Archive: Calamities

Veronique de Turenne is following the Woolsey fire aftermath at Here in Malibu.

Veronique de Turenne: Praying for everyone in all of today's mind-boggling number of fire zones.

"The world stood still today for my sweet husband," his wife posted after a solemn procession Sunday drew crowds along several SoCal freeways. "He is home."

This weekend's fire in Los Angeles isn't even the worst La Tuna Canyon fire in recent times.

An estimated 188,000 people fled areas downstream from Lake Oroville after a hole was spotted Sunday in the giant dam's emergency spillway. LA swift-water rescue teams are headed north.

Readers of the Southern California News Group papers are warned how to watch out for the stuff.

As of last night, officials had found one body burned to death in a car and counted 18 structures destroyed.

The amount of gas and oil to escape was small, but everyone is jittery.

Gov. Jerry Brown wants the state to spend $176 million on cleanup of lead contamination.

A relief well has allowed SoCal Gas to stop the uncontrolled release of odorized natural gas, but the utility describes the stoppage as temporary pending a final seal over the well leaking since October.

California's Secretary of State put his family in a Burbank hotel about six weeks ago.

Civi lawsuit blames SoCal Gas for the three-month methane leak in Aliso Canyon

Aides for elected officials get to go where news cameras can't. But the Gas Co. got Sherman to take the videos down.

"If the wellhead fails," says a physical sciences professor, "It will be a horrible, horrible problem."

Several state agencies are ordered to take a role in getting SoCal Gas to stop the methane venting above Aliso Canyon.

"It’s the climate equivalent of the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico," the Guardian says. More than 3,000 Angelenos remain out of their homes.

LA's favorite earthquake expert tweets her review of the latest impossible movie disaster to destroy Los Angeles.

Eloi Vasquez was struck and killed on the 10 freeway early Sunday morning, but did not carry any identification.

Prime Minister Najib Razak of Malaysa announced Monday that analysis of satellite data confirms that Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 flew south over the Indian Ocean after changing course and could...

The prime minister of Australia, Tony Abbott, informed Parliament on Thursday morning that satellite images appear to show debris in the ocean under a likely flight path of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370.

The Daily News package includes a dramatic shot of what the newsroom in Woodland Hills looked like when staffers tried to get in. The paper's executive editor recalls the day.

In Los Angeles in the 1960s, there were three huge local news stories that riveted people in front of their televisions — mostly to watch KTLA Channel 5, because that was the only station with a news helicopter.

From a long night of posting on September 12, 2008: "Channel 5 just wisely advised parents to keep the children of possible victims away from the television for awhile."

El Pais has online video of yesterday's train crash at Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, and a gallery of photos that is not for the squeamish.

The Dodgers' Matt Kemp is from Oklahoma City. He homered in tonight's Dodgers win in Milwaukee and after the game he represented.

After the tornado passed today in Moore, Oklahoma, one family opened its shelter and looked onto a vanished neighborhood. Whoever is holding the camera seems stunned into silence, at first.

We know about the deal we make with earthquakes, but the biggest catastrophes through time in California have actually been storms. There's only been one on the epic scale since statehood, but a story in the new Scientific American says the next time will be worse for us.

With a note from the editors.

Saida Méndez Bernardino, the 27-year-old mother who was killed with her daughters Hilda, 6, and Stephanie, 4, when their car was struck head-on on Highland Avenue at Willoughby, is survived by a 12-year-old daughter. Friends and Oaxacan community organizations are trying to raise money.

The LA Times says that Solomon Mathenge, who is 74 and lives in Lawndale, had his drivers license suspended for not showing up in court on a traffic ticket. His DMV record includes citations for speeding and talking on a cellphone. The mother and daughters who died have been identified.

I can just imagine the tragic news rippling through the day across several communities. Awful.

LA police confirmed that last night's crash in Valley Village is being investigated as a reckless driving case. Witnesses said they believed two cars were speeding along Magnolia Boulevard at Ben Avenue when the crash occurred. Two women who rushed to help the driver of the car that sheared off a fire hyrdrant were electrocuted, and at least six other people who tried to help were treated for electric shocks.

Heal the Bay has prepared a sober, hype-free set of frequently asked questions regarding the likelihood of floating debris reaching our shore. Message: calm down.

>The Lost & Found Project's Exhibit of Photos Swept Away by Tsunami in Japan opens Thursday at the Hiroshi Watanabe Gallery in West Hollywood.

