The city of Memphis, Tennesee has been put on alert for record flooding as the waters of the Mississippi river reached a historic peak.
Police went door-to-door to evacuate people from low-lying neighbourhoods after forecasters said the river could reach its peak of 14.6 metres (48ft) by Monday evening.
RIO DE JANEIRO — A widespread drought in the Amazon rain forest last year was worse than the “once-in-a-century” dry spell in 2005 and may have a bigger impact on global warming than the United States does in a year, British and Brazilian scientists said on Thursday.
More frequent severe droughts like those in 2005 and 2010 risk turning the world’s largest rain forest from a sponge that absorbs carbon emissions into a source of the gases, accelerating global warming, the report found.
Trees and other vegetation in the world’s forests soak up heat-trapping carbon dioxide as they grow, helping cool the planet, but release it when they die and rot.
“If events like this happen more often, the Amazon rain forest would reach a point where it shifts from being a valuable carbon sink slowing climate change to a major source of greenhouse gases that could speed it up,” said lead author Simon Lewis, an ecologist at the University of Leeds.
The study, published in the journal Science, found that last year’s drought caused rainfall shortages over a 1.16 million square-mile expanse of the forest, compared with 734,000 square miles in the 2005 drought.
It was also more intense, causing higher tree mortality and having three major epicenters, whereas the 2005 drought was mainly focused in the southwestern Amazon.
As a result, the study predicted the Amazon forest would not absorb its usual 1.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in both 2010 and 2011. In addition, the dead and dying trees would release 5 billion metric tons of the gas in the coming years, making a total impact of about 8 billion metric tons, according to the study.
In comparison, the United States emitted 5.4 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel use in 2009.
The combined emissions caused by the two droughts were probably enough to have canceled out the carbon absorbed by the forest over the past 10 years, the study found.
The widespread drought last year dried up major rivers in the Amazon and isolated thousands of people who depend on boat transportation, shocking climate scientists who had billed the 2005 drought as a once-in-a-century event.
The two intense dry spells fit predictions by some climate models that the forest will face greater weather extremes this century, with more intense droughts making it more vulnerable to fires, which in turn could damage its ability to recover.
Under the more extreme scenarios, large parts of the forest could turn into a savannah-like ecosystem by the middle of the century with much lower levels of animal and plant biodiversity. Although human-caused deforestation in Brazil has fallen sharply in recent years, scientists say the forest is still vulnerable.
A crucial question is whether the droughts are being driven by higher levels of greenhouse gases or are an anomaly, Lewis said. If they are driven by global warming, a vicious cycle of warmer temperatures and droughts could conceivably lead to a large-scale transformation of the forest over a period of decades.
“You could quite rapidly move to a much drier Amazon with less forest there,” Lewis told Reuters.
The research was a collaboration among scientists at the University of Leeds and the University of Sheffield in Britain and Brazil’s Amazon Environmental Research Institute.
Freshwater is flowing into Earth’s oceans in greater amounts every year, a team of researchers has found, thanks to more frequent and extreme storms linked to global warming. All told, 18 percent more water fed into the world’s oceans from rivers and melting polar ice sheets in 2006 than in 1994, with an average annual rise of 1.5 percent.
“That might not sound like much — 1.5 percent a year — but after a few decades, it’s huge,” said Jay Famiglietti, UC Irvine Earth system science professor and principal investigator on the study, which will be published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He noted that while freshwater is essential to humans and ecosystems, the rain is falling in all the wrong places, for all the wrong reasons.
“In general, more water is good,” Famiglietti said. “But here’s the problem: Not everybody is getting more rainfall, and those who are may not need it. What we’re seeing is exactly what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted — that precipitation is increasing in the tropics and the Arctic Circle with heavier, more punishing storms. Meanwhile, hundreds of millions of people live in semiarid regions, and those are drying up.”
DES MOINES, Iowa – Three nights of heavy rainfall caused Iowa creeks and rivers to swell, forcing hundreds of residents from their homes and killing a 16-year-old girl when three cars were swept away by a torrent of water on a rural road.
