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.
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."
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.
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.
At least 17 people have been killed and dozens more are missing after a series of landslides in south-west China, state media says. The landslides, which were triggered by days of heavy rain, struck three rural communities in Sichuan and Yunnan provinces.
Four people were killed and 42 others were missing after one landslide in Xiaohe in Yunnan’s Zhaotong city. In Sichuan, two separate landslides left 13 people dead and two missing. Meanwhile further to the west in Qinghai province, 10,000 people have been evacuated from the area around an overflowing reservoir. Teams are trying to dig a channel to drain the reservoir, which has been filled far beyond capacity by recent heavy rain. It is the latest in a spate of weather-related incidents to hit China. Although seasonal, the rains are particularly heavy this year and disruption is severe. At least 43 people had died and 18 were missing after heavy rains along the Yangtze River in central and eastern China since 8 July, state media said. In Xiaohe in Yunnan, an official said that the side of a mountain crashed down on houses.
“The township is located in a river valley surrounded by mountains, people were buried in their homes,” the government official, who asked not to be named, told AFP news agency.
The other two landslides struck Yandai village in Garze and Sima village in Luzhou city. Search teams were working at all three sites, Xinhua news agency said, and relief supplies had been sent to Xiaohe. In Qinghai, soldiers were using bulldozers to cut a channel to drain water from the Wenquan reservoir, Xinhua reported. If it bursts, the reservoir could damage the nearby Qinghai-Tibet railway, along with the city of Golmud’s power and water plants, the agency said. Some parts of the city are reportedly already under 2m of water. Xinhua said the soldiers hoped to start draining the reservoir within the day.
A flood is an overflow of an expanse of water that submerges land. The EU Floods directive defines a flood as a temporary covering by water of land not normally covered by water. In the sense of “flowing water”, the word may also be applied to the inflow of the tide. Flooding may result from the volume of water within a body of water, such as a river or lake, which overflows or breaks levees, with the result that some of the water escapes its usual boundaries.
While the size of a lake or other body of water will vary with seasonal changes in precipitation and snow melt, it is not a significant flood unless such escapes of water endanger land areas used by man like a village, city or other inhabited area.
Floods can also occur in rivers, when flow exceeds the capacity of the river channel, particularly at bends or meanders. Floods often cause damage to homes and businesses if they are placed in natural flood plains of rivers. While flood damage can be virtually eliminated by moving away from rivers and other bodies of water, since time out of mind, people have lived and worked by the water to seek sustenance and capitalize on the gains of cheap and easy travel and commerce by being near water. That humans continue to inhabit areas threatened by flood damage is evidence that the perceived value of living near the water exceeds the cost of repeated periodic flooding.
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras (AP) — Four people have been killed and another injured following a week of heavy rains in Honduras.
The country’s Permanent Emergency Commission says three men died Monday while trying to cross rain-swollen streams or rivers.And one teenage boy was killed and an 11-year-old injured when their house partially collapsed in the capital Tegucigalpa on Monday. Honduras has been hit by heavy rains for about a week.Authorities say three people died in various parts of the country after being hit by lightning last week.
Heavy rains caused flash flooding across the Boston metro area Saturday, stranding cars and causing damage, the National Weather Service reported. No injuries were immediately reported. Flash flood warnings were issued for four counties in eastern Massachusetts, and 2 to 4 inches of rain fell in the region, according to the weather service.
There were several reports of cars getting stuck in floodwaters, particularly in the Somerville area, northwest of Boston, where the weather service said at least five vehicles were stranded underneath the Assembly Square Underpass. Video from CNN affiliates WHDH and WCVB showed the vehicles fully submerged beneath the underpass. Drivers had to be rescued from their cars when the tunnel filled with up to 18 feet of water, according to an off-duty police officer involved with the rescue efforts. The officer told WCVB that the water was heavily mixed with sewage. The flooding also forced the closures of at least two bridges. Witnesses told WHDH that cars were also submerged around the bridges and residents waded through water up to their knees. Some locals said they helped direct traffic since lights were knocked out by the storms. The bad weather also disrupted travel for the Boston area transit system. Joe Pesaturo, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, told CNN affiliate WCVB that there were weather-related delays during the afternoon, including the suspension of rail service in one area due to water on the tracks.