Legion of Angels News Archive

CHRISTIANSTED, U.S. Virgin Islands - St. Croix authorities were trying to contain oil spills after more than 40 boats sank or washed ashore during Hurricane Omar.

About half the vessels lost their anchors, including houseboats, catamarans and pricey yachts and sailboats owned by tourists. The other half were tied at marinas but broke loose, Carlos Fachette, enforcement director for the Department of Planning and Natural Resources, said Friday.

The hurricane caught many local boaters off-guard because they did not take the storm seriously, according to Kim Jones of the St. Croix Yacht Club.

“It’s devastating,” she said of the damage. “That puts a brake into people getting into boating, which is such a way of life in the Caribbean. It’s going to take a lot to rebound.”

Roughly 400 boats are registered in St. Croix, she said.

Omar became a tropical storm again Friday night, far from land in the Atlantic Ocean.

Police on Friday also had to rescue three people from a 35-foot catamaran when it hit a reef and ran aground near Salt River Bay, Fachette said.

All St. Croix beaches have been deemed unsafe because of high pollution levels, and the Schooner Channel area of the Christiansted Harbor remained closed.

Power outages, crop damage
Omar passed overnight Wednesday between St. Martin and the U.S. Virgin Islands, where the government has spent more than $1 million in cleanup costs.

The storm caused more than $700,000 in damages to roads in St. Croix and destroyed more than 100 utility poles in the eastern region. About half of the island’s 55,000 people remained with power on Friday, said Cassandra Dunn, Water and Power Authority spokeswoman.

“Restoring power to some areas is going to take time,” she said.

St. Croix also reported heavy crop damage, as did Antigua, where Prime Minister Baldwin Spencer warned of a produce shortage, saying the farming community “appears to have suffered an extensive loss of crops.”

“No one is reported to have perished in this disaster,” Spencer said late Thursday, hours after Omar blew past the Lesser Antilles islands as a Category 3 hurricane. “We are, nonetheless, faced with a natural disaster of serious proportions.”

The crop damage comes amid spiraling food prices in the Caribbean and around the world.

On Saturday morning, Omar was located about 775 miles east of Bermuda and had weakened to a tropical storm with top winds of 60 mph. It posed no threat to land and forecasters say it should keep weakening as it heads farther out into energy-sapping cold waters.

Source — MSNBC

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras - At least 13 people are dead and six are missing in Honduras after heavy rains caused flooding and landslides.

Emergency services spokeswoman Ana Maria Rivera said most of the country has been affected in some way by the stormy weather.

Nearly 12,000 people have been evacuated from their homes and more than 9,000 people are living in shelters.

Raging rivers have destroyed 62 bridges, while dozens of highways have been damaged, some by landslides.

President Manuel Zelaya has declared a national state of emergency and asked for international aid.

Source — MSNBC

ST. GEORGE’S, Grenada - The world’s second-largest nutmeg industry is rebounding very slowly from a 2004 hurricane because Grenadian farmers unknowingly planted too many male trees, which do not produce as much fruit.

Agriculture Minister Denis Lett says 80 percent of the plants farmers expected to produce a big harvest are not bearing fruit.

Local research scientist Reginald Buckmire says farmers have no way to tell the sex of a nutmeg plant until it is capable of bearing fruit.

Agriculture officials are now grafting and cloning to speed up the fruit-bearing process.

Grenada is the second-largest producer of nutmeg after Indonesia. In 2004, Hurricane Ivan destroyed about 60 percent of the island’s crop.

Source — Yahoo!

HOUSTON (Reuters) - A huge relief effort was accelerating in storm-struck Texas on Monday as the big oil center of Houston struggled to get back to business after it was battered by Hurricane Ike.

About 2,000 people have been rescued from flooded areas in the largest such effort in the state’s history as searchers scoured hard-hit places like the devastated island city of Galveston, which was shredded when the hurricane made landfall on Saturday morning before heading inland to Houston.

Reuters energy correspondent Erwin Seba reported that 12 of the 15 Texas oil refineries that had been shut as a precaution showed no visible signs of flooding or damage — a sign fuel production could resume more quickly than initially thought. But power outages could still hinder their start-up.