In Ames, flooding contributed to a water main break that forced the city to shut off water to its roughly 55,000 residents and left Iowa State University’s basketball arena under 4 to 5 feet of water.
The flooding in central and eastern Iowa on Wednesday followed three straight nights of strong thunderstorms. After a brief respite for much of the state, more thunderstorms were possible Friday and Saturday, according to the National Weather Service.
Divers found the body of Jessica Nichole Webb, of Altoona, near the submerged cars in Mud Creek on Wednesday afternoon, more than 10 hours after she disappeared. Authorities said fast-moving water had hindered earlier search efforts.
Three cars had been swept off the road between Altoona and Mitchellville about 4 a.m. Rescuers found 10 of the 11 passengers clinging to trees and hanging onto logs.
Doug Phillips, a division chief with the Polk County Sheriff’s Office, said the creek is usually only 3 feet deep and 10 feet wide but early Wednesday morning, "it looked like a river."
Storms dumped 2 to 4 inches of rain on central and eastern Iowa overnight Wednesday, with 6 inches in some spots, the weather service said. A snowy winter and wet spring and summer "set the stage" for the flooding, but the recent storms were the big problem, meteorologist Jim Lee said.
"The bulk of this has been caused by those recent extreme rainfalls, especially back-to-back-to-back," he said.
The weather service issued a flash flood watch for northwest Iowa from Thursday afternoon through Friday evening, when more storms could bring up to 3 inches in some already saturated areas. Other parts of the state weren’t expected to get more rain until later in the week.
Hundreds of residents in one Des Moines neighborhood were asked to leave Wednesday afternoon because of flooding by Four Mile Creek, and utility workers turned off natural gas and electric service to homes. A shelter was opened at an elementary school.
"It’s such a serious and dangerous situation any time there is water around these homes because of the electricity and gas," police Sgt. Lori Lavorato said.
In Ames, about 30 miles north of Des Moines, officials shut off the city’s water supply after saturated soil shifted under flooded Squaw Creek, causing a buried 24-inch main to fail. The break drained a city water tower, dropping pressure in the distribution system and raising the possibility the system’s water could become contaminated.
Officials said repairs could take up to 24 hours and it might be a week before the water was safe to drink.
Several hundred Ames residents were evacuated after both Squaw Creek and Skunk River rose, Fire Chief Clint Petersen said. In some spots, water was up to car windshields.
The floor at Hilton Coliseum, Iowa State’s basketball arena, was covered with up to 5 feet of water, school spokesman John McCarroll said. It was too soon to know how much damage had been done, he said.
Howe’s Welding and Metal Fab had several feet of water inside it, even though the owners had been sandbagging all night. Piper Wall, whose husband owns the business, said it was difficult to assess the damage while the water remained, but it appeared worse than in 1993, when much of the area was underwater.
"It will be when all this comes out and all the mud that remains and the machining tools and electric stuff that’s not high enough," Wall said. "In 1993, it was $150,000 and this year it’s higher."
Downriver from Ames, the town of Colfax was nearly cut off by the rising Skunk River. Roads were covered by water, and people used boats to help neighbors. City officials asked at least 300 residents on the west side of town to move to higher ground, Colfax Mayor David Mast said.
Heather Kern’s basement was flooded, and water was inching into the first floor with waste-high water in the backyard.
"I feel blessed that we have our lives," Kern said. "We don’t know where we’re going to live or where we’re going to stay, but we have our lives."
Beijing – Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao on Sunday toured an area in northwest China wracked by an avalanche of rain and mud that killed at least 127 people and left another 2,000 missing – the latest disaster in a summer season 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 rain-swollen Zhouqu County in the nation’s northwestern Gansu Province.
A torrential downpour began late Saturday in the province’s Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, an area dominated by steep and barren terrain. Most of the area’s 135,000 residents are ethnic Tibetan herders and farmers.
Shortly after midnight, as residents slept, mountains of mud struck the area, smashing a small power station and wreaking havoc as the Bailong River overflowed its banks.
Half the county was left underwater and one village of 300 homes was literally "buried" under mud and debris, according to the Xinhua news agency.
