Disasters

With floodwaters finally receding, Georgians began the unglamorous task of cleaning up Wednesday, while taking stock of the destruction from an unprecedented autumn deluge that has claimed nine lives and caused an estimated $250 million in damage. Across the state, roads opened and residents returned to view the damage to their homes. In the early hours Wednesday, work crews managed to fix much of the damage to a city of Atlanta water-treatment plant that spilled millions of gallons of water into the Chattahoochee River.

Convoys of military vehicles brought food, water and medicine to the tsunami-stricken Samoa Islands on Thursday as victims wandered through what was left of their villages with tales of being trapped underwater, watching young children drown and hoisting elderly parents above the waves. The death toll rose to 160 as grim-faced islanders gathered under a traditional meetinghouse to hear a Samoan government minister discuss a plan for a mass funeral and burial next week. Samoans traditionally bury their loved ones near their homes, but that could be impractical because many villages have been wiped out. The dead from Tuesday's earthquake and tsunami include 120 in Samoa, 31 in American Samoa and nine in Tonga.

Is 2012 the end of the world? If you scan the Internet or believe the marketing campaign behind the movie "2012," scheduled for release in November, you might be forgiven for thinking so. Dozens of books and fake science websites are prophesying the arrival of doomsday that year, by means of a rogue planet colliding with the Earth or some other cataclysmic event. Normally, scientists regard Internet hysteria with nothing more than a raised eyebrow and a shake of the head. But a few scientists have become so concerned at the level of fear they are seeing that they decided not to remain on the sidelines this time.

Thousands of National Guard troops with chain saws cut their way into remote communities to reach residents stranded by a deadly ice storm, freeing some to get out of their driveways for the first time in nearly a week. The troops went door to door handing out chili and beef stew rations to people cooped up in their powerless homes as authorities stepped up the relief effort for what Gov. Steve Beshear called the state's biggest natural disaster ever. Kentucky was hit hardest by the storm, which paralyzed wide areas from the Ozarks through Appalachia last week.

The crew of the doomsday movie "2012" expressed sympathy Friday for victims of flooding and earthquakes this week in the Asia-Pacific region. The epic, set for release in November, is based on a Maya prophecy that a catastrophe will occur in 2012. "Things in the film were happening in real life," co-producer Harald Kloser said of the Asian disasters on a stop in Taiwan during the film's promotional tour. "Our hearts go out to those suffering."

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.