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CNN Newsnight Aaron Brown

Deadly Weather Strikes West Coast

Aired January 12, 2005 - 22:00 ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

AARON BROWN, CNN ANCHOR: Good evening again.
Everyone talks about the weather. Nobody does anything about it. That's how the old saying goes. Swap out the word weather and replace it with nature and the problem multiplies and it seems we find ourselves in one of those moments where nature is reminding us all again who really is the boss? That in brief is what the program looks at tonight and here are some of the chapters.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN (voice-over): We start in the west, which will surely remember this winter of '05 as unforgiving, water causing mountains to move and families to crumble, so much damage and loss.

But the past week has seen spectacular rescues as well, fathers and mothers, babies plucked, if barely, from the floodwaters, stories of bravery and good fortune.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm just thinking, oh my God what happened? Where are they at? What can I do to get them back to shore, get them safe?

BROWN: We'll also return to the hurricanes that leveled parts of Florida last fall, Charley and Jean and Frances battering the sunshine state turning lives upside down. We'll go back to one town just now, just now getting back to normal.

And, of course, South Asia, the world still trying to absorb the enormity of tonight's most extreme (UNINTELLIGIBLE), a reminder that the world can shift with little or no warning at all.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: So all that and more in this special edition of NEWSNIGHT, a special that began in our newsroom with a rather simple observation. The weather all around the globe seemed to have gone nuts.

Of course, seems and has are not the same. It's human to want to generalize from the specific to look for connections where there is only coincidence. So, one of the things we'll look at tonight is there something bigger going on? What does science tell us? We begin, though, with the observation itself weather, or nature more correctly, gone nuts.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) BROWN (voice-over): For Californian Jim Wallet (ph) the news could not have been worse. The bodies of his wife and three children were found amid the ruins of their home in the coastal town of La Conchita.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We just tried to be a source of comfort for him, put our hand on his shoulder and let him know he's not going through this alone.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We lost some close family friends of ours yesterdays, so it's an emotional roller coaster but I got my family, you know, and we'll get through this.

BROWN: Since the mudslide struck this small community on Monday, ten bodies have been pulled from the debris. Residents cried as authorities announced the names of the dead.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Michelle Wallet (ph), Palermo Wallet (ph) and Raven Wallet (ph).

BROWN: California's Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger took an aerial tour of the damage, later promising residents the state would help them return to their homes.

The mudslide and destruction culminated days and days of rain in Southern California, some of the worst rain since the late 1800s, according to the weather service, the most recent example of weather at the extremes. All in all the extremes of nature during the past year have been spectacular, widespread and deadly.

Just a little over a year ago the world watched as an earthquake leveled a city in southeastern Iran. When the dead were finally counted in the city of Bam, more than 30,000 had perished.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The U.S. government has now joined into national efforts here to help the victims of this huge earthquake here in this ancient town of Bam in southern Iran.

BROWN: In the United States, the spring tornado season resulted in relatively few deaths but don't tell that to the people of Utica, Illinois where eight died after violent tornadoes spun through the town.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Everything was just demolished. Nothing was in order. It was just destroyed.

BROWN: On average, the National Weather Service says there are about 1,200 tornadoes in the U.S. every year. In 2004, there were more than 1,700, in part because of the unusually violent hurricane season. Two Atlantic hurricanes spun off about 100 tornadoes each.

In late May, heavy rains hit both Haiti and the Dominican Republic, 3,000 people died. The casualty toll made worse, experts say, because of heavy deforestation in both countries.

Five months later, tropical storm Jean hit Haiti especially hard. Another 3,000 were killed near the city of Gonaives (ph).

By the time the hurricane season hit its stride, Florida suffered some of the worst damage in years. Hurricane Charley slammed into the west coast of the state centering on a small town called Punta Gorda. Five weeks later, hurricanes Jean and Frances smashed into the state with damage estimates running into the billions.

GARY TUCHMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: These may be the worst conditions I've seen during any of these four hurricanes over the last six weeks in Florida.

BROWN: And even though it's not exactly weather, it is nature and Mt. St. Helens erupted again this year spitting a fair amount, 20 years after the volcano blew its top. This time nobody hurt but there was lots and lots of smoke and lots to think about.

Then, of course, as the year was ending one of the biggest natural disasters in the history of the world struck a dozen nations bordering on the Indian Ocean, an enormous earthquake registering 9 on the Richter Scale caused damage enough on its own in Indonesia but the tsunami that followed has resulted in the deaths of more than 155,000 people, the count still going up.

But was 2004 especially unusual when it comes to weather? That's a question we'll ask in the program. The extremes were most certainly more deadly. We talk about them more perhaps because we can see the aftermath.

More than a quarter of a million people are said to have died in China during the earthquake several years ago but there were no pictures. There were pictures, of course, this week in Southern California where mud destroyed lives but where the sun is finally shining again.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: So, we have weather and we have acts of nature both tonight, in the past week in California a reminder of the resiliency and the goodness of people. It is also a reminder of our capacity for denial in the face of known risk. The horrific mudslide in La Conchita was not the first to strike that neighborhood at the foot of the hills.

Here's CNN's Ted Rowlands.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JOHN FRANCO, LA CONCHITA RESIDENT: It came right to here, man. I tell you we run out this way and there was a wall right there.