Peng Wei, head of the county’s fire department told reporters that "the county was in a valley and the river runs in the middle."
State-run television Sunday estimated that 50,000 people had been evacuated. Nearly 3,000 troops and 100 medical workers were converging on the scene, while helicopters surveyed the damage, officials said.
"Now the sludge has become the biggest problem to rescue operations," one local official told Xinhua. "It’s too thick to walk or drive through."
Li Tiankui, a resident who lives near the Bailong River, also told the news agency: "Someone said the fifth floor of my residential building had been submerged. People are busy looking for family members and friends."
So far this year, 1,100 people have been killed and more than 600 have gone missing amid floods that have caused tens of billions of dollars in damage across 28 provinces and regions. Overall, some 875,000 homes have been destroyed with more than 9 million residents evacuated.
Record-high rains have raised rivers in numerous regions to perilously high levels, including the fast-flowing Yangtze River. Floodwaters filled the reservoir at the massive Three Gorges Dam to dangerous levels, officials said.
Elsewhere, some 40 large and medium-sized reservoirs in northeast China were near capacity. Officials are investigating the breaching of a reservoir that killed 40 residents in five downstream communities.
On Sunday, state-run TV showed images from Zhouqu County, where cavalcades of mud several-feet deep flowed down the town’s streets, sweeping along cars, uprooted trees and other debris. The coverage showed one boy being pulled from a ruined house.
Terrified residents fled to high ground or upper stories of apartment buildings. Power, water and communications were cut in flooded areas.
NOWSHERA, Pakistan – The death toll from massive flooding in Pakistan surged past 800 in Saturday and could reach into the thousands in coming days as floodwaters recede in the hard-hit northwest, authorities said.
"The death toll could go as high as 3,000 because the level of destruction has been so great," Mujahid Khan, chief spokesman for Pakistan’s largest rescue service, said by telephone from Peshawar.
Saturday afternoon, 817 people had been confirmed dead, he said. In neighboring eastern Afghanistan, 64 others were reported dead.
The damage to roads, bridges and communications networks was hindering rescuers, while the threat of disease loomed as some evacuees arrived in camps with fever, diarrhea and skin problems.
Even for a country used to tragedy, the scale of this past week’s flooding has been shocking. Monsoon rains come every year, but rarely with such fury.
Compounding the tragedy was the country’s worst-ever plane crash, caused by heavy rains, which killed 152 people in Islamabad on Wednesday.
As waterways swelled in Pakistan’s northwest, people sought ever-shrinking high ground or grasped for trees and fences to avoid getting swept away as buildings crumbled into raging rivers.
The United Nations estimated that 1 million people across Pakistan were affected in some way by the disaster.
More than 30,000 Pakistani army troops had evacuated 19,000 trapped people by Saturday night, said army spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas.
"The level of devastation is so widespread, so large," he said. "It is quite possible that in many areas there is damage, deaths, which may not have been reported."
In the Nowshera area, men, women and children sat on roofs in hopes of air or boat rescues. Many had little more than the clothes on their backs.
"There are very bad conditions," said Amjad Ali, a rescue worker in the area. "They have no water, no food."
In the town of Charsadda, Nabi Gul looked at a pile of rubble where his house once stood.
"I built this house with my life’s earnings and hard work, and the river has washed it away," he said. "Now I wonder, will I be able to rebuild it?"
PESHAWAR, Pakistan – The death toll in three days of flooding in Pakistan reached at least 267 on Friday, rescue and government officials said, as rains bloated rivers, submerged villages, and triggered landslides. The rising toll of the monsoon rains underscore the poor infrastructure in impoverished Pakistan, where under-equipped rescue workers were struggling to reach people stranded in far-flung villages.
Pakistani TV showed striking images of people clinging to fences and other stationary items as water at times gushed over their heads. The northwest appeared to be the hardest hit, and Mian Iftikhar Hussain, the information minister for the province, said it was the worst flooding in the region since 1929.
At least 245 people died in various parts of that province over the last three days, said Mujahid Khan of the Edhi Foundation, a privately run rescue service that operates morgues and ambulances across the South Asian country.
In Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, at least 22 people had been confirmed dead as of Thursday evening, the area’s prime minister, Sardar Attique Khan, told reporters.
The tolls from the deluge were expected to rise because many people were still missing. Poor weather this week also may have been a factor in Wednesday’s Airblue plane crash that killed 152 people in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. In the Swat Valley, residents were forced to trudge through knee-deep water in some streets.
A newly constructed part of a dam in the Charsadda district collapsed, while the U.N. said it had reports that 5,000 homes were underwater in that area. Hussain estimated 400,000 people were stranded in various northwest villages.
"A rescue operation using helicopters cannot be conducted due to the bad weather, while there are only 48 rescue boats available for rescue," he said on Thursday.
Pakistan’s poorest residents are often the ones living in flood-prone areas because they can’t afford safer land.
Southwest Baluchistan province has also been hit hard by the recent rains. Last week, flash floods in that region killed at least 41 people and swept away thousands of homes. The U.N. statement Thursday said 150,000 people were affected there.
The U.N. said Punjab province in Pakistan’s east was also hit by some flooding. Crops were soaked in farmlands throughout the country. The U.N. said the humanitarian community was trying to put together a proper response, but the rains were making many roads impassable, complicating efforts to assess needs.
China is bracing itself for its worst floods in more than a decade as Typhoon Conson closes in on its southern coast. Conson – which claimed at least 37 lives in the Philippines – brings with it torrential rains increasing the risk of floods, meteorologists warned. Floods and landslides have killed at least 135 people in China this month and 41 are missing, state media report.
More than 35 million people across China have been hit by the poor weather and 1.2 million have been relocated. Conson had been downgraded to a tropical storm after it left the Philippines but strengthened into a typhoon again late on Thursday.The China Meteorological Administration said it was packing winds of 75mph (120km/h). Conson is expected to make landfall late on Friday in Hainan, an island off south-east China, where 24,000 fishing boats have been recalled. Light rain was already falling on Hainan, and conditions were dark and windy, an official at the local meteorological bureau told AP news agency. Parts of Guangdong province and neighbouring Guangxi region are also forecast to see torrential rains over the next 24 hours.
Heavy rains and powerful winds battered East Asia on Thursday, pressing authorities to evacuate hundreds of thousands of people from their homes in Japan and putting China on alert for its worst floods in years. In the Philippines, power was gradually restored to millions of homes in and around Manila after Typhoon Conson hit the capital harder than expected on Tuesday night, killing 23 people and leaving dozens missing.
Tropical Storm Risk downgraded the typhoon to a tropical storm on Thursday, but the Philippines’ weather bureau said it was expected to regain strength as it moved over the South China Sea and headed toward southern China and northern Vietnam. Conson was due to hit land late on Friday. Typhoons and tropical storms regularly hit the Philippines, China, Taiwan and Japan in the second half of the year, gathering strength from the warm waters of the Pacific Ocean or South China Sea before normally weakening over land. Japan’s Kyodo news agency said local governments had recommended that some 300,000 people be evacuated from their homes, as the Meteorological Agency forecast heavy rains from a separate weather system for the west and east of the country later on Thursday. TV images showed some houses tilted after being hit by mudslides, swollen rivers and abandoned cars almost totally submerged in flooded streets. Footage also showed a rescue crew saving a man caught in a fallen tree on a fast-running river. Authorities says two people have been killed and other were missing.
"NO ROOM FOR OPTIMISM" IN CHINA
Central China faces was bracing for its worst flooding since 1998, when thousands died, as rain continues to batter the upper and middle reaches of the Yangtze River. "Although the current situation along the Yangtze River has yet to reach the danger level, it is definitely at a crucial point," the China Daily quoted senior flood official Wang Jingquan as saying. "If heavy rain hits the upper reaches of the Yangtze River, coupled with the continuous rainfall in the middle and lower reaches, severe flooding similar to that in 1998 will occur," Wang added. "There will be no room for optimism as the incoming Typhoon Conson will add to the grave situation in flood control." Yangtze floods in 1998 killed more than 4,000 people and forced the evacuation of more than 18 million, the newspaper said. Rain across a large swathe of southern China has already killed around 400 people this year. Storms over the last week in Yunnan, Sichuan and Hunan provinces have killed at least 41 and left nearly 40 others missing, with many vanishing under landslides. President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao have ordered local governments to step up flood relief efforts and "stressed that people residing in areas under the threat of floods and typhoons must be relocated to safety in a timely manner," the report said.
