Hurricanes

Back-to-back floods have residents of the sedate community of Palm Lake wondering if more than wretched weather is to blame. Tropical Storm Isidore unleashed torrential rains and 8-foot tidal surges, flooding 295 homes in the town nestled in a thick canopy of pines on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain. Hurricane Lili added to the misery Thursday. Residents watched as homes flooded again. Lili was a Category 4 hurricane packing 145-mph winds before it weakened substantially and hit land.

A wide range of design and construction defects in levees around New Orleans raise serious doubts that the system can withstand the pounding of another hurricane the size of Katrina, even after $3.1 billion in repairs are completed, a team of independent investigators led by UC Berkeley's civil engineering school said Sunday.

Hurricane Jimena plowed over Baja California on Wednesday, tearing off roofs, knocking down power poles and bringing welcome rainfall to a drought-stricken state. The storm's winds decreased from 150 mph on Tuesday to 80 mph by the time it made landfall between Puerto San Andresito and San Jaunico, a sparsely populated area of fishing villages on the Pacific coast of the peninsula. Wind gusts and heavy rains tore down dozens of trees and lampposts in Loreto, the nearest significant resort town, said Humberto Carmona, a city official at an emergency response center.

The surge of water that engulfed parts of Iberia Parish four weeks ago tore shrimp boats from their moorings, wrenched the stairs off porches and lifted children's toys out of their yards. Residents spent the next weeks cataloging objects that seemed to have vanished. But they have not vanished; they have moved to other places.

Hurricane Norbert swept across Mexico's southern Baja California peninsula on Saturday, tearing off roofs and forcing hundreds of people to flee flooded homes. It hit land near Puerto Charley on Baja's southwest coast as a Category 2 hurricane, but weakened to Category 1 after emerging over the Gulf of California, according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami. Norbert was expected to reach mainland Mexico before dawn today.

Typhoon Damrey smashed into Vietnam after killing 16 people in China, tearing into vital networks of sea dikes on a long stretch of coastline, where more than 330,000 people had been evacuated. In Thanh Hoa province, where the typhoon landed, one person was killed while trying to tie down the roof of a house. The government deployed small armies to shore up the sea dikes and to quicken rice harvesting, but the barriers were soon breached in some areas, flooding and isolating villages.

Along the piers and cobblestone streets of Fells Point, the people living in the 150-year-old brick row houses that line the waterfront thought they had survived Hurricane Isabel in surprisingly good shape. Then they got sucker-punched. Hours after the storm had passed on to the northwest and high tide had brought only moderate flooding in the predawn hours of Friday, a new wall of water -- driven by southerly winds that trailed behind Isabel -- surged unexpectedly up Chesapeake Bay.

Although the Gulf of Mexico has seen two Category 5 hurricanes this summer -- with sustained wind speeds in excess of 155 mph -- such extremely powerful storms are rare beasts that often fade before reaching land. Since 1928, only 28 Category 5 hurricanes have formed in the Atlantic Ocean, and of those, eight have struck land, three of them in the United States.

More than half a million people fled the sea shore Tuesday, from Murrells Inlet, S.C., to the Chesapeake Bay as Hurricane Bonnie, a storm almost as large as the South itself, gathered strength and whirled its way toward land. Like a scene from some end-of-the-world movie, cars were bumper-to-bumper on roads leading inland, after officials issued strict evacuation orders for residents of North Carolina's Outer Banks and warned everyone in the region that this is a storm not to be trifled with.

These are not good times for USAir Group, parent of USAir. Its merger with Piedmont Airlines, the largest in airline history, was planned with patience and precision. But it did not come off as smoothly as had been hoped. Arlington-based USAir has also been buffeted by natural disasters--Hurricane Hugo and the San Francisco Bay Area earthquake--and by troubles being suffered generally throughout the industry. But the big problems grew out of the merger.