TED ROWLANDS, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The mudslide came knocking at John Franco's front door. His family and his home are OK but many of his neighbors are now dead or injured.

FRANCO: One more up that's where Charlie Womack (ph) lived and, you know, where the family, children and Charlie, I mean there were seven people and then one more up was John, who they found deceased.

ROWLANDS: John bought the house five years after a slide here in 1995, which destroyed several homes and he says he knew he was taking a risk.

FRANCO: It's always on the back of our mind just never thought it would happen.

ROWLANDS: With a wife and three children, John thought hard about buying the house. After the slide of '95, banks were reluctant to grant mortgages and many of his neighbors had to buy their homes with cash. But John did get a mortgage. A geologist report characterized the risk of a slide damage as low, so unable to resist the lure of La Conchita's shoreline beauty, John and his family moved in.

Don Ski went back to his house that's also intact to get some personal belongings. He says he too was well aware of the possible danger.

DON SKI, LA CONCHITA RESIDENT: Yes but I didn't realize it, you know, and nobody does, you know, no one thinks it's going to happen, you know, to you, you know and it did. What can I say? You know, I don't know. I don't know.

ROWLANDS: While it's hard for some to fathom living in a place that faces a high risk of natural disaster, the fact is a lot of people are willing to risk it.

BOB ROPER, FIRE CHIEF, VENTURA COUNTY, CA: We have oceans that cause wave issues on homes, earthquake faults, rivers and the mountains. That's part of the beauty of the state of California and I don't believe that there's a way really to prevent people from evoking their private property rights and living where they want to.

FRANCO: Oh, the memories, the memories here.

ROWLANDS: John and his wife Jerri (ph) were given a half an hour to get some things out of their home. They don't know when they'll be able to come back. John says unless the hillside is somehow fortified he'll never have his family live here again.

FRANCO: Not after what I saw of the devastation, loss of life. There's lots of tears, lots of memories.

ROWLANDS: Ted Rowlands, CNN, La Conchita, California.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Because of its sheer power, we don't control the weather and we don't control nature. We adjust and adapt. We react a lot when the worst of the weather hits us. Often it turns out badly, that mudslide.

Sometimes it turns out dramatically well. Take the case of Erica Henderson and her 8-week-old son who tried to get out of their mountain cabin with the help of the firefighters in San Dimas, California. A more dramatic few moments would be hard to find.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN (voice-over): The raft appeared to take on water almost immediately. Ms. Henderson, who was clutching her baby, leaned forward trying to maintain her balance.

RICH ATWOOD, LOS ANGELES COUNTY FIRE DEPARTMENT: The choice I made was to lean back and try to counter it and that wasn't working. All of a sudden, boom, the boat is upside down. We're in the drink.

BROWN: When that raft flipped, firefighter Rich Atwood says he had but one thought.

ATWOOD: My biggest concern is where's my, you know, where's my victim? Where's the baby? As soon as I went in the water, it's like, oh my God, where are they at?

BROWN: When Captain Larry Collins saw Ms. Henderson and child wash up on a sandbar downstream, without hesitation he waded into the raging waters.

CAPTAIN LARRY COLLINS, LOS ANGELES COUNTY FIRE DEPT.: I was seeing this as do or die, get them now, especially get the baby now before another wave comes, a wave or flood surge comes in and washes her off that sandbar.

BROWN: Meanwhile, upstream despite almost drowning, Atwood never thought once about his own safety.

ATWOOD: I heard her scream to my side and I ended up going through some downstream hazards that put me under water. I finally got into a safe area.

BROWN: Atwood didn't know then that Ms. Henderson and her child were in the safe hands of his captain.

ATWOOD: For that short period of time the terror in my, you know, my heart just being torn apart thinking, you know, I have two small kids at home, you know, how would you feel? How would you feel? It's just brutal.

BROWN: So what could have turned truly horrible did not this time thankfully and thanks to a team of rescue workers who were just doing their job.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: That one shot, the shot of the big fireman, the fire captain holding that tiny baby that's one of the great shots of all time.

The fine line between life and death is so thin rescue teams across that part of Southern California this week have been called upon to summon all their physical strength to keep people alive. Not far from La Verne in Cerritos, California, another dramatic rescue reported. It is a story that reveals both a fight to stay alive and the battle to throw someone a life line literally so, from Cerritos tonight, Miguel Marquez.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Come on now. Come on now. Come on. Hold on. He's in the water!

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He's in the water!

MIGUEL MARQUEZ (voice-over): It was a rescue that almost didn't happen.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: OK, no, no, he's coming fast. He's coming faster. He's coming faster. Tell him to get ready.

MARQUEZ: The minutes leading up to the rescue are an example of training, ingenuity, sweat and pure luck.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We got him. I think we got him. I think we got him. He's out. Woo-hoo (ph)!

MARQUEZ: The man on top of the BMW is William McGree (ph) an eye surgeon from central California. He and his beamer are floating down a rain-swollen drainage canal called Coyote Creek in suburban Los Angeles. How he got there is a story in itself.

CAPTAIN THOMAS MCCAULEY, SATNA FE SPRINGS FIRE DEPT.: We had a vehicle that was traveling northbound on one of our local freeways that had gone through the barricade and had fallen into the Coyote Creek reservoir.

