Disasters

Rocking an infant nephew in her arms, Mary Poloai stood outside the main entrance of the imposing Samoan Congregational Christian Church in Carson on Wednesday staring up at the sky and fighting back tears. "I'm so sad that I can't think straight," said Poloai, 58, one of more than 100 people who gathered at a special prayer service for victims of the earthquake and tsunami that devastated Samoa and American Samoa early Tuesday. "They still haven't found my mother's sisters," she said.

Along with California's vigorous efforts to crack down on its own greenhouse gas emissions, state officials have begun preparing for the worst: heat waves, a rising sea level, flooding, wildlife die-offs and other expected consequences from what scientists predict will be a dramatic temperature increase by the end of this century. California's Natural Resources Agency on Monday issued the nation's first statewide plan to "adapt" to climate change.

Warm winds whipped up clouds of embers today that threaten to spread southern Australia's wildfires into more towns, as dozens more dead were found in the smoldering ashes of earlier blazes. At least 173 people have been confirmed dead, and with search teams recovering more charred corpses in fire-scorched areas, police warned that the final death toll in what is already the country's worst fire disaster could reach 300.

National Guard and reserve forces remain inadequately equipped and unprepared to deal with a wide range of domestic disasters, particularly an attack with unconventional weapons, a congressional commission has concluded. In its final report, the panel said Thursday that congressional and Pentagon policymakers had been reluctant to acknowledge that the military remains the only institution that can respond quickly to natural and man-made disasters.

The image of a catastrophic natural disaster that humbled a powerful leader may have stalked Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao as he made rapid-fire visits last week to areas devastated by snowstorms, but it probably wasn't Hurricane Katrina. Try going back a few centuries. In a country where history is never far from the surface, the events back in 1351 and 1644 may weigh on leaders' minds.

They knew they couldn't set this little country community right in a day -- the storms had been too brutal for that. But at least, they figured, they could clean it up. All along the two-lane road through town, men in hunting jackets moved around quickly in heavy machinery, plowing and piling debris. Farmers in ball caps amputated horizontal cedars, poplars and pines with buzzing chain saws. Church ladies in fresh makeup and work gloves tidied the yards in front of roofless homes.

Newspapers have always written about the nation's disasters -- but so have balladeers, enshrining death and heroism and crime in songs about virtually every newsworthy event: the 1889 Johnstown flood, the last train ride of engineer Casey Jones, the sinking of the Titanic. These songs were popularized in sheet music and phonograph records, and some of the mournful tunes later wound up on the radio.

It's been 80 years since the catastrophic collapse of St. Francis Dam. On March 12, 1928, just moments before midnight, 12 billion gallons of water -- a year's supply for Los Angeles in those days -- crashed down San Francisquito Canyon. A thundering wall of water carried mud, boulders, trees and debris through the canyon, destroyed more than 1,000 homes, killed up to 600 people, took out five bridges and flowed overland until it reached the sea.

The death toll continued to climb in Myanmar as state media reported Tuesday that more than 22,000 people had died due to a weekend cyclone and more than 41,000 were missing. Efforts to reach the victims and help the estimated 1 million people left homeless by Tropical Cyclone Nargis remained mired amid bureaucracy, logistical problems and the isolation of many affected areas.

Frustration mounted Wednesday as humanitarian groups waited for Myanmar's government to grant visas and allow more relief flights into the country, steps deemed essential to easing the plight of as many as 1 million left homeless by a cyclone last weekend. By day's end, as gasoline lines grew and darkness enveloped a battered Yangon, Myanmar's most populous city, a trickle of aid was starting to flow.