning culverts after the 10 tornadoes roared through central Arkansas the night of April 3. Forecasters said Thursday's storm could be on scale with last week's tornadoes, with Saline County to get up to 2 inches of rain Thursday, with gusts of wind up to 30 mph.

''It's just overwhelming -- a flood on top of a tornado,'' Saline County Judge Lanny Fite, the county's top administrator, said Wednesday. ''People have been working night and day trying to prepare, but there's not a whole lot we can do to prepare for rain in the magnitude they're talking about.''

The Federal Emergency Management Agency estimates at least 47 homes were destroyed by last week's tornadoes in Saline County. More could be affected as rainwater hits already saturated fields and lawns Thursday.

    Storms Hit Already - Soaked Arkansas, NYT, 10.4.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Severe-Weather.html

Tornado Sweeps Through Little Rock, Ark.

April 4, 2008
Filed at 5:32 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) -- A tornado hit parts of Little Rock and its suburbs Thursday, injuring an unknown number of people while damaging businesses and downing trees and power lines.

The National Weather Service, which said a tornado passed directly over its North Little Rock office, reported injuries at a Benton trailer park. An elderly woman was treated by paramedics outside her Cammack Village home.

Meanwhile, at the North Little Rock airport, the storm destroyed a hangar and left several single-engine planes flipped over onto their wings while others were destroyed.

Gregory Greene, 39, said he was outside a restaurant when the tornado hit.

''I saw debris flying around in a circle when I was about to go in and pick up my girlfriend from work,'' said Greene. ''Stuff was going around in circles.

''About that time, it pushed her up against the building and knocked me down and pushed me under that truck,'' Greene said. While under the truck, he said the storm flipped a car in the next parking space.

''I thought I was going to die,'' said Greene, whose right elbow was scraped raw.

The National Weather Service said the storm damaged a car dealership and a mobile home park near Benton, southwest of Little Rock, and downed power lines and trees farther southwest on I-30. After hitting Little Rock the storm moved into the city's northeastern suburbs.

In Cammack Village, a community of 1,000 surrounded by northwest Little Rock, police and firefighters went door-to-door to check on residents. Paramedics tended to an elderly woman, who didn't appear seriously hurt. An oak tree blocked in residents on a cul-de-sac and half-foot-deep water from torrential rains flowed down streets.

Susann Walters, 55, said she hid in a closet with her two dogs and a cat as the storm approached. ''It was probably 30-45 seconds,'' Walter said. ''It was quick.''

A tree from her front yard smashed the hood and front windshield of a neighbor's SUV but her bungalow home only lost a few shingles. She was still blocked in though, with trees down across either end of the street. ''I'm not going anywhere,'' she said as lightning filled the sky and the roar of chain saws pierced the night.

A second storm hit much of the same area south of Little Rock later Thursday but was not as potent, and another storm formed south of Hot Springs and also tracked northeast, toward Arkansas' capital city.

Over the past two months, parts of Arkansas have seen a tornado during a storm outbreak that killed 13, a foot of snow, more than a foot of rain and near-record flooding.

    Tornado Sweeps Through Little Rock, Ark., NYT, 4.4.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Arkansas-Storm.html