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US: 4 dead in Oklahoma tornado outbreak


Associated Press
Mon, 10 May 2010 22:08 UTC
Image
© AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki
A muddy kitten takes cover next to a tree after a tornado swept through the mobile home community of Prairie Creek Village in Slaughterville, Okla., flattening several homes, Monday, May 10, 2010.
Tecumseh - Four people have been killed in Oklahoma during an outbreak of violent weather that dropped tornadoes across parts of the Southern Plains.

The Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management said three people were killed at Tecumseh on Monday and that another person died at Oklahoma City. Tecumseh is about 45 miles southeast of Oklahoma City.

The agency did not have any additional details.

The storms caused traffic accidents that closed two major cross-country interstates. Damage was reported throughout much of northern, central and eastern Oklahoma.

The Storm Prediction Center at Norman had predicted the outbreak, saying the atmosphere had the right mix of winds, heat and moisture.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.
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MIB

Slick Operator: The BP I've Known Too Well

Greg Palast
Truthout
Wed, 05 May 2010 16:16 UTC
gulf oil spill
© Unknown
I've seen this movie before. In 1989, I was a fraud investigator hired to dig into the cause of the Exxon Valdez disaster. Despite Exxon's name on that boat, I found the party most to blame for the destruction was ... British Petroleum (BP).

That's important to know, because the way BP caused devastation in Alaska is exactly the way BP is now sliming the entire Gulf Coast.

Tankers run aground, wells blow out, pipes burst. It shouldn't happen, but it does. And when it does, the name of the game is containment. Both in Alaska, when the Exxon Valdez grounded, and in the Gulf last week, when the Deepwater Horizon platform blew, it was British Petroleum that was charged with carrying out the Oil Spill Response Plans (OSRP), which the company itself drafted and filed with the government.
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Frog

UN Fears "Irreversible" Damage to Natural Environment


Raw Story
Mon, 10 May 2010 13:29 UTC
Image
© Agence France-Presse
Geneva - The UN warned on Monday that "massive" loss in life-sustaining natural environments was likely to deepen to the point of being irreversible after global targets to cut the decline by this year were missed.

As a result of the degradation, the world is moving closer to several "tipping points" beyond which some ecosystems that play a part in natural processes such as climate or the food chain may be permanently damaged, a United Nations report said.

The third Global Biodiversity Outlook found that deforestation, pollution or overexploitation were damaging the productive capacity of the most vulnerable environments, including the Amazon rainforest, lakes and coral reefs.

"This report is saying that we are reaching the tipping point where the irreversible damage to the planet is going to be done unless we act urgently," Ahmed Djoghlaf, executive secretary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, told journalists.

Djoghlaf argued that extinction rates for some animal or plant species were at a historic high, up to 1,000 times those seen before, even affecting crops and livestock.
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Better Earth

A "New Level" of Disaster: BP's 70-Ton Oil Containment Dome Floats, No "Plan B"


Raw Story
Mon, 10 May 2010 13:15 UTC
oil spill
© Agence France-Presse
Update: 'Flummoxed' BP engineers ask public for oil leak solutions

New Orleans, Louisanna -- With the impending threat of a growing oil slick just offshore, US Gulf coast states are seizing at all straws to avert disaster, with police in north Florida even suggesting protecting beaches with rolls of hay.

"That's why we get a lot of inventions in wartime, because people are willing to take a chance," Eric Smith, an oil and gas expert at Tulane University in New Orleans, said of the flood of ideas on how to stop the spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

On Florida's Santa Rosa Beach, Walton County Sheriff Michael A. Adkinson and C.W. Roberts, Inc., a private contractor, unveiled their audacious plan to stop oil from blackening 26 miles of pristine white beaches facing the Gulf.
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Hourglass

Gulf Oil Spill Spreads West Toward Texas

Erwin Seba
Reuters
Sun, 09 May 2010 18:38 UTC
aerial view of the oil leaked
© Reuters/Daniel Beltra
An aerial view of the oil leaked from the Deepwater Horizon wellhead, May 6, 2010.
Robert, Louisiana - BP Plc engineers desperately explored options on Sunday to control oil gushing from a ruptured well deep under the Gulf of Mexico after a setback with a huge undersea containment dome fueled fears of a prolonged and growing environmental disaster.

The spill is spreading west, further from Florida but toward the important shipping channels and rich seafood areas of the Louisiana shoreline, where fishing, shrimping and oyster harvesting bans have been widened.

A state of emergency was declared in Lafourche Parish, Louisiana, with sheen, the leading edge of the oil slick, forecast to come ashore near Port Fourchon within days.

