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National Situation Update: Sunday, March 26, 2006

Homeland Security Threat Level: YELLOW (ELEVATED).

National Weather Forecast

South: As the core of the cold high pressure surface ridge shifts to the central Gulf Coast this morning, freeze warnings are posted from parts of the lower Mississippi Valley to the Carolinas. Adding to this wintry condition, mountain snow showers should continue in the Smoky Mountains, thanks to a slow-moving upper-level low.

West:  A compact, powerful upper-level storm system will slide into Rockies this morning and significant snow will fall in the northern Rockies and Wasatch. High wind warnings are posted for the Salt Lake Valley, including Ogden and Provo. Frequent wind gusts above 30 mph, possibly reaching 60 mph will subside by this morning. Wind advisories are also posted for a large part of the Great Basin, from southern Idaho to the Mojave Desert. Significant wind-driven snow is expected from the northern Rockies and there could be sudden reductions in visibility, with potential whiteout conditions in the high country. The snow should spread into the High Plains of eastern Montana and northeast Wyoming.

In the Desert Southwest, following two weekends of cold, stormy, snowy weather from Southern California to New Mexico, warmer, more tranquil weather has set in.
More heavy rain is headed for Hawaii, where a stuck area of low pressure to the west of the island chain should enhance rainfall into the islands. Flash flood watches continue through tomorrow night. A winter storm watch was hoisted above 8000 feet on the "Big Island", namely for Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea. Hilo is running a surplus of over 14 inches and Mt. Waialeale has picked up an incredible 10 feet of rain over the past month.

Northeast:  There is an expansive pool of cold air aloft lumbering through the Appalachians and there will be plenty of clouds, cold, and showery conditions associated with this upper-level low. Unlike winter, ground temperatures are only marginally supportive of snow, primarily over the Appalachians.

An ocean storm is expected to remain sufficiently far offshore to minimally impact the Northeast Urban Corridor. Patchy light rain, flurries, or drizzle may continue wrapping into the Delmarva Peninsula, Jersey Shore, and perhaps, New York City before the low begins to pull eastward later in the day. Except for strong winds on Nantucket Island, peaking in the morning hours, this storm will pose little other impact today.

Midwest:  The cloudy, cool, showery regime which has plagued the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley will slowly loose its grip and high pressure will build into the region, keeping high temperatures in the chilly 40s. However, on the backside of the surface high, southerly winds will return milder air to the Great Plains and Upper Midwest. Highs there should range from the 40s in the Dakotas and Minnesota to the 60s in Kansas and Missouri.  (NWS, Media Sources)

New Orleans Flood-Map Delays Create Angst

Delays in releasing new federal maps of New Orleans' most flood-prone neighborhoods have slowed rebuilding, frustrated homeowners and created uncertainty about the future of the region ravaged by Hurricane Katrina.  And the angst may all be for nothing, the government says.

Residents of the city and surrounding communities have waited since the fall for the maps that will help determine how much flood insurance they will need to rebuild. Under current maps, 80 percent of New Orleans lies in a federally designated flood plain; that figure probably will rise.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is issuing preliminary new building standards as early as this week, says homeowners do not have to make that decision now.
They say people who build now will not have to pay higher flood insurance rates even if the new maps and building standards eventually require higher rates. Only people building after the new maps and standards are finished will face higher rates, they say. That process could take another year.

FEMA is expected to issue advisory standards this week suggesting how high homes need to be rebuilt to be considered safer from floods in Orleans, Jefferson, St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes in southern Louisiana. Orleans includes the city of New Orleans.  The standards will be followed by geographic maps later this spring that probably will expand the boundary of the region's flood plain - the area with the greatest potential to flood each year.  The flood plain maps have not been updated since the mid-1980s.

The problem comes as Congress considers revamping the FEMA-run National Flood Insurance Program, which will pay out an estimated $23 billion in flood insurance claims as a result of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The program collects about $2 billion annually in premiums, and is depending on loans from the Treasury to fulfill current claims.

FEMA has issued the advisory maps in three Mississippi counties and 11 other Louisiana parishes that were not protected by levees when Katrina hit. Communities ultimately can reject the final federal standards, but they rarely do as they would then be ineligible for future flood relief.