MARQUEZ: The car stayed still just long enough for McCree's 11- year-old daughter and her 12-year-old friend to be hoisted to safety by people passing by and firefighters who only had seconds to act.

CAPTAIN MARK TUBBS, SANTA FE SPRINGS FIRE DEPT.: There was a bunch of people up top holding onto an old piece of nylon rope and another line that they had fastened together with just tying knots into straps that would normally be used for tying down furniture in a moving van and I didn't have a lot of faith in that equipment.

MARQUEZ: The equipment held but now McCree was headed south, his car now a boat.

TUBBS: Yes, I didn't have a lot of hope for him at that point. I felt that he would be lost in the vehicle going down the river.

MARQUEZ: As they are trained to do, firefighters set up a secondary position at the next bridge, about a mile down the creek.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Where is he?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He's in the center, in the center. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Right in the center of the pylons.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Right in the center Thomas.

TUBBS: We've done a lot of rescues but I don't think any of us in this department have ever seen anything like this before. We trained for swift water rescue but the typical scenario is that you know you have someone in the river and they're coming downstream. You get there ahead of them. You follow prescribed procedures.

MARQUEZ: With minutes to act they only had time to improvise.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Grab the rope! Grab it tight! Grab it tight!

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Get off the car.

(CROSSTALK)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hold on dude.

MARQUEZ: Firefighters set lines on the bridge's front and back side in case the man fell. He held tightly to the first rope, the water rushing so fast it pulled his pants down around his ankles.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Go, go, go! We're going to pull you up. Keep pulling, pulling, pulling! We've got him! Keep coming! Keep pulling! Don't let go! Did he drop it?

MARQUEZ: For a moment firefighters think they lost him.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I don't see him.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Where is he?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Come on back, we got him! We got him! Jesus Christ! Heave, everybody. Come on now! Come on now! Come on!

MARQUEZ: And then they do lose him.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He's in the water!

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He's in the water!

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A vest.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Grab a vest.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, there you go. Hold on.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hold on! Hold on!

MARQUEZ: A closer view shows McCree literally at the end of the rope. As firefighters try desperately to pull him to waiting hands the rope runs out. CAPTAIN MIKE YULE, SANTA FE SPRINGS FIRE DEPT.: Right about the time that we were attempting to stop the pull on the rope and go, and grab him was when he let go. He just didn't have the strength any longer.

MARQUEZ: McCree was able to grab a life vest tethered to a rope on the far side of the bridge.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hold on.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hey, John, put that other vest behind him. Float it behind him in case...

MARQUEZ: McCree rides the river as though he were on a boogie board. Rescuers inch him to the side.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yeah! Yeah! Right on.

MARQUEZ: McCree asked first about his daughter and her friend.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The girls are OK? You got them up?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.

MCCAULEY: We'll be talking about this for a long time. We'll critique our actions. We'll try to do better. We'll improve but it was just a great day. It's a once in a lifetime career incident and I can't wait to go home and, you know, kiss my wife and the kids and tell them, you know what, we did a great job today.

TUBBS: It's an unusual feeling. I mean it's not something we feel in this line of work a lot. Even now I feel a little emotional about it, you know, but it's a joy that you can't really describe.

MARQUEZ: Miguel Marquez, CNN, Los Angeles.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: That is a great story. That is a -- can you imagine the adrenalin that was flowing and the heart rate, what their heart rates were at? "Hang on dude" he screamed at one point.

Ahead on the program, a horrible hurricane season in Florida, one major storm after another, billions of dollars in damage just now getting repaired.

Also ahead back to the west where parts of the Sierras buried in snow, the most snow in nearly nine decades, so what's going on?

From New York, which is battling fog tonight, this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Florida takes a beating in August and September. It's the West Coast this week. What's going on with the weather patterns or is anything special going on? Could it be we're just more in tune with the weather around us, more aware of the destructive power in this age of 24-hour news?

Patrick Michaels is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. He is also a climatologist for the state of Virginia, which means you get a little hurricane, a little snow but not a whole lot of either, good to have you with us. Thank you.

PATRICK J. MICHAELS, VIRGINIA STATE CLIMATOLOGIST: Hey, nice to be with you.

BROWN: Is it -- is there something big going on or is this just an odd year within the range of normal?

MICHAELS: No, there's not more weather. There's just more people watching the weather and it's very popular. Our society has sort of obsessive (UNINTELLIGIBLE) on the weather. We have a 24-hour weather channel that's very successful.

Its ratings go up when they show what we call tragedy TV weather in the evening. It's entertainment. Weather is entertainment and there's an awful lot of it. You know the United States for a developed country probably has the most violent weather of any nation in the world and there's a lot of cameras to take pictures of it.

BROWN: Well, but we have had, to put it simply, a lot of weather lately. It's not usual to have this much rain in Southern California this time of year or any time of year. It's not usual to have that much snow in the mountains. Is that telling us anything or is it just a cycle that we go through periodically?

MICHAELS: Well, I can tell you there were similar years, even 70, 75 years ago and with today's weather consciousness I think they would have inspired hysteria. The summer of 1930 saw 60 out of 90 days in the mid-Atlantic with temperatures above 90. Half the counties in Virginia didn't have enough drinking water.

