Disaster

The alarm over potential bank runs in Greece and Spain this week has highlighted an often-overlooked fact: Europe's debt crisis is also, in many ways, a major banking crisis. In capitals such as Athens, Madrid and Rome, large portions of the sovereign debt racked up by spendthrift governments are owed to the countries' own banks, locking governments and the banks in an embrace so tight that disaster for one would almost certainly spell doom for the other. International bailouts for Greece, Ireland and Portugal have helped to keep not just their governments but also their banks afloat, as well as financial institutions in other parts of Europe with large exposure to those nations' debts.

LAFAYETTE, La. - Visitors to this oil town might be forgiven for wondering whether the BP oil spill and subsequent drilling moratorium ever happened. "Now hiring" signs are plastered on billboards around town, and hotels such as the Crowne Plaza are chock full of seminars training students to work on offshore rigs. Many offshore companies can't find enough workers for the jobs they're listing. This parish has the lowest unemployment rate in Louisiana, 4.8%. Such is the opportunity on the offshore rigs that Sheila Clark, whose husband, Donald, died in the Deepwater Horizon explosion two years ago, said her 22-year-old son recently asked her how she'd feel if he went to work on a rig. "I can't stop him," said Clark, who moved to Baton Rouge after her husband's death.

The scope of devastation left by the second-deadliest tornado blast in U.S. history continued to emerge Saturday as stunned survivors combed the wreckage of homes churned into matchsticks and aid workers and volunteers struggled to get food, water and generators to thousands displaced across seven Southern states. Hundreds who spent the night in emergency shelters hastily erected in hardest-hit Tuscaloosa, Ala., scoured the remnants of their homes and businesses for photos and keepsakes, mostly in vain.

Three days after Walt Disney Studios said it would incur a $200-million loss on "John Carter," the film's star, Taylor Kitsch, was still licking his wounds. He had just returned to his Beverly Hills hotel, cheeks flushed following a boxing workout where a fellow gym rat had tried to console him about the box-office dud. "This guy came up to me and goes, 'Next one. Don't worry about it, you'll be fine,' " Kitsch chafed. "I'm like, 'I'm not worried about it, man. I didn't market the movie.

Anyone dreaming of a sunny winter break in Hawaii this week can forget it: Gov. Neil Abercrombie has declared a disaster on the islands of Kauai and Oahu after days of relentless rain that caused flooding, mudslides, waterspouts, hail and dangerously high surf. The sun was putting in a brief guest appearance Wednesday, but forecasters said more rain was coming Friday and Saturday -- this after Wainiha, on Kauai, has seen more than 35 inches since Saturday, with more than 15 inches dumped on the island's main city, Lihue.

Times writer Frank Clifford has made a good point about the absence of any reference to the Saint Francis Dam disaster in the Department of Water and Power's exhibits at our museum ("L.A. History: The Future Looks Good," Part I, April 19). The Castaic Reservoir Visitors' Center also shows nothing. While this disaster is certainly an embarrassment, disasters like that will continue to occur if we continue to pretend that they can't happen and have never happened. The one thing that success breeds is complacency.

I came home last week to find my daughter standing on the front porch looking up at the sky. "What are you doing?" I asked. "Thinking about the radiation plume," she replied. She's 18, she understands you can't see radiation, but she had been hearing a lot about the invisible particles landing in Los Angeles. Then there was Libya. I watched on CNN as bombs fell and targets exploded, intercut with the devastation in Japan. It seemed there were bodies everywhere. Later, it felt odd to drive down Sunset Boulevard and see people shopping, talking or waiting for the bus, everyone alive.

A Paradise Built in Hell The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster Rebecca Solnit Viking: 354 pp., $27.95 The bad news is that more disasters are coming, arising from any number of sources: climate change, widespread infrastructural vulnerabilities, toxic threats brewed at cellular or weapons-grade levels, seismic or oceanic volatility, and so on and so on. Whatever their cause, disasters will be born of some mixture of...

Removal of fuel from the Costa Concordia, which ran aground last month off Tuscany, began last week and officials say that after it's gone, it may take seven to 10 months to refloat the ship. Meanwhile, Tuscan tourism officials are urging tourists to visit eight-square-mile Giglio, off whose coast the ship ran aground on Jan. 13, as a “gesture of love.” Not long after the accident, which killed at least 17 people (15 are still missing), islanders said people came to Giglio to gawk and not because of their affection for Giglio, one of seven islets in the Tuscan Archipelago.

