Could it be a sign of Global Cooling?
"Brazil rushes in aid as floods kill 32" by Associated Press | May 7, 2009
SÃO PAULO - Army soldiers and civil defense authorities used boats, trucks, and helicopters yesterday to deliver food and water to scores of cities and towns isolated by floods that have killed at least 32 people and left nearly 200,000 homeless.
Rain continued to fall on a vast region stretching from the
In three Amazon states, at least 3,000 Indians near rivers that overflowed fled to higher ground or into the jungle after seeing their crops of manioc, bananas, and potatoes destroyed, said Sebastiao Haji Manchiner, executive secretary of the Brazilian Amazon Indigenous Organization. In the hardest-hit state of Maranhão, some rivers were rising a foot per day. The heavy rains are affecting an area three times the size of Alaska.
Holy crap!!!
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I'm hoping my Brazilian follower is okay.
"Brazilians flee flood-ravaged homes; Waters rife with reptiles pose threat to escape" by Marco Sibaja, Associated Press | May 8, 2009
Residents in the northeast state of Maranhao moved along flooded streets yesterday. Thirty-six people have been killed. (Andre Penner/Associated Press)
CORIMATA DA CIMA, Brazil - The dirt road that runs in front of her house is a river. Her fields of rice and manioc lie ruined under water. And with water seeping into her mud-brick, thatched-roof home, Maria do Remedio Santos knows it is time to join her neighbors.
Like 218,000 others across a swath of northern Brazil three times the size of Alaska, the neighbors have fled the worst rainfall and flooding in decades, braving newly formed rivers teeming with anacondas, alligators, and legless reptiles known as "worm lizards" whose bite is excruciating....
Already, 36 people have been killed in the flooding, sparked by unusually heavy rains that have been falling for two months on 10 of Brazil's 26 states, an area stretching from the normally wet rainforest to coastal states known for lengthy droughts. Meteorologists blame an Atlantic Ocean weather system that typically moves on by April.
And this is the FIRST TIME the MSM decided to report it?
It's like the fires and floods here in the U.S. Globe has been mum on them save for a daily picture you can not see on the website.
They forecast weeks more of the same.
Oh, no, this is a CATASTROPHE!!!!
Downriver from Santos's home in the town of Sao Miguel de Rosario, adults waded through waist-deep, muddy water covering the main road - though they kept children in boats to protect them from rattlesnakes and anacondas swimming nearby. Also driven from their burrows and swimming through the water were rodent-eating reptiles known as a "worm lizards" that look like giant white earthworms.
Oh, I would be freaking out!!!
Alligators swam through the city of Santarem, civil defense official Walkiria Coelho said. Scorpions congregated on the same high ground as people escaping the rising water. No injuries were reported. But authorities worried about thousands of people isolated for days with little food or clean water, rushing aid to towns and cities. In some places, aid was stuck because there were no local workers to distribute it....
Brazil's Katrina?
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Update:
I stand corrected (although it is a slow Saturday special buried on page A12).
SANTA BARBARA, Calif. - Turning the horizon a lurid orange and raining embers on roofs as it advanced, a raging wildfire that has destroyed scores of homes in the hills menaced this celebrity enclave and other coastal towns yesterday, and the number of people ordered to flee climbed to 30,000.
That's why it finally made the joospapers: celebrity.
Authorities warned that an additional 23,000 to be ready to leave at a moment's notice.
Columns of smoke rose off the Santa Ynez Mountains as the 4-day-old blaze - fanned by "sundowner" winds that sweep down the slopes in the evening - blew up from 2,700 acres to 3,500 in less than a day, creating a firefighting front 5 miles long.
One thinks we could have used a pitiful fraction of the TRILLIONS we've wasted on wars and banks to run a sound fire-control policy, but we all know where that lot went -- as well as the loot for the dams and levees of Louisiana.
Yeah, I did just look at Iraq on a map, 'murkn.
"It's crazy. The whole mountain looked like an inferno," said Maria Martinez, 50, who with her fiancé hurriedly left her home in San Marcos Pass, on the edge of Santa Barbara....
More than 2,300 firefighters battled the blaze, using at least 246 engines, 14 air tankers, and 15 helicopters. A DC-10 jumbo jet tanker capable of dumping huge loads of retardant began making runs on the fire in the afternoon.--more--"
Look something like this, does it?
