places been shorn to the slab, and accounts for at least 36 deaths. Thousands have been injured, and untold more have been left homeless, hauling their belongings in garbage bags or rooting through disgorged piles of wood and siding to find anything salvageable. – New York Times
5/3 – Mississippi River Valley. Thousands of people are being warned to prepare for the worst tonight as the Mississippi River swells to historic flood levels. Heavy rain is pushing the river's basin to its limits. That is forcing water into already swollen tributaries, and wherever else it can go. The city of Memphis is preparing for the surge, and many people in the Home of the Blues see their immediate future underwater. The city's mayor has pleaded for calm, however, and said this city possibly faced a "large-scale disaster." Things could get much worse. After the great Mississippi flood of 1927 – the most destructive in U.S. history – engineers built an elaborate system of levees, reservoirs and floodways. That system's being tested as never before by floodwaters higher than existing records. It's not just the Mississippi Basin that's flooding this spring. In the northeast, heavy rains and snow melt have triggered flooding along Lake Champlain. Surging water has already swamped hundreds of homes and cottages on the lake's 600-mile coastline. – CBS News
5/13 – United States. The USA has been hit with five weather disasters costing more than a billion dollars each in 2011, setting a modern record for the most high-cost weather events so early in a year, according to insurance estimates and government records.
Tornadoes, floods and storms have inflicted unusually high costs because of their severity and their location. The 2011 costs follow three record-setting years in which thunderstorms and tornadoes alone caused an average of $10 billion in annual damage, according to an institute study. A record nine billion-dollar weather disasters hit the U.S. in 2008, according to National Climactic Data Center records dating back to 1980. Only two of those disasters hit by mid-May. – USA Today
5/23 – Missouri. Rescue crews dug through piles of splintered houses and crushed cars Monday in a search for victims of a half-mile-wide tornado that killed at least 116 people when it blasted much of this Missouri town off the map and slammed straight into its hospital. It was the nation's deadliest single tornado in nearly 60 years and the second major tornado disaster in less than a month. Authorities feared the toll could rise as the full scope of the destruction comes into view: house after house reduced to slabs, cars crushed like soda cans, shaken residents roaming streets in search of missing family members. And the danger was by no means over. Fires from gas leaks burned across town, and more violent weather loomed, including the threat of hail, high winds and even more tornadoes. At daybreak, the city's south side emerged from darkness as a barren, smoky wasteland. Unlike the multiple storms that killed more than 300 people last month across the South, Joplin was smashed by just one exceptionally powerful twister. Authorities were prepared to find more bodies in the rubble throughout this gritty, blue-collar town of 50,000 people about 160 miles south of Kansas City. – Associated Press
Copyright ©2008 Courtney White, A West That Works, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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