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Sunday, April 15, 2012

Dangerous Storms Move into Midwest

A tornado moves on the ground north of Solomon, Kan.,
on Saturday evening. A strong wave of storms pounded the Midwest.
Tornadoes Reported

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) – Tornadoes reported across the Midwest and Plains on Saturday and early Sunday left five people dead in Oklahoma and damaged houses, a hospital, a jail, an Air Force base and other buildings around the region, officials said.

Oklahoma authorities said five people died early Sunday after a tornado hit in and around the northwest Oklahoma town of Woodward. Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management spokeswoman Keli Cain said the state medical examiner's office confirmed the fatalities in the Woodward area. She didn't know the gender or age of the victims or details of their deaths.

The National Weather Service said the tornado hit at 12:18 a.m. Sunday.

Woodward Mayor Roscoe Hill said the sirens were not apparently working when the tornado struck, although they had been sounding loudly from storms on Saturday afternoon. The tornado hit in a mixed area of residences and businesses, Hill said.

Sheriff's deputies carry an injured man from a south Wichita neighborhood after a tornado caused massive damage Saturday night.
Woodward police said search and rescue units were headed to the damaged areas.

Storms also were reported in Kansas, Iowa and Nebraska.

National Weather Service forecasters issued sobering outlooks that the worst of the weather would hit around nightfall, predicting that conditions were right for exceptionally strong tornadoes. Weather officials and emergency management officials worried most about what would happen if strong storms hit when people were sleeping, not paying attention to weather reports and unlikely to hear warning sirens.

When it's dark, it's also more difficult for weather spotters to clearly see funnel clouds or tornadoes.
In Kansas, a reported tornado in Wichita caused damage at McConnell Air Force Base and the Spirit AeroSystems and Boeing plants. A mobile home park was heavily damaged in the city, although no injuries or deaths were reported.

Yvonne Tucker rushed to a shelter with about 60 of her neighbors at Pinaire Mobile Home Park. She said people were crying and screaming, and the shelter's lights went out when the twister hit. When they came back outside, they found several homes destroyed, including Tucker's.

"I didn't think it was that bad until I walked down my street and everything is gone," said Tucker, 49. "I don't know what to do. I don't know where to go. I've seen it on TV, but when it happens to you it is unreal.
"I just feel lost."

Iowa emergency officials said a large part of the town of Thurman in the western part of the state was destroyed Saturday night, possibly by a tornado, but no one was injured or killed. Fremont County Emergency Management Director Mike Crecelius said about 75 percent of the 250-person town was destroyed. Some residents took refuge at the City Hall.

A hospital in Creston, about 75 miles southwest of Des Moines, suffered roof damage and had some of its windows blown out by the storm, but patients and staff were not hurt. Medical center officials were calling other area hospitals to determine how many beds they had available in case they needed to move patients.

In Nebraska, baseball-sized hail shattered windows and tore siding from houses in and around Petersburg, about 140 miles northwest of Omaha. In southeast Nebraska, an apparent tornado took down barns, large trees and some small rural structures. Johnson County emergency director Clint Strayhorn said he was trying to determine the twister's duration and the damage it caused.

"I'm on a 2-mile stretch that this thing is on the ground and I haven't even gotten to the end of it yet," he said, walking the path of destruction near the Johnson-Nemaha county line. He didn't immediately know of any injuries.
At least 10 tornadoes were reported in Kansas, mostly in rural parts of the western and central sections of the state. A suspected tornado narrowly avoided Salina, meteorologists said. Another was on the ground for about a half-hour north of Dodge City.

Sedgwick County, home to Wichita, declared a state of disaster and said preliminary estimates suggest damages could be as high as $283 million.

Kristin Dean, who was among the Wichita mobile home residents taking shelter during the storm, said she was shaking as she was being pushed from home in her wheelchair. She was able to grab a bag of her possessions before going into the shelter and that was all she had left. She lost her mobile home, and the windows in her car shattered.

"It got still," the 37-year-old woman, who's in a wheelchair after hurting her leg a month ago, recalled of the scene inside the shelter. "Then we heard a wham, things flying. Everybody screamed, huddling together.
"It is devastating, but you know we are alive."

Kansas Division of Emergency Management spokeswoman Sharon Watson said Rice County was the only other Kansas county to issue a disaster declaration. Several buildings in the county were damaged, including the one housing the sheriff's department and jail. Inmates were transferred to another facility because of the damage.

Homes were damaged or destroyed in 10 other Kansas counties, Watson said.
Warnings for more serious storms continued. Bill Bunting, chief of operations at the Storm Prediction Center, said severe weather is possible Sunday "from east Texas and Arkansas and up into the Great Lakes."

"The threat isn't over with tonight, unfortunately," he said Saturday.

Adapted from USA Today
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Published by Gusti Putra at: 4:38 PM
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Human Remains Might Be at Titanic Wreck Site

This photo provided by the Institute for Exploration, Center for
Archaeological Oceanography/University of
Rhode Island/NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration,
shows a pair of shoes at the bottom of the ocean near
the Titanic shipwreck site.
Officials say evidence of human remains at Titanic wreck

NEW YORK (AP) – Human remains may be embedded in the mud of the North Atlantic where the New York-bound Titanic came to rest when it sank 100 years ago, a federal official said Saturday.


A 2004 photograph, released to the public for the first time this week in an uncropped version to coincide with the disaster's centenary, shows a coat and boots in the mud at the legendary shipwreck site.

"These are not shoes that fell out neatly from somebody's bag right next to each other," James Delgado, the director of maritime heritage at the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Administration, told the Associated Press in a phone interview.

The way they are "laid out" makes a "compelling case" that it is where "someone has come to rest," he said.
The image, along with two others showing pairs of boots resting next to each other, were taken during an expedition led by NOAA and famed Titanic finder Robert Ballard in 2004. They were published in Ballard's book on the expedition. Delgado said the one showing a coat and boots was cropped to show only a boot.

The New York Times first reported about the photographs in Saturday editions.

Filmmaker James Cameron, who has visited the wreck 33 times, told the newspaper that he had seen "zero human remains" during his extensive explorations of the Titanic. "We've seen shoes. We've seen pairs of shoes, which would strongly suggest there was a body there at one point. But we've never seen any human remains."

For Delgado, who was the chief scientist on an expedition in 2010 that mapped the entire site, the difference in opinion is "one of semantics."

"I as an archaeologist would say those are human remains," he said, referring to the photograph of the coat and boots specifically. "Buried in that sediment are very likely forensic remains of that person."

He said in an email that the images "speak to the power of that tragic and powerful scene 2 ½ miles below" and "to its resilience as an undersea museum, as well as its fragility."

"This is an appropriate time to note the human cost of that event, and the fact that in this special place at the bottom of the sea, evidence of the human cost, in the form of the shattered wreck, the scattered luggage, fittings and other artifacts, and the faint but unmistakable evidence that this is where people came to rest, is present," he said.

He said the images are also evidence that society could do a better job protecting the site.

There has been a long fight to protect the Titanic since it was rediscovered by Ballard in 1985, beginning with a federal law passed by Congress aimed at creating an international agreement to transform the shipwreck into an international maritime memorial. Sen. John Kerry introduced what some observers see as stronger legislation April 1 aimed at protecting the site from "salvage and intrusive research."

But the luxury liner, which went down April 14, 1912, after striking an iceberg, sits in international waters, limiting what the U.S. government can do.

Delgado said an international treaty would need to be negotiated between Britain, Canada, France and the U.S.

Adapted from USA Today
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Published by Gusti Putra at: 4:07 PM
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