Published: February 3, 2007

By ABBY GOODNOUGH

Twisters Hit Central Florida, Killing at Least 19

PAISLEY, Fla., Feb. 2 — At least 19 people died when thunderstorms and tornadoes devastated parts of Central Florida before dawn Friday, flattening hundreds of homes and leaving thousands of residents who had little or no warning of the storms in grim shock.

Rescue workers combed what remained of toppled houses for survivors, and Gov. Charlie Crist, who declared a state of emergency in Lake, Volusia, Sumter and Seminole Counties, said federal aid would arrive soon. "It looked like a bomb went off on some of these homes and it breaks your heart to see that," Mr. Crist said after arriving by helicopter at Lake Mack, near Paisley in rural Lake County, where most of the dead were found.

The worst of the storms touched down north of Orlando between 3 and 4 a.m., jolting people from sleep with a noise some compared to a jumbo jet. Though a tornado watch had been posted for many Florida counties late Thursday, the National Weather Service issued warnings just minutes before the twisters hit in the middle of the night, when hardly anyone was watching or listening for them.

At a trailer park in Lady Lake, about 30 miles west of Paisley, Marie Magana said her daughter Brittany May, 17, died when an oak tree crashed into her room at the height of the storm.

Forecasters said El Niño weather conditions helped create the deadly tornadoes, which originated as thunderstorms over the Gulf of Mexico and resembled a string of tornadoes that hit the region in February 1998. Those killed 42 people over two days, damaging or destroying more than 2,500 homes and businesses.

"Unfortunately, again, we’ve seen what Mother Nature can do without warning," Craig Fugate, the state’s emergency operations director, told reporters in Tallahassee. Unlike in parts of the Midwest where lethal tornadoes strike regularly, warning sirens for tornadoes are almost nonexistent in Central Florida, officials said.

"We get all these sudden, different weather patterns," said Christopher Patton, a spokesman for Lake County, where all of the confirmed deaths occurred. " I wouldn’t say they’d be useless, but it would be tough to have some kind of threshold on whether you’d sound them off or not."

POSTED: 1:52 a.m. EST, February 2, 2007

Jakarta: Worst floods in 5 years

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) -- Two days of severe rains caused the worst flooding in five years in the Indonesian capital Friday, washing into thousands of homes and forcing residents to flee, witnesses and officials said.

Filthy storm water inundated markets, hospitals and businesses as people used inflatable rafts to retrieve their belongings from houses. Water was four-meters (13-feet) deep in some places in Jakarta, home to some 12 million.

With many of the city's roads inaccessible, commuters spent several hours in gridlock trying to get to work. Many were unable to reach the central business district and returned home.

"It has not been this bad since 2002," when the Presidential Palace in the upscale Menteng area flooded, said Anom Nurcahyo of Jakarta's Flood Crisis Center said. "We cannot say yet if the water will get higher."

"The water at my house was up to my neck," said Tina, a housekeeper who uses a single name, who had to leave her home with three young children.

There were no reports of casualties due to the floods, a yearly occurrence in the city during the peak of the rainy season.

A meteorologist forecast continued downpours over the city for the next two weeks.

Seasonal downpours cause dozens of landslides and flash floods each year in Indonesia, a sprawling archipelago of 17,000 islands, where millions of people live in mountainous areas or near fertile plains.

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