Mud

Four young men died when their car crashed into a pool of steaming thermal mud, police said today. Police said the four, all residents of Rotorua, south of Auckland, probably had no chance to escape after the accident near Lake Rotorua because the accident damaged the car's roof and jammed the doors. Another motorist, who saw the accident, tried to break the windshield with a rock and dug into the mud with his bare hands in a futile attempt to free the four.

A horse that was ridden into an off-limits area of Carbon Canyon Regional Park sank to its chest in mud Sunday morning, but was rescued by about 15 people who tugged him out with a rope. County park rangers and animal control officers said the horse apparently suffered no injuries--only a scare--when it became trapped about 11 a.m. in an area being used to deposit silt dredged from the park's man-made lake. "The guy rode through that area.

When the rain started to fall, Janet Blake started to worry. From the picture window of her home, she could see the stream that was once her street become a torrent of stones, branches and mud. The fire was easier, she thought; that was only six days of worry. The possibility of the mountain sliding down upon her is indefinite. Her husband, Brian Hodge, worked in the other room, and Cooper, their yellow lab, stood beside her, his tail merrily striking the ornaments on the Christmas tree.

When I close my eyes at night, no matter where I am, my mind often drifts back many years to the newly commissioned Calypso floating beneath a Mediterranean sky. The ship was my childhood home, though I never had a place reserved to me. Instead, I slept in a different bunk each night, sometimes in the open drawer of a locker, sometimes in my mother's bed, sometimes in my father's. Calypso was my childhood identity. I was lucky. My father's ship was my foundation, the beginning of my future.

Mudslides triggered by the punishing rains of a late summer typhoon buried people sleeping in their homes in a remote Taiwanese village and toppled buildings in Taiwan and the Chinese mainland, raising fears that hundreds may have perished. The confirmed death toll from Typhoon Morakot stood at more than 50 early today, including 22 killed in the Philippines, but the numbers are likely to rise significantly as bodies are dug out of the mud. In Wenzhou, an eastern Chinese city, a four-story apartment building collapsed Monday night.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao on Sunday toured an area in north-central China racked by an avalanche of rain and mud that killed at least 127 people and left hundreds missing, the latest disaster in a summer that has brought the nation's worst flooding in a decade. Wen's visit came as rescue teams franticly searched flooded homes for survivors in Zhouqu county in Gansu province. Authorities were reportedly trying to find 1,300 people, down from an earlier estimate of 2,000.

After the Station fire, Cory Ryken got a quick education in how to build a sandbag wall. What he didn't learn was how to keep his neighborhood together. "I've been predicting this for months, and it's all coming true," says the 39-year-old deejay, standing on 3 feet of mud and rocks that cover the backyard of his La Cañada Flintridge home. Ryken wanders over to the property line. Debris from the Feb. 6 downpour buried his neighbors' swimming pools, and with more rain in the forecast, he worries.

An American airlines flight preparing to take off from Houston's Hobbby Airport on Friday slid off a runway into mud when the pilot turned the plane too sharply, authorities said. The 90 passengers were unharmed.

Karin Wakefield was walking in the Sepulveda Basin on Monday when the earth gave way "like quicksand," authorities said. A passerby called 911 after seeing her waist-deep, just north of Burbank Boulevard, west of Woodley Avenue shortly before 3 p.m., said Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman Bob Collis. Wakefield was not injured. Wakefield had one leg in the mud and one leg free, which saved her from sinking deeper into the muck, Collis said.

Rescue workers using a fleet of helicopters lifted survivors Friday from dark, oozing mud that rushed down the slopes of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano, destroyed the town of Armero and buried thousands of its residents. In the government's first official report on the world's most deadly volcanic disaster in more than 80 years, Health Minister Rafael de Zubira estimated the death toll at between 17,000 and 20,000 and said at least 3,000 others were injured.