The 1931-32 winter was just like the current one only more extreme. It snowed in Southern California all the way down to Orange County where Disneyland is. The eastern United States was 12 degrees above normal in January of 1932. These are records that have never been eclipsed. In 1933, there were 21 tropical storms and hurricanes, get the picture?

BROWN: Yes.

MICHAELS: Six of them hit almost in the same spot in Mexico, eight hit the U.S.

BROWN: Does the fact that we're having a kind of a rugged few months tell us anything about the next few months?

MICHAELS: No, unfortunately it does not, especially in this situation in the United States. Now, the California trough, which has stirred up all this bad weather, has kind of attenuated and it doesn't look like it's going to repeat itself at least in the near future.

But, there's nothing like a big El Nino causing that this year. It just seems to be one of those things that we can't quite explain. The jet stream gets anchored in certain positions that tends to persist throughout the winter. You notice how almost all the storms in the eastern United States have been going up the Ohio River Valley?

BROWN: Yes.

MICHAELS: Or in the Midwest and there are very few of these coastal cyclones this year, the ones that create the big snowstorms along the East Coast. Why we get locked into these patterns is the thing that we're working on and we sure don't have the answer yet.

BROWN: Well call me when you get it. I'm interested.

MICHAELS: I will. I'll be happy to.

BROWN: Thank you, Mr. Michaels, good to have you with us. I had no idea that the Cato Institute had a weather guy on the staff.

MICHAELS: Yes, we do.

BROWN: Thank you. It's good to talk to you.

Five months ago, nature was unleashing its fury on the state of Florida. You remember this. Within a span of six weeks in the late summer, four major hurricanes hit the state. Communities in many cases leveled, lives lost, lots of damage done.

Putting the pieces back together has been and remains an enormous undertaking, so from Florida tonight here's CNN's John Zarrella.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JOHN ZARRELLA, CNN MIAMI BUREAU CHIEF (voice-over): Over the course of six weeks, Florida was pounded. It was an unrelenting onslaught. Florida was in the crosshairs of four hurricanes.

Three of them, Charlie, Frances and Jean crisscrossed the state and found their way through Wauchula, a rural city nestled in citrus and cattle country in central Florida. Like so many other places, Wauchula was wrecked. The scars left behind have been fading slowly.

But the spiritual and physical rebirth has gone on since. The junior high marching band played. Dignitaries cut a red ribbon. In Wauchula, the grand reopening of the city's only supermarket was a very big deal.

REV. JIMMY MORSE, NORTHSIDE BAPTIST CHURCH: It's a symbolic action that Wauchula is going to come back and be better than it's ever been before.

ZARRELLA: For the past five months, the Reverend Jimmy Morse has done a lot of praying and pitching in.

MORSE: Hi, Ms. Staton.

ZARRELLA: Reverend Morse stopped in at Carol Sue Staton's home to see how the rebuilding was coming.

CAROL SUE STATON, HURRICANE VICTIM: This is my beautiful new front porch.

ZARRELLA: Reverend Morse coordinates and helps house the busloads of volunteers here from all over the U.S. and Canada. A team from Mennonite Disaster Services is putting Carol Sue's home back together. She didn't have insurance.

STATON: They're all family men. They all have homes and families that they've left and left their wives and children in charge and come down here, you know, to help us and God only knows how long they're going to be here.

ZARRELLA: The Mennonites expect to be here for two years that's how long rebuilding will take. Kathleen Manekis came from Michigan to help. She worked for the United Way. She asked for a leave of absence but couldn't get one, so...

KATHLEEN MANEKIS, MENNONITE VOLUNTEER: I quit my job after 18 years, shed a few tears, packed up my car and left.

ZARRELLA: Do you think you did the right thing?

MANEKIS: Absolutely. I have no doubt.

ZARRELLA: For the storm victims, like Carol Sue, it's hard to express their feelings. Saying thanks is often left to Reverend Morse.

MORSE: We want to thank you guys for coming so far and helping us, leaving your families behind. Only eternity will be able to determine what you have done for our county.

ZARRELLA: There is still so much to be done in Wauchula. Everywhere you look there are reminders of the storms.

MORSE: If you look out the rear view mirror, if you just take a couple of glances of that remember where you'd been but in front of you you've got the windshield and the space is wide open, no telling how far we can go.

ZARRELLA: In Wauchula hope is built on looking forward.

John Zarrella CNN, Wauchula, Florida.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Coming up on this special edition of NEWSNIGHT, we'll take you to Squaw Valley, California, there it is, where the problem is too much snow, too much even for the most avid skiers, dangerous amounts of snow, extreme weather on a special edition of NEWSNIGHT on CNN.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) BROWN: Well, that's a familiar scene, a terrible reminder that, for all its beauty, the snow can be deadly as well, two Seattle TV stations reporting tonight that a skier was killed in an avalanche at Snoqualmie Pass east of Seattle up in the Cascade Mountains of Washington state. The avalanche occurred in an area that was off limits to skiers.

Farther down the coast, high up in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, avalanches are the concern tonight. Simply put, parts of the region haven't seen this much snow in nearly 90 years. Of course, you expect snow in the winter in the mountains, but this much, this fast?

