Disasters

Midway through this winter's El Nino storms, the consensus among county and city officials is that the separate areas that make up Orange County have achieved an unprecedented level of unity--at least when it comes to disaster. "One of the things showing up now is a newfound cooperative spirit between emergency response agencies," said Capt. Scott Brown, spokesman for the Orange County Fire Authority. "We deal with the potential for nature's fury on three plains--flood, fire and earthquake.

The rainstorm brought an avalanche of mud and debris crashing into a Dana Point hotel over the stormy weekend, but it didn't dampen the manager's sense of humor on Monday. "All I know is that our neighbor above us was so kind that she moved her property line and gave us her backyard," said Justine A. Harrison of the Holiday Inn Express, who enlisted a cellular phone to field calls from cleanup crews and this week's arriving guests after phone service was disrupted.

The pipe's in here somewhere, Loren Chapman is thinking as he digs at the side of the road. He laid the pipe out himself, a black plastic hose about four fingers wide, to carry water from his glassworks studio through the front fence to a drain at the edge of Laguna Canyon Road. But that was before the hill moved. Before the natural forces, which created the beautiful narrow canyon in the first place, resumed their timeless work.

Earthquakes, floods and hurricanes cause suicide rates to climb among grieving and stressed survivors, researchers report in today's New England Journal of Medicine. "Overall, the suicide rate increased by 13.8% during the four years after a severe natural disaster," the research team led by Dr. Etienne G. Krug of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta found.

As head of an agency that has tracked this winter's El Nino scourge across the continent, American Red Cross President Elizabeth Hanford Dole said Saturday it will take more organization, fund-raising and volunteers--particularly young people--to address emergencies in the future. "El Nino has certainly been a problem throughout California and the coastal areas this year," Dole said in a Newport Beach speech commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Orange County Red Cross chapter.

A miner feared dead after massive landslides buried him and 10 others in a talc mine was rescued late Sunday. Austrian television interrupted its regular programming as Georg Hainzl, 24, was hoisted by cables from the 200-foot-deep eating area where he was trapped by a mudslide during heavy rains July 17. A second, larger mudslide buried 10 others who had been sent to rescue him in the town of Lassing. There was no word on the 10 others.

The nation's coastal population has exploded in recent years during a period of fewer than normal hurricanes, meaning that millions could be in harm's way should the number of storms rebound to historical levels. Researchers at Florida State University point to a downward trend in hurricanes striking coastal sections of the Gulf of Mexico.

As local governments tally the damage from this winter's El Nino storms, they have yet to fully repair millions of dollars in flood damage from 1995 storms because of a long-running funding dispute with the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Officials in several Southern California counties said they have yet to receive federal funds needed to complete repairs and improvements to flood control channels and other public facilities that they believed FEMA would cover.

The area where a sudden landslide sent a home careening down a canyon appeared to stabilize Monday, but officials and experts said the record El Nino rains have so saturated hillsides that further destructive earth movement is likely elsewhere along the coast. The prospect of more landslides brings an added level of stress to residents because, unlike the brush fires and flowing mud that regularly torment coastal canyon property owners, earth movements are not covered by homeowner insurance.

The inhabitants of funky and iconoclastic Canyon Acres, arguably one of the most storm-vulnerable neighborhoods in all of Southern California, are scurrying to prepare for what some fear is another date with disaster. Two men were killed, nine others were injured and dozens driven from their homes last week when a heavy storm unleashed a wall of mud in Canyon Acres and a nearby enclave of artists, writers and other devotees of rural canyon life.