They are assembling a Mass Care Task Force, including the American Red Cross, The Salvation Army, the North Texas Food Bank and the Volunteer Center of North Texas.

If you are interested in helping, the Volunteer Center of North Texas asks you visit their Web site to register to become a potential disaster volunteer. Should the situation call for major volunteer assistance, you will be notified.

You can also make donations to the Red Cross via text message. Text “REDCROSS” to 90999 to make a $10 donation.

The Inter-American Development Bank has proposed allowing member countries to tap loans in case they need to respond to natural disasters, the multilateral lender’s president said on Saturday.

Luis Alberto Moreno said the disaster funding would be financed by credits normally set aside for counter-cyclical spending in sharp economic downturns.

“What we want to do is liberate these credits for things related to natural disasters, so countries can be ready to disburse them if needed,” he told Reuters.

He did not say how much cash would be available for disasters, but seemed to downplay expectations about how much funding would be made available.

“This is something we have to talk about” with member states, he said.

The IADB is one of the main sources of development financing for Latin America and the Caribbean and approved $10.9 billion in loans last year.

Moreno said he does not expect the bank to hold another general capital increase after a recent boost by $70 billion to $170 billion. The increase raised the IADB’s annual lending capacity to about $12 billion.

Koldo Echevarria, an IADB manager, said the natural disaster plan presented to the bank’s governors would allow countries to use the loans to reinforce their financial systems. He did not say when the board of governors would vote on the proposal.

Latin America has suffered deadly disasters in recent years. In 2010, an earthquake killed 300,000 people and left more than half a million homeless in Haiti, the region’s poorest country. That same year, one of the biggest earthquakes on record caused $30 billion in damage in Chile, Latin America’s model economy.

“No country is immune to the possibility of being affected by a (natural disaster) crisis. What we are doing is designing a series of instruments” to help them cope, Echevarria said.

The Concordia accident, in which 32 people died when the ship ran aground in January off the coast of Italy, cast a long shadow over this year’s Cruise Shipping Miami conference.

The annual meeting Tuesday drew thousands of people who work in the cruise and travel industries in more than 100 countries.

Costa’s parent company, Carnival Corp., the world’s largest cruise operator, said booking trends are running behind last year, leading it last week to slash 2012 profit forecasts nearly in half.

Miami-based Carnival’s brands also include Princess Cruises, Holland America Line and Cunard Line.

“As everyone here well knows, the Concordia incident has focused considerable attention on our industry,” Carnival Corp. vice chairman and COO Howard Frank said in his keynote address. “While most of this attention has been negative, and we are clearly seeing some setbacks in the short term, we have faced similar setbacks in the past, and in each case we have shown tremendous resiliency in bouncing back.”

Frank, who is also chairman of the Cruise Lines International Association trade group, said that in the aftermath of Concordia, despite the industry’s good safety record, cruise lines are re-emphasizing passenger and crew safety, implementing “a comprehensive, top-to-bottom review of our shipboard safety and emergency response procedures.” That will include improved emergency muster training for all passengers prior to departure.

Supercomputer simulations show there will be more typhoons with winds of 179 miles (288 kilometers) per hour—considered an F3 on the five-level Fujita

Scale—by 2074.

By definition, supertyphoons carry winds of at least 150 miles (241 kilometers) per hour.

Such storms would be more destructive than Hurricane Katrina, which slammed into U.S. states along the Gulf of Mexico in August 2005.

“The most important factor in the creation of these typhoons is the warming of sea-surface temperatures in the western Pacific,” said researcher Kazuhisa

Tsuboki of Nagoya University.

Small But Severe

If global warming continues at its present pace, by 2080 the western Pacific Ocean will be 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) warmer, according to

Tsuboki, who worked with a team from Japan’s Meteorological Research Institute.

“That sounds like a small difference, but it will have a very big impact on a typhoon,” Tsuboki said.

That’s because even a relatively minor increase in seawater temperature adds an exponentially larger amount of energy to a storm, he said.

A rise in air temperature will also increase the amount of water vapor in the lower atmosphere, adding yet more fuel to the system.

Typhoons generally cover an area of between 311 and 497 miles (500 and 800 kilometers), Tsuboki said.

But to the researchers’ surprise, the predicted supertyphoons will be smaller, stretching only 249 miles (400 kilometers).

However the storms will pack a far higher concentration of energy, wind speed, and overall destructive power.

Widespread Damage

The tempests would cause a great deal of damage across Japan, which is unprepared for such violent weather systems, Tsuboki said.

Ferocious winds would level homes and damage infrastructure such as bridges and power lines. Severe floods would also inundate low-lying areas.

The most destructive typhoon to strike Japan to date was Typhoon Vera, which barreled across the country in September 1959.

Known in Japan as the Isewan Typhoon, the storm came ashore in Ise Bay near Nagoya and killed 5,238 people.

Lahars can be best described as volcanic mudflows. They may not necessarily be caused by volcanic activity, but at the very least do originate from some type of volcanism. Lahars have the consistency of concrete: fluid when moving, then solid when stopped. Lahars can be huge: the Osceola lahar produced 5,600 years ago by Mount Rainier in Washington produced a wall of mud 140 metres (460 ft) deep in the White River canyon and covered an area of over 330 square kilometres (130 sq mi) for a total volume of 2.3 cubic kilometers (0.55 cubic miles).

