Natural Disasters News

A thunderstorm formed so rapidly over a Southern California beach that experts said Monday it was impossible for anyone to predict a lightning strike would turn a day of carefree fun into one of terror.

Kent Brantly always wanted to be a medical missionary, and he took the work seriously, spending months treating a steady stream of patients with Ebola in Liberia.

Steve Hammond, president of the Sacramento Convention & Visitors Bureau, said Monday that too much water would be needed to bring in and later clean up the nearly 200 tons of dirt used for the Labor Day weekend event.

Firefighters in northern California are battling large wildfires, attempting to extinguish a blaze near Yosemite National Park that quadrupled in size over the weekend.

A storm system that wreaked havoc across the eastern half of the U.S. spawned a tornado just north of Boston on Monday, causing extensive damage in Revere, where roofs were ripped off buildings and dozens of large trees were uprooted.

Market shelves are bare. Children are getting skinnier. Warnings of mass hunger have been made.

A wildfire burning in the foothills of Northern California's Sierra Nevada mountains destroyed 13 homes and 38 other structures, California authorities said late Sunday.

Wildfires burning near Northern California vineyards and in the Yosemite National Park area were threatening hundreds of homes even as crews worked to contain them.

Fire crews were battling two fast-moving wildfires in California that threatened many homes and forced hundreds of evacuations, officials said.

Spokeswoman Gina Breeding with the office of emergency management in east Tennessee's Claiborne County told The Associated Press that searchers were going door to door amid the debris of ruined homes Sunday night in one particularly hard-hit community, Speedwell.

Authorities now say 14 people - including a 15-year-old - have been struck by lightning during rare summer thunderstorms that have swept through Southern California, injuring two critically.

The Ebola virus ravaging West Africa is taking a toll on the doctors and health workers battling it.

Scientists and public health officials are studying a Vermont whooping cough epidemic to determine if the current vaccine is less effective against a new strain sweeping the country.

Firefighters traveling from the Wye Fire get a rest before getting assignments for the Mill Fire at the incident base camp at the Silver Dollar Fairgrounds on Aug. 16, 2012.

BEIJING: A typhoon has killed 13 people in China and left thousands in need of basic living supplies, the Civil Affairs Ministry said Sunday.

An information officer with the B.C. Wildfire Management Branch, says temperatures are expected to rise again next week, especially in the southern interior, where they could reach the mid-30s.

A rapidly spreading wildfire in Northern California forced the evacuation of about 700 homes Saturday as it raced through Sierra Nevada foothills turned tinder-dry by drought.

Even for a regular like Allen Keeten, who has been visiting here since the late 1970s, the retreating shoreline of Lake Mead behind Hoover Dam is a shock to witness.

The Pikes Peak Stormwater Task Force is trying to explain its stormwater prevention proposal so the public will understand why they might be asked to pay $10 a month.

The sprinklers outside the California's state Capitol are off and the lawn is withering, the lemon- and cucumber-infused "water stations" at the state pension building are gone, and prison inmates are taking shorter showers while campers at some popular parks can't take them at all.