Reporting from Squaw Valley tonight, CNN's Rob Marciano.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ROBERT FROHLICH, AUTHOR: You know, coming to Squaw is like tugging on Superman's cape.

ROB MARCIANO, CNN METEOROLOGIST (voice-over): Locals call him Fro. Author Robert Frohlich has lived in these mountains for the last 30 years.

FROHLICH: But it gets ugly real quick. It can be in these storm periods.

MARCIANO: Squaw Valley in the Sierra Mountains boasts some of the best skiing in north America. It also gets some of its most dangerous winter storms.

FROHLICH: We get these big storm systems coming in usually once a decade, when the low pressure systems come in. The doors open and it just rocks. You have a series of storms come here like we just had. In 14, in the last 14 days, we had over -- close to 160 inches of snowfall.

MARCIANO: Estimates already put the region's total snowfall at over 21 feet. And winter isn't even half over yet. Reno, Nevada, hasn't seen weather like this since 1916, roads closed, leaving commuters stranded in their cars for hours. And businesses suffered significant losses.

FROHLICH: They were on some record business I know right around the Christmas period, and then all of a sudden just the bottom fell out.

MARCIANO: With this much snowfall comes the potential for deadly avalanches. The ski patrol has been working round the clock to detonate areas most prone to collapse.

FROHLICH: In a 14-day period, they have had a 75-millimeter Howitzer up on Gunner's Knob, and they fired over 100 shells.

MARCIANO: Not just shells, but also hand-tossed explosives.

(on camera): How many explosives do you think they threw off yesterday?

FROHLICH: Well, not yesterday but in the 14-day storm period, they threw 9,400 pounds of explosives. That's over 4,200 bombs.

MARCIANO (voice-over): Ski patroller Will Pedan is responsible for keeping the ski area safe for visitors. He took us for a snowmobile ride and explained what to do if you're ever caught in an avalanche.

WILL PEDAN, SQUAW VALLEY SKI PATROL: But you want to fight for your life and try to swim to the surface. And should you get feel like you're going to get buried, try to cover your mouth to give yourself a little bit of an airway to breathe.

MARCIANO: Fro says people here are ready for a break.

FROHLICH: I guess you could compare it to the folks down in Florida that suffered through that series of hurricanes. Here you have all this big weather come in and just hammers on you. And it finally breaks. You come up for air and you think, oh, man, that has to be the worst of it, and the next thing you know it gets socked in again and you're just getting your potatoes peeled.

MARCIANO: For now, the worst may be over and the best is on its way, the best skiing of the year, that is.

FROHLICH: This weather isn't disastrous, by any means. It's very welcome. And it ensures a great season for us. It's been more of an inconvenience. I really don't think it's anything more than Mother Nature shrugging its shoulders.

MARCIANO: For some, however, Mother Nature has been shrugging a little too often.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MARCIANO: Well, today was the first day that it didn't snow in the Tahoe Basin since Friday. And tonight, it's a cold but beautiful night. The mountain sits calm, but snow-covered behind me.

And I suppose, Aaron, with all this coverage in the last hour of extreme weather, this snow story probably has the best news, in that the incredible snow pack that we've built is going to do a couple of things. It will help the drought conditions out here, out West, and also, once the danger of these storms pass, as far as the ski resorts are concerned, any snow is good snow. And they've got a ton of it, enough to last them at least through this season.

BROWN: Now, further up in the Northwest -- you know Portland pretty well -- I know Seattle pretty well -- this would all be welcome, because, ultimately, this would turn into electricity. The snow pack would melt and flood the river. Do they get electricity out of this or is it just irrigation water and the water that Southern California ends up using?

MARCIANO: Absolutely. California gets a quarter of its power from hydroelectric dams. So snow pack incredibly important not only just for reservoirs and drinking water and irrigation, but, as far as California is concerned, a quarter of its power comes from basically the snow pack. So this means good news for electricity customers as well, Aaron.

BROWN: Rob, good to have you with us tonight. Thanks a lot.

Still to come on the program, a wager. Who's better at forecasting this weather, the weatherman with all his maps and satellites -- that could be the weather woman, too, couldn't it? -- I'm sure it could -- or the good old-fashioned "Farmer's Almanac," which I'm certain is male.

And remember the headline the day after tragedy struck. We'll look back, a special edition of morning papers dealing with the weather. This is extreme weather. It's NEWSNIGHT around the world.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: It's supposed to be 60 in New York tomorrow.

Any program about the weather needs a good weather yarn and a guy to spin it. We have both. The guy is Norm. The yarn is both legend and legendary.

Norm's tale reported tonight by CNN's Jason Bellini.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JASON BELLINI, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Norm Sayler knows snow.

NORM SAYLER, NORDEN RESIDENT: When you push the snow, it doesn't take the air out of it.

BELLINI: Norm lives in Norden, California. Norm knows most of his customers don't love snow the way he does.

SAYLER: I will get -- I will get them there. They'll be there in the morning. All right. God (EXPLETIVE DELETED) that guy.

BELLINI: Of course, at the summit of the Donner Pass, few if any towns in the Sierra Nevada Mountains get as much snow as Norden, 10 to 15 feet of it this past week alone.

SAYLER: Maybe it's such a big storm, someone will have to open an arm-and-a-leg restaurant because people are going to eat each other to survive.