David Ono goes to Japan to see how things stand a year later.

President of the Huntington Library and botanical gardens asks for financial help to clean up "extensive" damage from last week's winds.

On her blog, the novelist uses verse to mark the century-old eucalyptus' passage into firewood and sawdust.

Volunteers have restrung most of the the wind-damaged lights on Altadena's traditional Christrmas Tree Lane and say they will flip the switch on Saturday at 6 p.m. — as scheduled before last week's freak wind event.

Over half the specimens at the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden suffered some kind of wind damage. Sobering pictures.

The National Weather Service update for Mammoth Mountain contained a startling fact.

What's that, half a million people in the Los Angeles metropolitan area bedding down for a second night without electricity?

DWP's map of outages is impressive. Plus: historic Los Feliz deodars down.

Pasadena really took the brunt of last night's wind storm.

The air over the Pacific Northwest has been at his highest barometric pressure in a long time. Instant wind down here.

It's right where scientists expected it would be, near Midway Island, and should reach Hawaii in two years and North America in three.

Much of the city of San Diego is still dark, but some areas — including the south end of Orange County and the desert cities of the Coachella Valley — are gradually getting power back.

Tears, candles and a moving display as each player from the Minsk team knelt at a photo of a deceased counterpart, then skated a solitary puck the length of the ice.

Without power or air conditioning, it could be a long night in the lower deserts. Here are the current temperatures.

With essentially all power off across the region served by San Diego Gas & Electric, the biggest problem faced by the SDPD right now is rush-hour traffic without stop lights.

The New York Times tweets, "As a public service, @nytimes will allow free access to storm-related coverage on nytimes.com and its mobile apps."

CET says that all of the money raised during the three-hour telethon it aired on May 24 will go for Japanese tsunami relief efforts.

KCET is devoting the 8 to 11 p.m. block on Tuesday night to a live show raising money for Japan. All proceeds will go to tsunami and quake relief efforts...

Northeastern Japan endured another 7.1 magnitude aftershock on Monday afternoon.

KTLA's Frank Buckley wasn't the only visiting foreign journalist to parachute into Japan after the earthquake then want to quickly get out once the story became about nuclear radiation.

The folks at Southern California Public Radio made a nice video with Tony Tsukui, one of the Japanese businessmen and women who were here when the earthquake and tsunami struck Japan.

In a sign of how bad it may be, Japanese officials finally accept help from American nuclear experts.

Channel 5's morning anchor explains how he came to be sent to cover the Japan disaster on short notice — and why he and his crew, producer Toni Molle and photographer Mike McGregor, came back so soon.

This might help prevent locals from going a little crazy over the arrival of airborne radiation particles from Japan.

Experts said that small amounts of radioactive isotope that escaped from the crippled Japanese nuclear power stations would blow across the Pacific in the upper atmosphere.

Channel 5's morning anchor flew into LAX tonight and tweeted there's a new addition to the customs procedure: a radiation wand.

Release from the office of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa says "no immediate threat to the United States" from radiation in Japan.

L.A. Creek Freak posted this video of Friday's tsunami wave rolling uphill in Ballona Creek.

Danger of nuclear disaster reaches a new level in Japan, "threatening to overshadow even the massive damage and loss of life spawned by a devastating earthquake and tsunami."

As if the March 11 quake off Japan's northeast coast needed any more historic cred, the USGS recalculated it upward in magnitude.

This clip catches the start of Friday's tsunami flooding into the streets of Kesennuma, in Miyagi Prefecture, and watches up close for six astounding, frightening minutes.

The Rafu Shimpo website has, of course, gone heavily into disaster relief and communication mode.

Japan is probably the most prepared country in the world, but the spreading misery and risk of nuclear disaster shows that you can't prepare adequately for an 8.9 magnitude earthquake and resulting tsunami.

The blogger behind the site called With Malice — "the half-crazed ramblings of a Laker fanatic in Japan" — has posted his reactions to news coverage and the local reality of the quake and tsunami.

L.A. County Fire's urban search and rescue team boarded buses last night for LAX.

These are always a mix of awesome and frightening.

Crescent City, near the Oregon border, appears to have suffered significant damage to its harbor.

Tsunami coming ashore at Natori in Miyagi prefecture. From Kyodo News Service at New York Times. Wave inundating Sendai airport on closed-circuit video....

TV reports are showing not much happening along the Southern California coast as the hour passes for the arrival of tsunami surges.

