Property Damage

America met Baghdad at the outset of the 1991 Gulf War with CNN correspondent Peter Arnett's live coverage from atop the Al Rasheed Hotel. A dozen years later, the beginning of another American war in Iraq came to us largely from reporters broadcasting live from another hotel, the Palestine. Those hotels -- complete with correspondents in the eerie light of antiaircraft fire -- have become landmarks in our collective memory. But the hotel that captured, or at least housed, the collective soul of a generation of correspondents in Iraq's wars was a stubbier, scruffier cousin, the Al Hamra.

The first e-mail went out within hours of the Jan. 12 earthquake, calling together some of Haiti's most prominent architects, engineers and urban planners. The next day, 50 people showed up at a house in the hillside suburb of Petionville and went to work. They have met every day since, gathering around a table in a courtyard under the shade of a spreading almond tree. Their goal is simple. It is also audacious. They want to plan a new Haiti. And not just new buildings. A new economy, a new political culture, a new way of thinking.

At Port-au-Prince's main art museum, it looked as if a cruel giant had taken bites out of the walls and ceiling of the cavernous exhibition hall. Large wooden panels where paintings once hung had toppled. A bronze bust of DeWitt Peters, a California water colorist widely credited with bringing international attention to Haitian art in the 1940s, lay on the ground. Joseph Gaspard, a member of the board of directors of the College Saint Pierre museum, was inspecting the site Saturday for the first time since the Jan. 12 earthquake, crunching broken glass as he walked through the debris.

Nancy Gjerset was finished sifting through the ashes for the day when the young woman stopped on Big Tujunga Canyon Road and offered a strange compliment. "She said, 'I hope you'll forgive me, but this is absolutely stunning,' " Gjerset recalled. That is hardly the way Gjerset looks at the ghostly, blackened trees around her and at the ghastly, charred foundation of her home of nearly 40 years that lies at her feet. The house burned to the ground Aug. 29. It was one of about 90 dwellings destroyed by the Station fire, the massive wildfire that killed two county firefighters and burned 250 square miles of Angeles National Forest.

Like so many others in the path of the Station fire, the owners of Singing Springs lost everything when flames chewed through a quarter of the Angeles National Forest late last summer. Or so they thought. As the fire swept across the family retreat-turned-movie-ranch Aug. 30, it wiped out all 11 buildings on the 16 1/2 -acre site along Angeles Forest Highway, destroying props, tools, keepsakes and furnishings. It leveled a barn that doubled as the gatekeeper's home, burned down the cabins, scorched the meadow, killed scores of trees and clogged with ash the streams and a swimming hole where trout had hidden.

For the Rev. Greg Hughes, it was a case of a resolute community of faith rising up from the ashes. "We were burned down, but fired up as a people," said Hughes, senior pastor at Malibu Presbyterian Church. "We don't have a scarcity mind set, 'woe is us' or whatever. We're still out having fun, living life and finding joy in our faith." The 300-member congregation marked a milestone Sunday, as worshipers celebrated services in an interim sanctuary on the hill above the Pacific for the first time since their landmark sanctuary burned to the ground in the 2007 Malibu wildfires.

Tony Peterson was 15 when he planted a pine sapling outside of his mother's home in South Los Angeles. For years he watched it grow, but then life took over. Peterson found a girlfriend, got married and moved out. As for the tree, it grew on its own, Peterson said. Over four decades, the pine grew into a towering "y," its thick trunk stretching and leaning toward homes in the 4900 block of Wadsworth Avenue. Its roots had burst through the ground, exposing themselves. Neighbors, including the now 58-year-old Peterson, feared the giant tree would one day fall.

Big Tujunga Canyon residents and others reeling from the Station fire called Monday for a federal investigation into what they termed a poor initial response to the deadly blaze by the U.S. Forest Service . "It was beyond irresponsibility, beyond neglect," said Cindy Marie Pain, who lost her Big Tujunga Canyon home to the fire, which broke out in the Angeles National Forest on Aug. 26. Pain and other residents said they were outraged by...

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.

The heaviest rainfall in at least eight decades sent flash floods barreling across a major highway and into busy business districts in Turkey's largest city on Wednesday, trapping factory workers and truck drivers in their vehicles and drowning at least 20 people. Waters 6 feet high in some places flooded hundreds of homes and offices and cut off the TEM highway, which connects central Istanbul to the city's main airport and goes on to Greece and Bulgaria. Rescue crews in helicopters pulled people off rooftops in Ikitelli, a district of media offices and corporate headquarters about 13 miles from the Bosporus strait, which divides the European and Asian parts of Turkey.