BELLINI: His off-color joke a reference to the Donner Party. The winter of 1846, 1847, half the Donner Party perished trying to get over the mountains, some of the group resorting to cannibalism. Norm believes the Donner Party got trapped in a snowstorm right here in Norden. SAYLER: You can almost get the feeling and the sensation of being with those people.

BELLINI: In 1866, the first transcontinental railroad was built through Donner Pass; 40 feet of snow that winter made it the most difficult section to build. Decades later, motorists on Interstate 40, the first highway linking the East and West coasts, ran into trouble here.

SAYLER: It was a lot harder then because we didn't have the equipment that we have today. That's the main thing. Today, it's a piece of cake to go out there and go to work, because the equipment is so good. It's so strong. It's so powerful.

BELLINI: Even so, over this past weekend, California had to close the modern road west running through here, Interstate 80. Norm knows in the end he'll benefit from the epic snowstorm. He owns the Donner Ski Ranch.

(on camera): It's kind of funny. The owner of the ski mountain's out plowing the parking lot.

SAYLER: Well, that's because the owner of the ski resort has fun plowing the parking lot.

BELLINI: Norm also knows, of all things, snowboarding. He says his was the first resort to welcome snowboarders.

SAYLER: All I wanted was $10. I didn't care if he was on a snowboard or whether he had skis or what he was on. I just wanted his money. And that's how snowboarding truly got started.

BELLINI: At 71 years old, Norm tries with his albums, with his stories, to keep the history of his mountain and of Donner Pass from being buried, a history of snow.

Jason Bellini, CNN, Norden, California.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: When we come back on this special edition of NEWSNIGHT, the weather stands still -- photos, that is.

We'll take a break first. This is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Extreme weather is by definition fierce. There is nothing still about it. Floodwaters rage. Hurricanes batter. Throw in weather's cousins, like earthquakes and tsunamis, and you have both power and destruction on a scale hard to describe.

And yet some of the most powerful images we've seen of nature flexing its muscles do not move at all. They're still photographs you're about to see. They speak for themselves.

Steve Stroud, the photo editor of "The Los Angeles Times," speaks to the challenges of making the pictures.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

STEVE STROUD, PHOTO EDITOR, "THE LOS ANGELES TIMES": Sort of a wide range of weather became a real challenge to us because of the geographic distances and because they were such different stories between snow and rain.

And then, when we had the landslide, the story turned from being an expensive inconvenience to being a life-threatening, and, in some instances, a life-costing news event. So it radically transformed in the matter of a couple of minutes.

Gathering all of that information into one picture is a goal that we always strive for. And sometimes we hit that, and sometimes stories like this work better in multiple pictures, where they interact with one another. California always seems to sort of be living these biblical scenes of flood and fire.

When the fires do break out, they can be very severe, as we saw this last summer. And most of our photographers are trained in how to cover fires. All of them are outfitted with protective clothing, boots, goggles, etcetera. So, this is something that we prepare for, and, unfortunately, we have a great deal of experience in covering.

We've had varied luck with hurricanes. Because they are so fickle, we don't know, nor does anyone know, when and where exactly they're going to come ashore and where the greatest problems are going to be. And unless we were to dispatch a dozen photographers, it would be very difficult for us to feel secure in being at that right place in the right time.

We sent a very experienced photographer, Francine Orr, who's been on many international assignments for us, we sent her to Colombo, Sri Lanka, because it was ground zero for the number of fatalities as a percentage of the population. And we were basically able to tell that story in a microcosm from Sri Lanka.

It is those pictures that show the Sri Lankans walking amidst the ruins of what was once their community and the extent of that devastation, which I think all of us have trouble imagining.

I think, with any one of those events, there are pictures that pop into my mind, and most of them have an emotional quotient to them. I think those are the pictures that hang with all of us, those that touch a nerve and bring home a story to us.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: I love those still photos.

Still ahead on the program, forget the barometers and the radars and the storm watchers. When we come back, we'll look at the forecast many farmers swear by.

We'll take a break first. This is a special edition of NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Extreme weather, as that graphic proves, has always been a fact of life; 117 years ago today, in 1888, tremendous blizzards swept across the Great Plains on a day that began so mild, the children had walked to school without their coats and gloves.

By the following morning, some 500 people lay dead on the prairie, many of them children who perished on their way home from school. The culprit was an unprecedented cold front and the capriciousness of nature.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN (voice-over): Weather and nature have always been matters of life and death. We just tend to forget that until we're hit. Because we've always depended on weather so much for life and livelihood, we've long tried to make sense of it, even before we had the science to do so.

Farmers learn to rely on their instincts, their observations, and sometimes their animals. Horses are said to run fast before violent storms, while cows reportedly just lie down and refuse to go out to pasture. Zuni Indians believed that reddish moons meant rain, while sailors have long said, red sky at night, sailor's delight, red sky in the morning, sailor take warning.

For nearly two centuries, the "Farmer's Almanac" has had a more systematic, though top-secret formula, for long-range forecasting, which is still used by the man making the almanac's predictions today.

SANDI DUNCAN, MANAGING EDITOR, "FARMER'S ALMANAC": He uses a formula that dates back to the beginning of the almanac, which is back in 1818, and it takes things like sunspot activity, tidal action of the moon, the position of the planets into factor, and he makes these predictions based on this formula. And it's been used for almost 188 years now.