NOAA has put up a tsunami advisory for us and a higher tsunami warning for north of Point Concepcion.

Updated monitoring of media reports on the Japan earthquake, which the USGS is calling a magnitude 8.9 event. Number aftershocks over 6.0 have occurred.

Members of the Los Angeles County Fire Department's search and rescue team are at LAX right about now boarding a flight for New Zealand.

On the 17th anniversary of the Northridge earthquake, it seems like a good time to point out the new research that says a theoretical Pacific-spawned superstorm is now believed likely to do much more damage in California than a major earthquake on the San Andreas Fault.

BBC is streaming live from Copiapo as the rescue capsule is being readied to lower a medic into the mine and remove the first trapped miner.

An underground natural gas pipeline blew up in a San Bruno neighborhood south of San Francisco this evening, engulfing whole blocks in a fireball.

Bennet Kessler, the dean of Eastern Sierra journalists, has covered more than her share of crashes on U.S. highway 395. "A horrible scene of death, fire and suffering," she wrote in today's story.

Anibal Archila was injured in the eruption that closed the airport at Guatemala City, declared missing then confirmed dead Thursday night.

On this day, the Rodney Kings riots erupted in 1992 and the Central Library burned in 1986.

At 2:30 this afternoon, the Los Angeles Fire Department will supervise the full evacuation of the Aon Building, the 62-story tower at Wilshire and Hope that was known as the First Interstate Tower when a fire broke out on the 12th floor in 1988.

Tsunami surges killed hundreds and devastated ports and towns along the Chilean coast in the first hours after Saturday's 8.8 magnitude earthquake. Check out the animation.

Lauren Williams and Aneya Fernando moved from Los Angeles to Santiago last month and have been blogging about the quake and its aftermath.

Modeling by NOAA of the tsunami action expected across the Pacific from the 8.8 earthquake in Chile. The ocean is normally blue on these maps. Small world, as they say....

More than 140 people have been killed by a major earthquake that struck before dawn, centered in the Pacific 60 miles offshore from the port city of Concepcion. A tsunami could hit Hawaii at 11:05 island time.

Reporter Andrew Mollenbeck of KNX 1070 flew into Haiti from Guantanamo Bay and is embedded now with the U.S. Navy ship USS Bataan. In Wednesday's report he described a water...

Video from KABC7 of last night's story.

The Los Angeles County Fire Department urban search and rescue team in Port-Au-Prince pulled another woman from the earthquake rubble. In this one, you can hear the crowd applauding and chanting "U.S.A!"

Task Force 2 comes through again. Just watch the video.

Firefighters apparently from California Task Force 2, the L.A. County FD urban search and rescue team in Haiti, are live on CNN trying to reach a girl buried in rubble in Port-Au-Prince who is believed to be tapping messages to rescuers.

The cameras crew grew in number today at TiGeorges' Chicken, the Haitian restaurant on Glendale Boulevard where Jenny Burman visited yesterday for Chicken Corner.

I'm told that L.A. Times photographer Carolyn Cole was packing in her Brooklyn apartment within fifteen minutes of the first quake bulletin. How she got to Port-Au-Prince.

The L.A. Times has photographers Carolyn Cole and Rick Loomis on the ground in Haiti.

TiGeorges Laguerre, the Haitian restaurateur in Echo Park who Jenny Burman visited with earlier today, talks about the earthquake devastation tonight on "Which Way, L.A.?" with Warren Olney.

Jenny Burman at Chicken Corner went over to TiGeorges' Chicken, the Echo Park restaurant that is becoming a center for the local Haitian community.

The Los Angeles County Fire Department's urban search and rescue team, veterans of Katrina and the South Asia tsunami, is poised to head for Haiti.

Ron Kaye's new organ for his activist brand of politics and news, OurLA.org, ran a long piece yesterday claiming to debunk the "meltdown myth" regarding the 1959 nuclear reactor incident...

Metrolink has agreed to pay the agency's former spokeswoman $135,500 to settle potential claims arising from her departure. Denise Tyrrell resigned last September after being criticized by some Metrolink officials...

When I read about the horrible crash where Angeles Crest Highway dumps out at Foothill Boulevard in La Cañada Flintridge, I wondered if the semi-truck driver had used the sand...

Among the texts that engineer Robert Sanchez sent before the fatal crash in Chatsworth last September were messages arranging to let enthusiasts ride in the cab later that evening. Details...