Titanic Voices From the Disaster Deborah Hopkinson Scholastic: 304 pp., $17.99, ages 8 and up Few tragedies have captivated generations like the Titanic. There's something about the disaster's enormity and unlikeliness, coupled with the hubris that brought it about and the horrors that came afterward, that have made the Titanic a subject of enduring fascination even 100 years since it sunk in April 1912, killing 1,496 of the 2,208 people aboard. With the centennial of the Titanic's sinking approaching as surely as the iceberg that doomed the luxury liner on that chilly night, dozens of books are being released to commemorate it, including a nonfiction title for young readers from award-winning author Deborah Hopkinson.

ATHENS - Fear for the health ofGreece's banks increased Wednesday after a rush of withdrawals as the country braces for fresh elections that could determine whether it remains part of the Eurozone. Reports that depositors pulled out nearly $1 billion on a single day fueled warnings this week from the Greek president of a run on already shaky financial institutions. There were no lines of worried customers outside banks in Athens on Wednesday, but one analyst said a panic could easily be sparked in the country's febrile political and economic environment.

With the sound of brass instruments coming from above, scenes of wreckage on the floor and an array of abstract sculpture in between, this warehouse space captures music, art and chaos all on a collision course. That's a fitting combination for a performance piece about post-Katrina New Orleans, but director Yuval Sharon wants to be clear: "Crescent City," the ambitious and unconventional "hyperopera" that opens this week at Atwater Crossing, both is and isn't about the hurricane-ravaged city.

Organizers of the famed Newport Beach-to-Ensenada sailing regatta were stunned by the mysterious loss of four crew members aboard a 37-foot boat that disappeared in mid-race, marking the first fatalities in the event's 65-year history. While the U.S. Coast Guard was still investigating the accident, regatta organizers said they believed the boat was hit and demolished by a much larger ship - perhaps a freighter or tanker - passing in the dark early Saturday. The boat disappeared from the online tracking system around 1:30 a.m. Saturday.

HOUSTON — The Justice Department on Tuesday unveiled the first criminal charges in its investigation of the 2010 BP oil spill: two counts of obstruction of justice filed against a former BP engineer accused of destroying records describing the rate at which oil was flowing from the broken well at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. The engineer, Kurt Mix, was involved in efforts to plug the well as well as internal BP efforts to estimate the amount of oil leaking from it in the first months after the spill.

WASHINGTON - Two years after the Deepwater Horizon explosion unleashed the worst oil spill in American history, Congress has failed to take meaningful action to prevent a similar disaster, according to a new report from members of a presidential panel. The report cited significant progress by the Obama administration and the oil industry, giving them a B and a C+ grade, respectively, for their efforts to bolster safety, spill response and resources. Congress, however, got a D grade for its inability to "enact any legislation responding to the explosion and spill.

Halifax, Canada - A cold wind ripped through Fairview Lawn Cemetery. Then came the frigid rain. In a minute, I was thinking, the headstones will be shivering. "Now," said Blair Beed, my guide, "imagine how it would have been in those lifeboats. Surrounded by ice. " He was talking about the Titanic, of course. Although this Halifax cemetery lies about 750 miles northwest of the waters where that celebrated ship went down April 15, 1912, it was the seamen of Halifax who retrieved more than 300 of the dead, along with a grim harvest of flotsam.

For days on end, 23-year-old Hiraku Sato and a co-worker toiled in their pharmacy in Tagajo City, picking through hundreds of small containers of vitamin drinks, aspirin and other medicines that were flung to the four corners of their shop when ocean waters from nearly a mile away rushed in. A 4-foot-high mound of metal shelves, broken computers and other retail detritus was still massed this week outside the store in the northeastern coastal community....

Titanic Voices From the Disaster Deborah Hopkinson Scholastic: 304 pp., $17.99, ages 8 and up Few tragedies have captivated generations like the Titanic. There's something about the disaster's enormity and unlikeliness, coupled with the hubris that brought it about and the horrors that came afterward, that have made the Titanic a subject of enduring fascination even 100 years since it sunk in April 1912, killing 1,496 of the 2,208 people aboard. With the centennial of the Titanic's sinking approaching as surely as the iceberg that doomed the luxury liner on that chilly night, dozens of books are being released to commemorate it, including a nonfiction title for young readers from award-winning author Deborah Hopkinson.

Multiple tornadoes ripped through the Dallas-Fort Worth area Tuesday, with two major twisters damaging hundreds of homes and causing numerous injuries, some critical. The mayor of Lancaster, Texas, a suburb about 15 miles south of Dallas,  saw one of the twisters approach. “I was leaving a meeting here in town and heard the tornado sirens go off,” said Mayor Marcus Knight at a news conference, adding that he watched the tornado bear down on the area before arriving at City Hall.