Lahars can be deadly because of their energy and speed. Large lahars can flow several dozen meters per second and can flow for many kilometres, causing catastrophic destruction in their path. The lahars from the Nevado del Ruiz eruption in Colombia in 1985 caused the Armero tragedy, which killed an estimated 23,000 when the city of Armero was buried under 5 metres (16 ft) of mud and debris. New Zealand’s Tangiwai disaster in 1953, where 151 people died after a Christmas Eve express train fell into the Whangaehu River, was caused by a lahar.

Lahars usually travel down valleys. They have a wide range of velocities varying from 1 m/s to 40 m/s. The velocity of a lahar depends on the channel width, channel slope, volume of the flow, and grain size composition (Scott, 1989). Lahars can travel long distances. Some lahars have traveled hundreds of kilometers from their source (Scott, 1989). The deposits of a lahar that traveled 60 km from its source at Mount Rainier can be found near the large city of Seattle, Washington (Pierson et al., 1992). The lahar’s origin at Mount Rainier helped make that volcano a decade volcano.

Lahars have been known to transport very large boulders. At Mount Pinatubo, boulders measuring 1.5 m long were not uncommon in lahar deposits (Pierson et al., 1992). The lahars from Nevado del Ruiz transported a boulder with a volume of 208 cubic meters, 300 m downstream (Mileti, 1991).

When a lahar travels down valley, the high point of the lahar is usually marked by the mudline it leaves on trees, valley walls, and buildings. This mudline marks the upper limit of how high a lahar will go. This upper limit is important because it defines how high people must go to be out of danger from the lahar. The small eruption of Nevado del Ruiz in 1987, produced large lahars that destroyed the city of Armero. Unfortunately, the 30,000 people who lost their lives might have been saved had they established an appropriate line of communication and evacuated to higher ground (Francis, 1993).

In 1991, Mount Pinatubo erupted. Some of the pyroclastic flows initiating from this eruption were transformed into lahars as they moved downslope through river valleys. Secondary lahars were formed when rain mixing with ash from the eruption became unstable. The formation of these lahars often occured within 30 minutes of as little as 10-15 mm of precipitation falling on the loose ash near the summit of Pinatubo (Primer, 1992). Secondary lahars are still forming today from the unconsolidated ash.

Lahars are extremely dangerous especially to those living in valley areas near a volcano. Lahars can undercut banks and cause houses on those banks to be destroyed. Lahars can bury and destroy manmade structures including roads and bridges. At Nevado del Ruiz, lahars destroyed an entire city; filling the first floor of a hospital with mud, breaking windows, floating cars, and leaving debris in the tops of trees (Mileti, 1991).

Causes of Lahar

Lahars have several possible causes:

• Snow and glaciers can be melted by lava or a pyroclastic flow during an eruption
• A flood caused by a glacier, lake breakout, or heavy rainfall can release a lahar, also called glacier run or jokulhlaup
• Water from a crater lake, combined with volcanic material in an eruption

In particular, although lahars are typically associated with the effects of volcanic activity, lahars can occur even without any current volcanic activity, as long as the conditions are right to cause the collapse and movement of mud originating from existing volcanic ash deposits.

A tsunami is a series of ocean waves that sends surges of water, sometimes reaching heights of over 100 feet (30.5 meters), onto land. These walls of water can cause widespread destruction when they crash ashore.

These awe-inspiring waves are typically caused by large, undersea earthquakes at tectonic plate boundaries. When the ocean floor at a plate boundary rises or falls suddenly it displaces the water above it and launches the rolling waves that will become a tsunami.

Most tsunamis, about 80 percent, happen within the Pacific Ocean’s “Ring of Fire,” a geologically active area where tectonic shifts make volcanoes and earthquakes common.

Tsunamis may also be caused by underwater landslides or volcanic eruptions. They may even be launched, as they frequently were in Earth’s ancient past, by the impact of a large meteorite plunging into an ocean.

Tsunamis race across the sea at up to 500 miles (805 kilometers) an hour—about as fast as a jet airplane. At that pace they can cross the entire expanse of the Pacific Ocean in less than a day. And their long wavelengths mean they lose very little energy along the way.

In deep ocean, tsunami waves may appear only a foot or so high. But as they approach shoreline and enter shallower water they slow down and begin to grow in energy and height. The tops of the waves move faster than their bottoms do, which causes them to rise precipitously.

A tsunami’s trough, the low point beneath the wave’s crest, often reaches shore first. When it does, it produces a vacuum effect that sucks coastal water seaward and exposes harbor and sea floors. This retreating of sea water is an important warning sign of a tsunami, because the wave’s crest and its enormous volume of water typically hit shore five minutes or so later. Recognizing this phenomenon can save lives.

A tsunami is usually composed of a series of waves, called a wave train, so its destructive force may be compounded as successive waves reach shore. People experiencing a tsunami should remember that the danger may not have passed with the first wave and should await official word that it is safe to return to vulnerable locations.