BP is exploring several new options to control the spill after a buildup of crystallized gas in the dome forced engineers to delay efforts to place a massive four-story containment chamber over the rupture on Saturday.
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Cloud Lightning

Over 200 private houses flooded in Dagestan due to heavy rains


Itar-Tass
Tue, 04 May 2010 21:33 UTC
Three residential areas were flooded in the town of Mamedkala, the Derbent district of Dagestan, due to heavy rains and an emergency water discharge from the local Gedzhukh lake. Some 210 private houses, where about 1,000 people live, were flooded, a source in the Emergency Situations Ministry main department in Dagestan reported.

The dam of the Gedzhukh lake was not damaged, the source said on Tuesday. The republican emergency service and the republican authorities laid out an evacuation camp for 250 people, but the local residents prefer to stay temporarily at their relatives.
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Calculator

Tennessee flood damage at least $1 billion: governor

Pat Harris and Andrew Stern
Reuters
Fri, 07 May 2010 21:14 UTC
NASHVILLE flood
Tennessee sustained more than $1 billion in flood damage just in the private sector, and many homeowners likely were not insured against flooding, the governor said on Thursday.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has received 8,500 requests for financial aid, which could come in the form of loans or grants, FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate said in a conference call with reporters.

"This is a very large, very complex flood event and the numbers are only going to go up," Fugate said.

A weekend deluge triggered flash flooding and pushed rivers out of their banks in parts of Tennessee, Kentucky and Mississippi, killing some 30 people.

"I'd be astonished if there weren't $1 billion in damage in the private sector, and probably considerably more," Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen told reporters.
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Bizarro Earth

New "Plan" After Gulf Oil Containment Failure

Harry R. Weber and John Curran
The Associated Press
Sun, 09 May 2010 14:00 UTC
Image
© AP Photo/Gerald Herbert
Black waves of oil and brown whitecaps are seen off the side of the supply vessel Joe Griffin at the site of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill containment efforts in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Louisiana, Sunday, May 9, 2010.
Crews planned Sunday to park the giant oil containment box on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, and offload equipment that could be used in a new attempt to stem the flow of gushing into the sea.

The equipment to be offloaded from another vessel would use a tube to shoot mud and concrete directly into the well's blowout preventer, a process that could take two to three weeks. But BP PLC spokesman Mark Proegler said no decisions have been made on what step the company will take next.

The company was considering several options, including the technique known as a "top kill," Proegler said.

Crews planned to secure the big box about 1,600 feet from the massive leak site, much farther away from where it was placed Saturday after icelike crystals clogged the top when it was over the leak, according to a daily activity sheet reviewed by The Associated Press.

It could be at least a day before BP can make another attempt at putting a lid on a well spewing thousands of gallons of crude into the Gulf each day.

Waves of dark brown and black sludge crashed into a boat in the area above the leak. The fumes there were so intense that a crewmember of the Joe Griffin and an AP photographer on board had to wear respirators while outside.
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Igloo

US: Arizona - Dividends of a Real Winter - 144 inches of snow in Flagstaff


Arizona Daily Sun
Sun, 09 May 2010 16:06 UTC
Image
© Jake Bacon/Arizona Daily Sun
A Blue Heron flies lazily across Marshall Lake beneath the snow-capped San Francisco Peaks on Thursday. After a winter of heavy snowfall, area lakes are at, or near, capacity.
Northern Arizona is seeing the dividends of this winter in area reservoirs and damp forests. What's less certain is this year's fire season. Despite this past week's wildfire in Timberline, firefighters expect the fire season to be moderate or light, because the big logs lying on the ground are still saturated from the snow.

But the finer fuels like grasses and twigs are beginning to dry, leading to the expectation of severe fires in grasslands and deserts at lower elevations. Depending on the weather and the wind, as seen last week in Timberline, the bigger fuels could dry, too.

"The future weather is what will determine whether it will be a moderate or severe fire season," said Buck Wickham, division chief of the Peaks Ranger District on the Coconino National Forest.
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Frog

Bahamas islands were giant labs for lizard experiment


New Scientist
Sun, 09 May 2010 15:45 UTC
Image
© Danita Delimont/Alamy
Think that'll save you?
Wrapping entire islands in the Bahamas with netting, introducing snakes to two other islands and measuring the fitness of hundreds of lizards using treadmills: one of the most ambitious ecological field experiments ever conducted has resolved a long-standing question about the evolution of lizards.

Lizards of the genus Anolis are found throughout the American tropics, where they vary widely in size and shape depending on ecological conditions. It has long been thought that predation is the most important evolutionary force for continental lizard populations, whereas on islands competition between lizards themselves is more important. Until now, though, no one had tested this experimentally.

Ryan Calsbeek and Robert Cox of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, cut no corners in their experiment. They excluded predators from two small, uninhabited islands in the Bahamas by wrapping the islands - about 1000 square metres each - with netting to keep out predatory birds. Meanwhile, they enhanced predation on two other islands by introducing lizard-eating snakes.
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