The epicenter of the earthquake was near Mount Chyornaya, Viktor Bondarev, chief of the Olyutorsky district administration, was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying.

The power and water supplies to the local village of Tilichiki were cut off. No casualties were reported yet.

Local authorities ordered urgent measures to restore power and water supplies to the area.
A strong earthquake hit the village of Tilichiki in April, forcing more than 1,200 people to be evacuated to Palana, Ossora and the Kamchatka region.

There were no immediate reports of damage or injury. Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy has a population of 196,000, according to the USGS e-mail.

The quake was the biggest of 5 tremors of magnitude 4.8 or bigger after a 6.6 earthquake struck in the region at about 12 minutes past midnight today, the USGS said. The main shock was revised from a magnitude of 6.2, itself a revision from an initial measure of 6.7.

The area has experienced strong aftershocks since a magnitude 7.7 earthquake hit Kamchatka on April 21. That earthquake hurt several people and destroyed a school, a hospital and power lines in the village of Tilichiki, as well as damaging an airport in nearby Korf.

Kamchatka lies in a zone where the Eurasian and Pacific plates meet and occasionally shift, causing earthquakes. Quakes of magnitude 5.0 or more can cause considerable damage, depending on their depth.

The 6.6 shock just after midnight wasn't strong enough to generate a tsunami warning to California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia or Alaska, the West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Center said in an e-mailed statement, citing historical earthquake and tsunami data. Some of those areas may have experienced "small sea level changes,'' the statement said.

Arief Akhir, an official at the Meteorological and Geophysics Agency in Jakarta, said that no damage or casualties were reported.

Indonesia, the world's largest archipelago, is prone to seismic upheaval due to its location on the so-called Pacific "Ring of Fire,'' an arc of volcanos and fault lines encircling the Pacific Basin.

A 9.1-magnitude earthquake on Dec. 26, 2004, off the coast of Sumatra Island triggered a tsunami that killed more than 131,000 people in nearby Aceh province, and more than 100,000 others in nearly a dozen other countries.

Some passengers climbed onto carriage roofs in fear of rising waters, state rail spokeswoman Monthakarn Srivilasa said.

The rain started at the weekend and was expected to continue until Friday.

In the Laplae district of Uttaradit province, 330 mm (13 inches) of rain fell in the 24 hours to 0000 GMT on Tuesday, causing mudslides which buried 10 houses and killed six people, officials said.

Four others died in nearby Sukhothai and Prae provinces.

The region is not a key farming area for Thailand, the world's biggest exporter of rice, tapioca and rubber.

"This is typical monsoon rain, which has come a little bit earlier and heavier than usual this year," Bangkok meteorologist Janjira Pornsri told Reuters.

The monsoon season in tropical Thailand usually lasts until October.

Already 53 homes in Passmore and Slocan Park have been evacuated due to rising rivers caused by heavy rain and melting snowpacks. Hundreds more in the West Kootenay area have been told to be ready to leave on short notice.

As much as 25 millimetres of rain was expected Monday evening, and perhaps 20 mm more is being forecast for Tuesday. Rain is in the forecast for the rest of the week.

The Slocan River is higher than many locals can recall.

"In the summer, I would say every other year I could walk across it.," said Don Munro, who lives within 100 metres of the Little Slocan, a tributary of the now-raging Slocan. "That's our island over there, so we can actually walk across the river. Now it would be, oh, 10 feet [three metres] deep."

Munro and his family are on evacuation alert, so they could be told to leave within an hour.

Unusually high temperatures that have melted snow in the mountains have combined with the recent heavy rainfall to cause flooding in the valleys.

"When the rains hit them [the snowpacks] they just melt, they just bring everything down," said Terry Warren, the local emergency response co-ordinator. "So it's really heavily soaked wet snow hanging on the mountains."

Emergency officials say they are well-prepared with sandbags and manpower if the coming rain brings down the rest of the snow.

And officials in Nelson, worried about water contamination, have warned people to restrict their use of sewage and septic tank systems.

The province has advised residents to be aware of the taste, colour and smell of the water they are drinking and to boil it should it appear irregular.