Some tsunamis do not appear on shore as massive breaking waves but instead resemble a quickly surging tide that inundates coastal areas.

The best defense against any tsunami is early warning that allows people to seek higher ground. The Pacific Tsunami Warning System, a coalition of 26 nations headquartered in Hawaii, maintains a web of seismic equipment and water level gauges to identify tsunamis at sea. Similar systems are proposed to protect coastal areas worldwide.

This enormous electrical discharge is caused by an imbalance between positive and negative charges. During a storm, colliding particles of rain, ice, or snow increase this imbalance and often negatively charge the lower reaches of storm clouds. Objects on the ground, like steeples, trees, and the Earth itself, become positively charged—creating an imbalance that nature seeks to remedy by passing current between the two charges.

A step-like series of negative charges, called a stepped leader, works its way incrementally downward from the bottom of a storm cloud toward the Earth. Each of these segments is about 150 feet (46 meters) long. When the lowermost step comes within 150 feet (46 meters) of a positively charged object it is met by a climbing surge of positive electricity, called a streamer, which can rise up through a building, a tree, or even a person. The process forms a channel through which electricity is transferred as lightning.

Some types of lightning, including the most common types, never leave the clouds but travel between differently charged areas within or between clouds. Other rare forms can be sparked by extreme forest fires, volcanic eruptions, and snowstorms. Ball lightning, a small, charged sphere that floats, glows, and bounces along oblivious to the laws of gravity or physics, still puzzles scientists.

Lightning is extremely hot—a flash can heat the air around it to temperatures five times hotter than the sun’s surface. This heat causes surrounding air to rapidly expand and vibrate, which creates the pealing thunder we hear a short time after seeing a lightning flash.

Lightning is not only spectacular, it’s dangerous. About 2,000 people are killed worldwide by lightning each year. Hundreds more survive strikes but suffer from a variety of lasting symptoms, including memory loss, dizziness, weakness, numbness, and other life-altering ailments.

Scientists assign a magnitude rating to earthquakes based on the strength and duration of their seismic waves. A quake measuring 3 to 5 is considered minor or light; 5 to 7 is moderate to strong; 7 to 8 is major; and 8 or more is great.

On average, a magnitude 8 quake strikes somewhere every year and some 10,000 people die in earthquakes annually. Collapsing buildings claim by far the majority of lives, but the destruction is often compounded by mud slides, fires, floods, or tsunamis. Smaller temblors that usually occur in the days following a large earthquake can complicate rescue efforts and cause further death and destruction.

Loss of life can be avoided through emergency planning, education, and the construction of buildings that sway rather than break under the stress of an earthquake.

Twisters are born in thunderstorms and are often accompanied by hail. Giant, persistent thunderstorms called supercells spawn the most destructive tornadoes.

These violent storms occur around the world, but the United States is a major hotspot with about a thousand tornadoes every year. “Tornado Alley,” a region that includes eastern South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, northern Texas, and eastern Colorado, is home to the most powerful and destructive of these storms. U.S. tornadoes cause 80 deaths and more than 1,500 injuries per year.

A tornado forms when changes in wind speed and direction create a horizontal spinning effect within a storm cell. This effect is then tipped vertical by rising air moving up through the thunderclouds.

The meteorological factors that drive tornadoes make them more likely at some times than at others. They occur more often in late afternoon, when thunderstorms are common, and are more prevalent in spring and summer. However, tornadoes can and do form at any time of the day and year.

Tornadoes’ distinctive funnel clouds are actually transparent. They become visible when water droplets pulled from a storm’s moist air condense or when dust and debris are taken up. Funnels typically grow about 660 feet (200 meters) wide.

Tornadoes move at speeds of about 10 to 20 miles (16 to 32 kilometers) per hour, although they’ve been clocked in bursts up to 70 miles (113 kilometers) per hour. Most don’t get very far though. They rarely travel more than about six miles (ten kilometers) in their short lifetimes.

Tornadoes are classified as weak, strong, or violent storms. Violent tornadoes comprise only about two percent of all tornadoes, but they cause 70 percent of all tornado deaths and may last an hour or more.

People, cars, and even buildings may be hurled aloft by tornado-force winds—or simply blown away. Most injuries and deaths are caused by flying debris.

Tornado forecasters can’t provide the same kind of warning that hurricane watchers can, but they can do enough to save lives. Today the average warning time for a tornado alert is 13 minutes. Tornadoes can also be identified by warning signs that include a dark, greenish sky, large hail, and a powerful train-like roar.

Safety Tips

• Prepare for tornadoes by gathering emergency supplies including food, water, medications, batteries, flashlights, important documents, road maps, and a full tank of gasoline.
• When a tornado approaches, anyone in its path should take shelter indoors—preferably in a basement or an interior first-floor room or hallway.
• Avoid windows and seek additional protection by getting underneath large, solid pieces of furniture.
• Avoid automobiles and mobile homes which provide almost no protection from tornadoes.
• Those caught outside should lie flat in a depression or on other low ground and wait for the storm to pass.