POWER RETURNS IN MANILA
Trains, planes and ferries returned to normal operations in the Philippines as Typhoon Conson tracked toward the Chinese island of Hainan. More than 8,000 people remained in temporary shelters in five cities and 47 towns on Luzon, the Philippines’ main island. About 40 percent of the Luzon power grid’s daily requirement of nearly 5,500 megawatts had been restored, although repairs have been slowed down by damaged bridges and roads, fallen trees and posts and snapped cables and transmission lines. Power distributor Manila Electric Co (Meralco) said it had restored power in most of the capital, but wider areas south of Manila will remain in the dark until Friday. Civil defense chief Benito Ramos said the typhoon had not caused a great deal of damage to rice- and coconut-growing areas near the capital.
MANILA, Philippines — Electricity was restored in the Philippine capital, flights resumed and schools reopened Thursday after the first typhoon of the season killed at least 26 people and plunged most of the main northern island into darkness. Thirty-eight people remained missing, mostly fishermen caught by Typhoon Conson’s fury at sea.
Electricity was restored to most of Manila and nearby provinces after Conson, packing winds of 75 miles (120 kilometers) per hour, slammed ashore late Tuesday and early Wednesday, toppling power lines, downing trees and ripping off roofs and tarpaulin billboards. Flights at the Manila international airport also resumed and schools reopened. Heavy rains, unrelated to the typhoon, have also wreaked havoc in China and Japan. The death toll from rain-triggered landslides rose to 41 in western China, and workers raced to drain overflowing reservoirs in the southeast. Flooding has killed more than 100 people in China so far this month, the official Xinhua News Agency said. Storm in southern and western Japan left two dead and three missing. An elderly woman drowned in a swollen river and another woman in her 70s was found buried in a landslide in Hiroshima, western Japan, according to Hiroshima police. Two women in their 70s also were missing there, as was an 82-year-old man in neighboring Shimane prefecture. More rain was predicted Thursday in both Japan and China. Conson, which weakened into a tropical storm over the South China Sea, was forecast to make another landfall along the Chinese-Vietnamese border this weekend.
In the Philippines, many died while fleeing the typhoon’s fury, regional disaster operations officer Fred Bragas said. The 26 deaths were spread over six provinces and areas near Manila. Newly elected President Benigno Aquino III scolded the weather bureau for failing to predict that the storm would hit Manila, which left government agencies unprepared for the onslaught. The Philippines is hit by about 20 typhoons and storms a year, gaining a reputation as the welcome mat for the most destructive cyclones from the Pacific. Last year, back-to-back typhoons inundated Manila and outlying provinces, killing nearly 1,000 people. Several people were killed by falling debris or electrocuted. One man drowned trying to save a dozen pigs in a swollen lake south of Manila, while his companion was swept away and is missing, Bragas said. Twenty-seven out of 30 towns in Laguna province were flooded and the governor declared a state of calamity. A concrete wall collapsed and pinned four carpenters to death while a landslide killed a man in his house in nearby Tagaytay city. The man’s son remains missing in the landslide, Bragas said. In Quezon province, four fishermen drowned and 18 others were rescued after huge waves and strong winds battered their motor boats as they raced toward an island to seek shelter late Tuesday, provincial Gov. David Suarez told. Villagers and the coast guard have launched a search for 27 missing fishermen, he said.
Three vessels, including an LPG carrier, sank during the typhoon and most of the crew were rescued while some are missing. Another nine fishermen were rescued after big waves overturned their boats off the island province of Catanduanes, regional military spokesman Maj. Harold Cabunoc said. The other 10 remained missing.