This might be the story of the weekend. Robert Sanchez, the engineer driving the Metrolink train that crashed in Chatsworth last September, not only texted regularly with teenagers along his...

On Sept. 12, a Metrolink commuter train headed for Simi Valley and Moorpark smashed head-on into a southbound Union Pacific freight train in Chatsworth. Twenty-five passengers and crew have died...

The NTSB says that Robert Sanchez, the engineer whose Metrolink train ran head-on into a freight train in Chatsworth, sent a text message 22 seconds before the crash that has...

In a personal reflection on his county website, Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky writes about going to the scene of the Metrolink crash in Chatsworth and talking with the relatives of victims....

When Conan O'Brien began a bit last night (this morning actually) about trains crashing together, KNBC Channel 4 cut in with anchor Colleen Williams introducing footage of Sen. John McCain's...

My KCRW segment on Friday said that Denise Tyrrell deserves our respect for cutting to the chase in her statements on the Metrolink disaster in Chatsworth. Listen here (or grab...

Veolia, the French multinational company that provided Metrolink with engineer Robert Sanchez, is already facing trial in Los Angeles federal court on suits alleging the firm routinely denied workers' rest...

Three calls to 911 are up on the LAFD news blog: one from a passenger on the Metrolink train, one from the adjacent school and another from up on the...

Chuck Peck's cell phone called family members 35 times on Friday night and Saturday during the hours while they waited to hear whether he had survived the Metrolink train crash...

Only four seconds elapsed from the time the two engineers could have seen each other around the curve in Chatsworth where the Metrolink commuter train and a Union Pacific freight...

Signs have begun going up in Downtown advising commuters. A funeral procession for Officer Spree Desha will begin at Parker Center at 8:45 am Thursday and move to the Cathedral...

Gregory Lintner walked away from the deadly 2005 Metrolink crash in Glendale &mdash and was hailed as a hero — but died in last week's head-on accident in Chatsworth. Two...

The man in his 50s died today at County-USC Medical Center. His name has not yet been released. The Los Angeles County coroner's office today also formally identified the engineer...

Former Metrolink spokeswoman Denise Tyrrell, who resigned overnight when the agency's board did not back up her statements about the engineer's culpability in the Chatsworth train crash, just talked to...

Metrolink spokeswoman Denise Tyrrell, who had said publicly on Saturday that the agency's engineer ran a red light and caused the Chatsworth train crash, resigned after the agency's board released...

A Metrolink dispatcher reportedly called train 111 to alert the engineer that a freight train was ahead, but reached the conductor too late. LAT Two more names of the...

Channel 2 aired reports tonight showing text messages reportedly sent by Metrolink contract engineer Robert Sanchez just before his train crashed head-on into a Union Pacific freight train, killing at...

Here's a partial list from the Los Angeles County Coroner's office (via Associated Press) of the passengers and crew killed in Friday's Metrolink train crash in Chatsworth. City News Service...

Paul Long, an English teacher at Oaks Christian School in Westlake Village, died this afternoon after being taken off life support at County-USC Medical Center. He had been riding the...

The 18th victim, possibly the Union Pacific freight train engineer, was pulled from the scene about 8:45 am. Authorities say that more bodies remain in the wreckage of Metrolink train...

The Los Angeles Police Department officer who died in the Chatsworth train collision was identified by the LAPD as Spree Desha, a seven-year veteran who worked in the Office of...

Channel 7 says an unidentified Los Angeles Police Department officer has been confirmed dead in the Chatsworth Metrolink crash. Updates from media monitoring: * Rescue workers have been pulled out...

First news round-up, second news round-up, media scan. Blood donations of all types are needed in the wake of the Chatsworth train crash, UCLA Medical Center says. The UCLA Blood...

First news round-up, second news round-up. At 8:30 pm, Channels 2 and 7 are the only Los Angeles TV stations still airing full coverage. The Los Angeles Times story (timestamp...

Information on victims will be gathered and distributed to families at Chatsworth High School, at De Soto Avenue and Devonshire Street. Thats's also where families will be reunited. Family members...

Picking up from the earlier roundup: * It's a bit clearer now what probably happened. A source with good connections in the transit agencies emails that Ventura-bound Metrolink train #111...

An outbound Metrolink train headed for Moorpark collided with a freight train on the Chatsworth side of Santa Susana Pass. Cars are off the tracks and rescues are underway. Triage...