In Gulfport, Miss., Mayor Brent Warr is pushing FEMA to scale back new flood plain building standards that raise the base of a house by 2 feet - from 15 feet to 17 feet.
The new elevation levels would be too high, Warr said, and would result in costly insurance premiums for about 600 homeowners in his city who cannot build to those standards. Homeowners who refuse to pay the higher insurance rates will almost certainly see their property values depreciate.

Those concerns are mirrored in the New Orleans area, too, where the map delays have exhausted the patience of residents.   (Media Sources)

Engineers' Panel Urges Study of All Levees in New Orleans

The safety of New Orleans's battered levees is "open to question" until the entire system can be analyzed in light of new information about how the 17th Street Canal levee failed after Hurricane Katrina, according to a review panel of civil engineers.

In a strongly worded letter sent Friday to Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock, the chief engineer of the Army Corps of Engineers, the panel, from the American Society of Civil Engineers, said that "a determination of the overall safety of the hurricane protection system cannot be made until such time as the remainder of the system can be evaluated with the benefit of this new information."

The Corps has been racing to repair damaged sections of the levees by June 1, the start of the Atlantic hurricane season. The letter argues that regardless of the quality of those repairs, the parts of the system that survived the hurricane and were built to the old standard should be given a close look before the city can be declared safe.  Over all, the group found that the 17th Street Canal floodwall "appears to reflect an overall pattern of engineering judgment inconsistent with that required for critical structures."

The design, the letter said, did not include a margin of safety allowing for stresses beyond the expected: for example, I-shaped walls were used when an inverted-T shape would have provided greater strength.

The review panel, which the Corps formed to analyze the work of its own investigation of the levee failures, was responding to a March 10 report by the investigators. The report found that the designers of the levees and floodwalls had not anticipated that floodwaters might push the floodwall away from the soil base, allowing water to course down into the gap and push the structure aside.

A 1988 report by the Corps showed that such a chain of events was possible. That and other studies, apparently, "never triggered an assessment of the impact that such a gap would have on the stability of the existing levee and floodwall system," the panel of engineers said.

The Corps investigators' report said a second factor in the 17th Street Canal failure was soft soils behind the levee that did not withstand the push from within the canal.  All such soils should be tested and "all I-walls should be re-evaluated" immediately to see what stress they can withstand, the engineers' group said in its letter.

Ivor van Heerden, a leader of Team Louisiana, the group studying the levee failures for the state, said he was pleasantly surprised to see that the panel had reached similar findings. The fact that the groups the Corps formed to review its work have taken such a strong stand, he said, means "it's not just the crazy Cajuns with funny-sounding accents" criticizing the Corps.

A Corps spokesman said that "in general, we agree" with the engineers' concerns, adding, "In fact, we're already implementing a lot of those recommendations."  The review panel's chairman said in an interview that he was encouraged to see that the Corps accepted the conclusions. But, he said, "Simply restoring levees to pre-Katrina levels does not address the question of whether the design was adequate in the first place."  He
also criticized the tendency of some Corps officials and public figures to proclaim the levees safe.

People deserve "the straight scoop on what the risks are, for those who do decide to return to New Orleans," he said.  (Media Sources)

Tackling the Animal-to-Human Link in Illness

Stronger ties between veterinarians and physicians are needed to prevent further outbreaks of the animal diseases that have caused deaths and serious illness among humans in many countries in recent years, international health officials said at a meeting.

The diseases are known as zoonoses because they affect animals primarily, and humans only incidentally. The AIDS, SARS and A(H5N1) avian influenza viruses and at least eight other infectious agents carried by animals have led to new and emerging human diseases in recent years.

The spread of new and emerging diseases can be a two-way street as people occasionally transmit human diseases like tuberculosis to elephants in captivity in the United States and Sweden and mongooses in Africa.

The latest and most visible zoonosis is A(H5N1) avian influenza. Through illness and culling, the virus has led to the death of an estimated 200 million birds worldwide. In Asia and Europe, the virus has caused 185 human cases of which 104 have been fatal.

New diseases are occurring in part because of globalization and because people are encroaching on areas once reserved for wildlife. After the AIDS virus infected tens of millions of people worldwide and an animal disease, anthrax, was deliberately spread through the United States postal system after Sept. 11, public health has become intertwined with national security.