BROWN: But although the almanac claims an accuracy rating of about 80 percent in its forecasting, it didn't exactly nail the weather devastating the West when it made its predictions for 2005 18 months ago.

DUNCAN: We said a winter of extremes throughout the country. However, in the Southwest states, we did see a little bit more mild and dryer conditions. It's just a reminder that nature can kind of throw us all a curve ball. Even though we might make predictions of something, she can come in and change it all around.

BROWN: But while the almanac missed the savage California weather, it was right about one thing. It got the East right, a mild spell this month it dubbed "Junuary." The temperature in New York tomorrow, expected to reach 60 degrees.

(END VIDEOTAPE) BROWN: And very rainy.

Still ahead on this special edition of NEWSNIGHT, a special edition of morning papers.

From foggy New York City, this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(ROOSTER CROWING)

BROWN: Okeydoke, time to check morning papers from around the country and around the country today.

First, just some weather things that have gone on in the past few days that we haven't gotten to. "Las Vegas Journal Review" today, January 12 -- that's today, right? "Scores Evacuate Homes. Overton Residents Watch River Overthrow." Yesterday, they led "Ski Resort Avalanche Rare." That was their lead yesterday. And they led that way yesterday because the day before, "Teen Dies in Avalanche." That's "The Las Vegas Review-Journal" and their last three headlines.

Then, last summer and early fall, "Charley Rips Across Florida" the lead on the 14th of August in "The Orlando Sentinel." On the 15th of August, the day after, "Powerless" was the lead. And they were for a while. "Thirteen Died." At least, that was the count at that point.

By mid-September, September 17, Ivan had hit, and "The Rampage Kills 21. Pensacola Hit Hard as Storm Moves Inland." And then in -- two weeks later, well, nine days later, not quite two weeks, "Slammed Again" is the way "The Sentinel" led, as another hurricane, this time Jeanne, made sure.

"The Indianapolis Star" on Christmas Day, "Holiday Travelers Get Frosty Reception." Ha, ha. Get it?

"Salt Lake Tribune" yesterday, or today, actually. "Rivers Rampage." They've got bad weather out there.

This one just because. You'll get this right away. "The Washington Times." The date, the 27th of November -- of December, rather, Monday: "11,000 Dead in Asian Quake." That's where we were on the day after, at 11,000. We are at 155,000 today. My goodness.

Somebody else led that way, too. Well, anyway.

Now a couple papers from today to get in. We were doing "The Washington Times," so we might as well stay with that. How are we doing on time, guys? Got it.

This is a huge story today, complicated story. "Chaos Seen on Sentencing Guidelines. Supreme Court Makes Federal Limits Voluntary." Let's see if I can explain this in 10 seconds. The court said that, if a jury hasn't heard about it, the judge can't use it in sentencing. And it throws out sentencing guidelines or part of the sentencing guidelines. That will create a big mess. We'll look at that some tomorrow, I do believe.

You know, the weather, we ought to end on the weather, don't you think? Weather in Chicago tomorrow, "whiplash."

Good to have you with us tonight. We'll see what tomorrow brings weather wise and program wise. Until then, good night for all of us.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com

Aired January 12, 2005 - 22:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
AARON BROWN, CNN ANCHOR: Good evening again.
Everyone talks about the weather. Nobody does anything about it. That's how the old saying goes. Swap out the word weather and replace it with nature and the problem multiplies and it seems we find ourselves in one of those moments where nature is reminding us all again who really is the boss? That in brief is what the program looks at tonight and here are some of the chapters.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN (voice-over): We start in the west, which will surely remember this winter of '05 as unforgiving, water causing mountains to move and families to crumble, so much damage and loss.

But the past week has seen spectacular rescues as well, fathers and mothers, babies plucked, if barely, from the floodwaters, stories of bravery and good fortune.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I'm just thinking, oh my God what happened? Where are they at? What can I do to get them back to shore, get them safe?

BROWN: We'll also return to the hurricanes that leveled parts of Florida last fall, Charley and Jean and Frances battering the sunshine state turning lives upside down. We'll go back to one town just now, just now getting back to normal.

And, of course, South Asia, the world still trying to absorb the enormity of tonight's most extreme (UNINTELLIGIBLE), a reminder that the world can shift with little or no warning at all.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: So all that and more in this special edition of NEWSNIGHT, a special that began in our newsroom with a rather simple observation. The weather all around the globe seemed to have gone nuts.

Of course, seems and has are not the same. It's human to want to generalize from the specific to look for connections where there is only coincidence. So, one of the things we'll look at tonight is there something bigger going on? What does science tell us? We begin, though, with the observation itself weather, or nature more correctly, gone nuts.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) BROWN (voice-over): For Californian Jim Wallet (ph) the news could not have been worse. The bodies of his wife and three children were found amid the ruins of their home in the coastal town of La Conchita.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We just tried to be a source of comfort for him, put our hand on his shoulder and let him know he's not going through this alone.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We lost some close family friends of ours yesterdays, so it's an emotional roller coaster but I got my family, you know, and we'll get through this.

