Disaster Areas

The Clinton administration on Friday declared 18 counties in California disaster areas, allowing farmers to receive federal aid after their crops suffered $657 million in damage in a cold snap last month. The disaster designation allows farmers to apply for low-interest government loans.

The whirlwind that had been Hurricane Georges began to disappear from the weather map Tuesday, but its story was still being written: Rains drenched Alabama and the Florida Panhandle, and evacuees slowly returned to find out what happened to their homes. "I had waterfront property, waterback property, waterside property, water-everywhere property," said 43-year-old postal worker Jayne Howell, who found her brick ranch house in Pascagoula awash in sewage, seaweed and branches.

President Clinton on Monday declared disaster areas in parts of Pennsylvania struck by tornadoes in late May and early this month. The tornadoes leveled scores of houses. The action makes federal assistance, including disaster housing, grants and low-cost loans to replace uninsured property, available to people in Allegheny, Berks, Somerset and Wyoming counties.

President Clinton presented an expanded package of federal aid Thursday to California communities hit hard by El Nino-related storms, designating Los Angeles, Orange and two other counties as disaster areas. Clinton said his trips this week to Florida, where he viewed devastation wreaked by tornadoes, and California produced "painful examples of the successes of this El Nino," which he called the worst in a century.

President Clinton declared a major disaster Thursday in portions of Florida because of recent storms, tornadoes and flooding attributed to El Nino weather changes.

A series of harsh winter storms gave most state residents a brief break Sunday after hitting Baja California with a vengeance, killing at least 13 people in widespread flash flooding throughout the border area. The overnight storm hit the cities of Tijuana and Rosarito hardest, forcing the evacuation of 220 people in Tijuana alone. An estimated 500 others were trapped in their homes by flood waters, which had destroyed or damaged at least 300 residences, officials said.

As another storm approached Wednesday, Gov. Pete Wilson declared Ventura County a disaster area, and officials estimated weather damage at $8.5 million and rising--with farmers taking the hardest hit. The governor's declaration of a state of emergency in Ventura and nine other waterlogged counties in Northern California allows local officials to recover 75% of the costs of emergency operations. There were no immediate estimates of those costs.