Experts at the three-day International Symposium on Emerging Zoonoses said they had no way of predicting what human disease would emerge next from an animal source.

Preventing further outbreaks, participants said, will require a variety of measures, including more education about zoonoses among veterinarians and physicians; more integration of animal diseases into health plans; the creation of more laboratories to detect animal diseases; and possibly changes in the foods people eat and the animals they keep as pets.

Breaking down barriers among government agencies, academia and special interest groups will be needed as scientists seek new ways to collect reliable evidence to protect the health of animals and humans, participants said.

The meeting was the first between the World Animal Health Organization, a cooperative of chief veterinary officers from 167 countries, based in Paris, and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, based in Atlanta, said Dr. Lonnie King, the dean of Michigan State University's veterinary school. Dr. King is soon joining the C.D.C., which is expected to become a laboratory and epidemiology reference center for the animal organization.

In 1999, scientists discovered the Nipah virus among pig workers in Malaysia and Singapore who developed inflammation of the brain and respiratory illness. Farming practices on pig farms where fruit trees were abundant created opportunities for transmission of the Nipah virus, said Dr. Peter W. Daniels of the Australian Animal Health Laboratory in Geelong.

Fruit bats carried the Nipah virus, and it was transmitted to pigs that lived in an open farm environment. In turn, the virus was transmitted to humans and their pets.  Additional factors favoring Nipah virus transmission were disrespect for regulations and the frequent breaking of rules to increase profits. It was a lesson that self-regulation must be realistically audited, Dr. Daniels said.

The demand for exotic pets can also spread zoonoses.  Customs inspectors recently stopped the potential spread of A(H5N1) virus in Belgium by catching a man trying to smuggle infected Thai eagles that had been stuffed alive in a roller tube.  Cats, leopards and tigers have died from A(H5N1) avian influenza in southeast Asia and Europe.  hough the number of cases is small, they have raised concern that the virus could become a bigger problem among felines.

Another zoonosis, rabies, killed 50,000 people in 2005, mainly from dog bites in Africa and Asia despite availability of an effective vaccine, according to the World Health Organization.  In poor countries, many dogs go unvaccinated because they are believed to be strays. But many strays turn out not to be strays. In a pilot study in Chad, a team vaccinated and tagged stray dogs. When the Swiss team recaptured stray dogs, it found that 70 percent had been vaccinated, concluding that their owners had let them roam freely and that opportunities existed to conduct rabies vaccination programs.  (Media Sources)

Tropical Activity

There are no tropical disturbances in the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans that affect the U.S. or U.S. interests. (National Hurricane Center, Central Pacific Hurricane Center, and the Joint Typhoon Warning Center)

Earthquake Activity

A moderate (5.0) earthquake struck 87 miles west-southwest of Gold Beach, OR at 3:14 pm EST.  There were no reports of damage or injuries and there was no tsunami generated by the quake.

A light (4.5) earthquake struck 196 miles west-northwest of Brandon, OR at 6:23 pm EST.  There were no reports of damage or injuries and there was no tsunami generated.

A light (4.6) earthquake struck 6 miles southwest of Petrolia, CA at 8:56 pm EST.  There were no reports of damage or injuries and no tsunami was reported.   (Source: United States Geological Survey (USGS) Earthquake Hazards Program, Pacific Tsunami Warning Center West Coast/Alaska Tsunami Warning Center)

Preliminary Damage Assessments

No new activity (FEMA HQ)

Wildfire Update

Current situation:  Initial attack activity was light nationally with 53 new fires reported. Very high to extreme fire indices were reported in Arizona.  The National Interagency Fire Center has requested assistance from the Department of Defense for MAFFS air tanker support. Two MAFFS C-130 air tankers and support personnel from the 145th Tactical Airlift Wing based in Charlotte, North Carolina are providing support. The MAFFS are based in Albuquerque, New Mexico in support of the Southwest, Rocky Mountain and Southern Areas.

Outlook:  A low pressure trough over the East will keep a dry northwest flow over Florida and much of the Southeast. In the Southwest, high pressure will cover the area but a storm system moving into the Great Basin will bring increasing winds to Arizona.  (National Interagency Coordination Center, National Interagency Fire Center)

Disaster Declaration Activity

No new activity (FEMA HQ)