YAKIMA, Wash. - Hundreds of trees blown down by wind exceeding 100 mph. Roads and campgrounds washed away by swollen rivers. Damages still unknown to be repaired on backcountry trails.
Winter storms have devastated the Pacific Northwest's popular national parks each of the past two years, causing damage that has run into the millions of dollars.
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| ©AP Photo/Ted S. Warren
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| Andrew Pratt, of Quigg Bros. Construction, based in Aberdeen, Wash., uses backhoe Friday, March 7, 2008, to build a rock wall on a bank of the Quinault River where it washed out a portion of North Shore Road in Olympic National Park in Washington state. Even though volunteer crews are making the park the focus of their efforts this year -- joining workers at Mount Rainier and North Cascades national parks in their storm clean-up efforts -- summer visitors will still have to sidestep some storm damage.
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PHOENIX - Dozens of vehicles collided in heavy, blinding snow on a northern Arizona interstate Sunday, killing at least two people, critically injuring 11 others and forcing police to close the highway for 20 miles in both directions.
The low visibility on Interstate 40 near Flagstaff caused about 20 collisions, which occurred over a stretch of highway at least 4 miles long around noon, Flagstaff Fire Department Chief Mark Wilson said.
He described the wrecks as clumps of vehicles piled on top of each other, involving cars, trucks and semis.
"The magnitude of it was pretty severe," Wilson said. "We had a whiteout scene with the snow, and obviously a single-vehicle accident caused multiple-vehicle accidents, which continued to pile up due to the low visibility."
A University of Leicester ecologist is setting out to discover why flamingos are so in the pink of health - in the poo!
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| ©University of Leicester
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| A University of Leicester ecologist is setting out to discover why flamingos are so in the pink of health - in the poo!
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Tens of thousands of basketball fans at two arenas were perfectly safe, officials insisted Saturday, even though the crowds apparently weren't warned about an approaching tornado - one that would ravage skyscrapers and injure dozens.
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| ©REUTERS/Tami Chappell
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| Debris are cleared away from a building in downtown Atlanta, Georgia March 15, 2008.
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Competing against older brothers and sisters can be tough work, as any youngest child will tell you. But new research from a biologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill shows that when it comes to some birds, you should reserve any underdog sympathies for the first born -- or rather, first laid -- siblings as well.
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| ©Keith Sockman
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| Newly hatched Lincoln's sparrows.
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The average temperature across both the contiguous U.S. and the globe during climatological winter (December 2007-February 2008) was the coolest since 2001, according to scientists at NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. In terms of winter precipitation, Pacific storms, bringing heavy precipitation to large parts of the West, produced high snowpack that will provide welcome runoff this spring.
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| ©NOAA
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| U.S. winter temperature highlights.
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JAKARTA, Indonesia - A strong earthquake struck nearly 200 miles off western Indonesia late Saturday. There were no reports of injuries or damage.
The magnitude 6.2 quake was centered 190 miles southwest of Banda Aceh on the island of Sumatra, the U.S. Geological Survey said.
An earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 6.2 struck Japan's Bonin Islands, the U.S. Geological Survey reported.
A 5.9 magnitude earthquake struck on Saturday at 7:44 a.m. Pacific time off the U.S. northern Pacific coast of Oregon, the U.S. Geological Survey said.
The quake was centered 112 miles west of Port Orford, Oregon, at a depth of 6.2 miles, the USGS said.
The severe impact of climate change in Central Asia is causing water and food shortages that could lead to regional conflicts, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana warned.
Solana delivered a climate change and security report from the High Representative and the European Commission to leaders at the European Union summit held on Thursday and Friday.