On the weekend, a man was swept away after falling into a creek in Penticton.

The 41,000-tonne Pont-Aven, which was sailing from Plymouth to Santander in northern Spain, was forced to pull into the French port of Roscoff for emergency repairs.

The 1,150 passengers on board were offered a refund and told that they could return to England on another ship or make their own way to Spain. Some complained that they had been left stranded with no way to continue their journey.

The wave struck at the height of a Force 9 gale that had caused the cancellation of dozens of crossings in the Channel. The £100 million Pont-Aven, the largest and most modern vessel in the fleet, was being buffeted by heavy seas when the wave struck.

Among the passengers were the owners of 19 classic cars who were heading for a rally in Barcelona. Richard Lloyd, of Brackley, Northamptonshire, said: "It had been pretty rough the night before as we headed down the Channel.

"During dinner, bottles were tipping over and things sliding about but, when we turned the corner into the Bay of Biscay, it really got bad. I have never seen seas like it. I saw a huge wave, a wall of water roaring past, and there was a loud noise like an explosion when it hit.

"Minutes later people were running around the ship very frightened. Some had what looked like shrapnel wounds and others were covered in blood." Mr Lloyd, 60, a motor racing entrepreneur, had been on his way to the car rally with his wife, Phillipa, and 18 other competitors.

He said that they would now have to drive their ageing vehicles an extra 600 miles and might miss the start of the rally. So many entrants were on the boat that the organisers have shortened the event by a day to compensate.

Dave French and his partner, Val Bostock, from Bolton, were on their way to Alicante with their motorcycle.

Ms Bostock said: "We woke up to find water in the cabin and we were on Deck 6, well above the sea. The alarm sounded and we were told to go to the restaurant.

"We knew conditions were getting bad the night before when the magician had to cancel his act because his table kept sliding off the stage." She said that they were given another cabin on the eighth deck.

"They have said we will get our £400 ticket money back," she said, "and they did dry out all our wet clothes for us. But we now have to spend another day or two on our journey."

The ship, which docked at 5am, is expected to be out of action until the week's end.

Past recorded BFOs include jellyfish, frogs, crabs, fish and coal.

BWS senior meteorologist Jim Dale said the phenomenon can be caused by heat and air pressure coupled with atmospheric instability.

He said: "Converging cold air off the North Sea and warm air off the land make for the necessary conditions."

Other BFO hotspots include east Manchester and Ipswich.

NOAA's outlook, published on its website, predicts:

• There will likely be 13 to 16 named storms, including tropical storms and hurricanes, compared with the 11 named storms seen in an average season.
• Eight to 10 of this year's named storms will become hurricanes, meaning they will have sustained winds of at least 119 km/h, compared with the annual average of six.
• Four to six of the hurricanes will reach an intensity of at least Category 3, with sustained winds of at least 178 km/h, though on average each season experiences only two.

The 2006 North Atlantic hurricane season begins on June 1.

"Whether we face an active hurricane season, like this year, or a below-normal season, the crucial message for every person is the same: prepare, prepare, prepare," Max Mayfield, director of the administration's National Hurricane Center, said on the organization's website.

"One hurricane hitting where you live is enough to make it a bad season."

2005 update more accurate than early outlook

Last year's early hurricane season forecast from NOAA failed to foresee that 2005 would be one of the most intense hurricane seasons ever. However, an update issued in mid-August was much more accurate.

It warned that a high number of powerful storms would develop in the Caribbean and along the eastern coast of North America.

"The forecasts that we're seeing are calling for numbers that are about double the average of the past 50 years," Steve Miller of the Canadian Hurricane Centre told CBC News at the time.

"Normally we'd get about 10. This year, the forecast is averaging 20 or even higher."

New Orleans still vulnerable to direct hit

Two weeks later, hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana and Mississippi as a Category 4 storm, sending flood waters gushing over entire neighbourhoods of New Orleans.

The disaster was one of the worst in decades for the United States, killing at least 1,747 people as of last week, when more deaths were added to the toll.