Over 4 million people, several refineries and many businesses and gas stations remained without power, but floods were receding as crucial aid such as ice, water and food was being delivered to distribution points.

“Sixty trucks with supplies rolled in earlier tonight. … As we are standing here, deliveries are being made,” Ed Emmett, chief executive for Harris County, which includes Houston, told a news briefing on Sunday night.

He added that six relief distribution points were already up and running and he expected 17 to be in operation by later on Monday.

The relief roll-out appeared to defuse tensions that flared between the Federal Emergency Management Agency and local officials as hard-pressed residents complained about the time it was taking to get supplies to those in need.

Local officials later attributed the rift to confusion over who was responsible for doing what in the relief chain, a situation that led to delays.

The Bush administration came under heavy fire for its botched relief efforts in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Floods have been among the obstacles to rescue efforts and aid operations, but officials said the waters were receding.

“The flood event should be behind us,” Emmett said. Local TV footage showed cattle driven onto roads by flooded fields.

DEBRIS, POWER OUTAGES

Houston Mayor Bill White said all city employees were expected to show up to work on Monday as the country’s fourth most populous city tries to get up and running again.

The city’s two main airports were to resume partial operations on Monday, but with debris still littering its streets and windows blown out of office buildings, as well as power problems, it seemed unlikely the city of more than 2 million people would return to business as usual soon.

That point was underscored by the imposition in Houston of a weeklong dusk-to-dawn curfew.

Power provider CenterPoint Energy reported it had restored power to 380,000 customers, but over 1.7 million or 76 percent of its clients remained without electricity as of Sunday night.

At least three bodies were found in Galveston, which sustained some of the worst damage of the storm. The scale of destruction became apparent as authorities allowed more people to return.

The downtown area, containing the few buildings that survived a hurricane in 1900 that killed thousands, was under a layer of foul-smelling mud and sewage.

“It looks like a war zone. Everything is gone. It’s heartbreaking,” said Susan Rybick, a retiree driving along the seafront with her husband, John.

Ike triggered the biggest disruption to U.S. energy supplies in three years and sent gas prices higher. But U.S. crude oil futures dropped more than $1.59 to as low as $99.59 a barrel on Sunday as traders shrugged off supply concerns.

Source — Yahoo!

TAIPEI, Taiwan - Raging floods and rivers swollen by Typhoon Sinlaku killed at least two people and left a further seven missing and presumed dead in central Taiwan, authorities said Monday as the storm barreled toward Japan.

Soldiers and rescuers in Taichung County searched for five people who remained missing after a section of a 2,000-foot-long bridge over the Tachia River collapsed on Sunday night.

CTI Cable News reported rescue workers as saying three cars plunged into the furious river after the water rose too high and washed part of the bridge away. Police recovered one body, identified as a 32-year-old engineer, the report said.

Pillars supporting the bridge gave way under pressure from the raging waters, the Apple Daily quoted highway official Chen Chin-yuan as saying.

The accident occurred just as highway maintenance workers were about to close the bridge to traffic, Transport Minister Mao Chih-kuo said Monday as he inspected the bridge.

Elsewhere in central Taiwan, a driver was killed when his car skidded in heavy rain and crashed into a road railing, and a utility company electrician and a farmer were washed away by rampaging flood waters, the Disaster Relief Center said.

Sinlaku slammed into the northeast coast of Taiwan on Sunday, bringing torrential rain and strong winds to the North Asian island. Mountainous regions recorded more than 40 inches of rain, and several large rivers overflowed their banks, forcing authorities to evacuate hundreds of people, the disaster center said.

Sinlaku was centered at sea 86 miles north of Keelung on the northern tip of Taiwan, moving northeast at a speed of 4 miles per hour as of 8.00 am local time (2000 EST Sunday), the Central Weather Bureau reported.

The bureau said Sinlaku would likely make landfall in southern Japan by Wednesday, and that it could be downgraded from typhoon status.

Source — Yahoo!