"But what can we do? We have to weigh the possible contamination to ground water versus piles of dead cows stinking and attracting flies," said Phil Larson, chairman of the Fresno County Board of Supervisors.

The heat wave, with 10 straight days of 100-degree temperatures, brought the threat of more rolling blackouts and raised the number of suspected heat-related deaths to at least 56. Cooler weather was not expected until Wednesday.

Fresno County, which reached 113 degrees in recent days, was one of the first to declare an emergency when a plant that handles the bulk of the region's dead animals broke down earlier this month.

After the old carcasses began decomposing in the searing summer heat, county officials were forced to make the declaration - the first in the county's history, Larson said.

"It wasn't any easy solution," he said. "It's not something we want to continue but we can't have piles of dead animals laying around."

Dairy farmer Brian Pacheco said he sometimes waits days before a rendering plant will pick up his dead cows.

"And when they do come, they only take the ones that died that day," said Pacheco. "I'm left with the old bodies."

Pacheco has spent thousands of dollars to build shade structures and install misters and fans in his barns to keep his cows cool, measures that have yielded higher milk production and fewer lost cattle than other area farmers.

But he said he still sees 15-20 cows die each year from the heat, and this year it could be more.

San Joaquin County, which also has declared an emergency, estimated that its dairy farms were losing a total of 120 cows per day from the heat. Individual dairy farmers could lose about 2 percent of their herd this year, according to industry experts. Hundreds of thousands of chickens and turkeys also have died.

The state Environmental Protection Agency issued guidelines earlier this month for farmers stuck with dead livestock.

Farmers can have them hauled to a landfill by licensed handlers or compost their animals on their property by burying them in manure, which is common in other states.

Usually, farmers in California take their dead animals to rendering plants, but many have closed amid odor complaints from growing communities nearby, accusations by environmentalists and lawsuits stemming from improper disposal.

© 2006 The Associated Press.

"If everything holds together, we will be all right. But if we have a major contingency like a plant going off or losing transmission, then we will have a problem," said Gregg Fishman, spokesman for the Cal ISO.

No major outages are reported in the state and the 62,000 customers without power on Tuesday were dark as a result neighborhood transformers overheating.

Southern California Edison, which has 4.7 million residential and business customers in an 11-county area of Southern California, has its own weather stations in its service area. Forecasters for SCE say they are seeing a cooling trend, said Gil Alexander, So Cal Ed spokesman.

"We are seeing a cooling trend," said Alexander. "It is very gradual. It began (Monday) night but it did not prevent another record."

Alexander referred to So Cal Ed setting yet another peak demand mark on Tuesday while most of the state's other major utilities set records either Monday or Saturday.

Firefighters defended homes on Clear View Drive and soaked the hillsides with heavy streams of water, while helicopters made water drops on flames craswling through tinder-dry hills. The fire was fully surrounded at about 7:30 p.m., Los Angeles Fire spokesman Ron Myers said. A damage estimate to the home was unavailable.

The fire was reported at 11:12 a.m. at Rimmele and Benedict Canyon drives and 200 firefighters were sent to the scene, Myers said.

"We are preparing, as usual... for the worst and working tirelessly for the best," Melissa Kelley said.

Los Angeles city fire crews were assisted by personnel from the Los Angeles County and the Beverly Hills fire departments.

The cause of the fire was not immediately known.

The flames burned to the north up the hillside, which rolls through a lush area dotted with multimillion-dollar homes.

Kelley said there were only light winds, meaning the fire was being driven solely by the terrain.

Although no evacuations were ordered, some residents told reporters on the scene they were clearing out of the area as a precaution.

Fire officials credited homeowners in the area for clearing brush from their properties to prevent the flames from reaching more homes.

At least 80,000 more were evacuated in the neighbouring coastal province of Zhejiang, and more than 44,000 ships were called back to port in Fujian.

The eye of the typhoon brought wind measured at 33 metres per second when it hit the Fujian coast late Tuesday, the agency said.

Up to 105 millimetres of rain fell on many areas of Fujian on Tuesday, and at least 27 flights were cancelled to and from the main airport in Fuzhou, the provincial capital.

Fujian officials sent task forces to several mountainous counties to try to prevent more casualties from landslides and flash floods, which killed more than 600 people and left about 200 missing after tropical storm Bilis hit China last week.

About 3,000 armed police, equipped with 130 vehicles and 80 speedboats, are ready to launch rescue and relief operations in Fujian, the agency said.

The typhoon was expected to batter Fujian for about 24 hours before moving inland to the neighbouring province of Jiangxi, weather forecasters said.

The central province of Hunan, where at least 350 people died last week in floods and landslides, was also preparing for more storms on Wednesday and Thursday.

Typhoon Kaemi brought strong winds and heavy rains but little damage to Taiwan as it crossed the island on Tuesday.

Most flights and train service in south-eastern Taiwan were halted for part of Tuesday for passenger safety, and power was cut to more than 20,0000 homes in Taitung county, reports said.

© 2006 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur

Research at Imperial College, London, shows that far from being rare events, rogue waves can emerge frequently, and may be responsible for some of the 200 supertankers and container ships longer than 200m that have sunk in poor weather conditions in the past two decades.

Chris Swan, who led the study, found that forecasts issued to warn shipping about the risks of rogue waves assume the choppiness of the sea varied little over the duration of a storm.

But he said that a combination of wave tank experiments and theoretical calculations revealed that in small patches of ocean, measuring up to a square kilometre, sea states vary enough to trigger rogue waves.

"We've shown that in a storm, if your ship or platform happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, it could experience much more severe wave conditions than you would expect from forecasts, including these freak waves that can cause enormous damage," said Professor Swan, whose study on freak waves appears in the journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society A.

According to Nigel Barltrop, professor of naval architecture at Strathclyde University, so little is known about many shipping accidents, that it can be difficult to know when a rogue wave is to blame.

"A lot of ships, when they go down, there's no real investigation possible without spending a lot of money, so most of them, no one really knows why they sink. These waves aren't like those you see on the beach, they are more like a solid wall of water."

Andrew Linington of the National Union of Marine, Aviation and Shipping Transport Officers, said: "We have to stop calling these freak or rogue waves because all the evidence seems to be suggesting they're to be expected with more frequency than people believed in the past.

"This kind of extreme weather is going to become more common with global warming. There's an urgent need to rewrite the rules of construction for all types of vessels.

"Our feeling is it's too easy to say an accident was a freak wave and right it off as that, but often when a ship falls victim to a wave, it'll be something as stupid as a porthole being broken and water flooding in that causes it to sink. Often, we're talking about bulk carriers and basically nobody cares.

"If these were passenger ships going down there'd be an outcry. There aren't many people in the industry taking it seriously."