Even now, recently repaired levees are not strong enough to protect New Orleans from a direct hit by a Category 3 storm, a team of academics warned in a new report released Monday.

The Independent Levee Investigation Team found fault with how levee repairs were funded leading up to Katrina, and said a piecemeal approach to managing emergency protection was still a problem.

So many storms in 2006, names ran out

Predictions of more storms than usual in 2005 were dead-on. Forecasters ran out of names for the tropical storms and hurricanes, having to dip into the Greek alphabet when the standard alphabetic list of 21 names was exhausted.

At the end of the day, the 2005 North Atlantic season included 28 storms, seven more than the previous record of 21 storms in 1933.

Four of them - Emily, Katrina, Rita and Wilma - reached Category 5, the top level of intensity, with sustained winds of at least 250 km/h at some point in their existence.

Phillips said snow cover is also fast disappearing across Nunavut. In Cape Dorset, there is typically 50 centimetres of snow on the ground in May. Now there's just two centimetres. And in Iqaluit, bare ground is exposed everywhere, when there would normally still be 20 centimetres of snow cover.

Phillips, a senior climatologist with the federal weather agency, says temperatures were four to five degrees warmer than usual this past winter. The higher temperatures come on the heels of dramatic losses in sea ice last summer, Phillips says, and so the natural cycle hasn't had a chance to recover.

"There has been no rebounding back," he said. "The ice just hasn't had a chance to bounce back, to grow during the winter, during the cold season of the year.

"Essentially what's happening is there's been so much warm weather, week after week, month after month, season after season, the environment is just not behaving the way it should," said Phillips.

Ice cover has now dropped to a record low for the winter period, attracting the attention of Mark Serreze, a senior research scientist with the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo.

Serreze said April is generally the month with the maximum ice cover over the Arctic Ocean, and the loss this year is shocking.

"If we compare this April with all previous Aprils, there's hundreds of thousands of square kilometres less ice," he said.

Climatologists, biologists and people living in the area fear the shifting ice patterns are a sign of even deeper changes that will disrupt age-old cycles of plant and animal life, and even global weather patterns.

Serreze says researchers will be watching ice cover data carefully this summer, and many are already predicting the shrinkage in September will largely surpass last year's record high.

Serreze says sea ice loss has been the greatest along the coasts of Siberia and Alaska. This winter a ship could have travelled northeast from London along Russia's Arctic Ocean coastline and down through the Bering Strait between Siberia and Alaska to Tokyo, he says.

Meanwhile, Phillips says people in Nunavut and the Northwest Territories can expect the balmy weather to continue through the summer.

Sugiono, one of the government observers watching Merapi around the clock, said that its crater continued to ooze glowing lava and spew ash up to 900 metres into the air.

"Merapi is still a danger and the avalanches of hot clouds remain a threat," said Sugiono, who uses only one name.

Yesterday morning, as many as 2,600 people "left the shelters to get milk from their cows and then feed them," Sugiono said. "Generally, they come back again in the afternoon."

Multiple hot gas and lava avalanches tumbled down the mountain slopes as ash blasted nearly a kilometre skyward. Repeated volcanic tremors also shook the area.

Authorities said they have no plans to lift the evacuation order put in place last week that saw more than 5,000 people leave villages closest to the crater.

Many others ignored the order, or have since returned home, saying they are bored with life in evacuation centres.

"Even though we have reports that Merapi activity has declined a bit, we call on people to stay in the safe zone," said Mardiyanto, the Central Java provincial governor.

On Sunday the mountain spewed a total of 170 visible lava outflows and 44 heat clouds.

The heat clouds, which geologists have warned were the primary threat posed by the volcano, travelled as far as 3.5 kilometres down its slopes yesterday. The nearest village is at least six kilometres from the peak.

On Sunday the mountain spewed a total of 170 visible lava outflows and 44 heat clouds.

The heat clouds, which geologists have warned were the primary threat posed by the volcano, travelled as far as 3.5 kilometres down its slopes yesterday. The nearest village is at least six kilometres from the peak.

In 1994, 60 people were killed by a searing gas cloud while in 1930, more than a dozen villages were incinerated, leaving 1,300 dead.