Landslides

Taiwan's military airlifted survivors from remote mountain villages devastated by mudslides triggered by last weekend's Typhoon Morakot, and announced today that it was sending an additional 4,000 soldiers to help with the rescue effort. The new troops will join the more than 10,000 soldiers already racing to save thousands of survivors stranded in several villages in the island's south, the Defense Ministry said in a statement. Rescue efforts have been slow because many bridges and roads to hard-hit villages collapsed or were washed out by raging floodwaters.

Charred slopes in the foothills towering above William Johnson's La Cañada Flintridge home are now a mudslide in the making after being charred by recent wildfires. But getting insurance for his property has been impossible for him and many of his neighbors, he said, as winter rains loom. Johnson, 54, said he called three providers, each of whom said they would not issue insurance for his area. "While I'm trying to get protection, they don't want to deal with their losses, and they're trying to maximize their profits," he said.

Rescue workers dug for a second day Saturday through mud and debris, searching for about 30 people believed caught in a mudslide that has killed at least 21 in Sicily. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said he feared that the death toll from Italy's worst mudslides in a decade could rise to 50. Berlusconi is expected to survey the area by helicopter today, his office said. Rivers of mud unleashed by heavy rains flooded parts of Messina, a city in eastern Sicily, on Friday, sweeping away cars and collapsing buildings.

If meteorologists are right, the storm of the year may be on its way to Steven Hand's backwoods patch of eastern Orange County, potentially transforming the steep, charred slopes encircling his family home into fast-moving rivers of mud and rocks. He knows all this, but on Thursday he just shrugged. "You can't stop a mudslide," said Steven, 16, who has lived on his family's isolated 14-acre plot in Modjeska Canyon his whole life.

The owner of a fluff-and-fold laundry in a small western Oregon town couldn't be happier that tons of mud, rocks, snow and fir trees sloughed off a hillside one day in January. No one was hurt when the landslide took out the Union Pacific Railroad's main track through the Cascades south of Eugene, but it has severed a key rail link between Los Angeles and Seattle. The slide spans 3,000 feet.

Her suitor had the ring, but she lost her dowry. It was buried beneath the fallen limestone cliffs that smashed her home and smothered her neighborhood two months ago, killing at least 200 people. That morning seems long past, but there are still funerals and newly made orphans when the digging men pull another body from the rock and grit. It goes on like this, names whispered in alleys, hearts broken.

Rescue workers rushed to help residents in southern Brazil on Monday after landslides and floods caused by heavy rain killed at least 59 people and forced more than 43,000 from their homes. The state of Santa Catarina declared an emergency as rescuers used helicopters and motorboats to reach those displaced or stranded after days of torrential rain. The state government said the floods and mudslides had affected 1.

The first significant storm of the season was moving out of Southern California on Wednesday night after dumping record amounts of rain in some areas but causing little further damage in the hillside areas denuded earlier this month by wildfires. Flash flood warnings for some areas remained in effect throughout much of the day, however.

Enough already. That seems to be the general consensus among residents in the fire-ravaged and now mudslide-threatened neighborhoods of Yorba Linda. So when the latest mandatory evacuation order went out Monday morning, many people decided to stay put. "Once you leave, you can't come back," said Michele Zenk, who like many of her neighbors in the Box Canyon area has been through this drill too many times to count. "This is not a good time of year to get stuck in your home."

Brazil began planning relief for tens of thousands of people forced from their homes by weeks of heavy rains and mudslides. Mudslides killed at least 26 people in Rio de Janeiro state and three in neighboring Sao Paulo state. Another 26 deaths have been blamed on rains in Minas Gerais state since October. Most of those affected lived in shantytowns perched on hillsides.