BROWN: Since the mudslide struck this small community on Monday, ten bodies have been pulled from the debris. Residents cried as authorities announced the names of the dead.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Michelle Wallet (ph), Palermo Wallet (ph) and Raven Wallet (ph).

BROWN: California's Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger took an aerial tour of the damage, later promising residents the state would help them return to their homes.

The mudslide and destruction culminated days and days of rain in Southern California, some of the worst rain since the late 1800s, according to the weather service, the most recent example of weather at the extremes. All in all the extremes of nature during the past year have been spectacular, widespread and deadly.

Just a little over a year ago the world watched as an earthquake leveled a city in southeastern Iran. When the dead were finally counted in the city of Bam, more than 30,000 had perished.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The U.S. government has now joined into national efforts here to help the victims of this huge earthquake here in this ancient town of Bam in southern Iran.

BROWN: In the United States, the spring tornado season resulted in relatively few deaths but don't tell that to the people of Utica, Illinois where eight died after violent tornadoes spun through the town.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Everything was just demolished. Nothing was in order. It was just destroyed.

BROWN: On average, the National Weather Service says there are about 1,200 tornadoes in the U.S. every year. In 2004, there were more than 1,700, in part because of the unusually violent hurricane season. Two Atlantic hurricanes spun off about 100 tornadoes each.

In late May, heavy rains hit both Haiti and the Dominican Republic, 3,000 people died. The casualty toll made worse, experts say, because of heavy deforestation in both countries.

Five months later, tropical storm Jean hit Haiti especially hard. Another 3,000 were killed near the city of Gonaives (ph).

By the time the hurricane season hit its stride, Florida suffered some of the worst damage in years. Hurricane Charley slammed into the west coast of the state centering on a small town called Punta Gorda. Five weeks later, hurricanes Jean and Frances smashed into the state with damage estimates running into the billions.

GARY TUCHMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: These may be the worst conditions I've seen during any of these four hurricanes over the last six weeks in Florida.

BROWN: And even though it's not exactly weather, it is nature and Mt. St. Helens erupted again this year spitting a fair amount, 20 years after the volcano blew its top. This time nobody hurt but there was lots and lots of smoke and lots to think about.

Then, of course, as the year was ending one of the biggest natural disasters in the history of the world struck a dozen nations bordering on the Indian Ocean, an enormous earthquake registering 9 on the Richter Scale caused damage enough on its own in Indonesia but the tsunami that followed has resulted in the deaths of more than 155,000 people, the count still going up.

But was 2004 especially unusual when it comes to weather? That's a question we'll ask in the program. The extremes were most certainly more deadly. We talk about them more perhaps because we can see the aftermath.

More than a quarter of a million people are said to have died in China during the earthquake several years ago but there were no pictures. There were pictures, of course, this week in Southern California where mud destroyed lives but where the sun is finally shining again.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: So, we have weather and we have acts of nature both tonight, in the past week in California a reminder of the resiliency and the goodness of people. It is also a reminder of our capacity for denial in the face of known risk. The horrific mudslide in La Conchita was not the first to strike that neighborhood at the foot of the hills.

Here's CNN's Ted Rowlands.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JOHN FRANCO, LA CONCHITA RESIDENT: It came right to here, man. I tell you we run out this way and there was a wall right there.

TED ROWLANDS, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The mudslide came knocking at John Franco's front door. His family and his home are OK but many of his neighbors are now dead or injured.

FRANCO: One more up that's where Charlie Womack (ph) lived and, you know, where the family, children and Charlie, I mean there were seven people and then one more up was John, who they found deceased.

ROWLANDS: John bought the house five years after a slide here in 1995, which destroyed several homes and he says he knew he was taking a risk.

FRANCO: It's always on the back of our mind just never thought it would happen.

ROWLANDS: With a wife and three children, John thought hard about buying the house. After the slide of '95, banks were reluctant to grant mortgages and many of his neighbors had to buy their homes with cash. But John did get a mortgage. A geologist report characterized the risk of a slide damage as low, so unable to resist the lure of La Conchita's shoreline beauty, John and his family moved in.

Don Ski went back to his house that's also intact to get some personal belongings. He says he too was well aware of the possible danger.

DON SKI, LA CONCHITA RESIDENT: Yes but I didn't realize it, you know, and nobody does, you know, no one thinks it's going to happen, you know, to you, you know and it did. What can I say? You know, I don't know. I don't know.

ROWLANDS: While it's hard for some to fathom living in a place that faces a high risk of natural disaster, the fact is a lot of people are willing to risk it.

BOB ROPER, FIRE CHIEF, VENTURA COUNTY, CA: We have oceans that cause wave issues on homes, earthquake faults, rivers and the mountains. That's part of the beauty of the state of California and I don't believe that there's a way really to prevent people from evoking their private property rights and living where they want to.

FRANCO: Oh, the memories, the memories here.

ROWLANDS: John and his wife Jerri (ph) were given a half an hour to get some things out of their home. They don't know when they'll be able to come back. John says unless the hillside is somehow fortified he'll never have his family live here again.

FRANCO: Not after what I saw of the devastation, loss of life. There's lots of tears, lots of memories.

ROWLANDS: Ted Rowlands, CNN, La Conchita, California.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Because of its sheer power, we don't control the weather and we don't control nature. We adjust and adapt. We react a lot when the worst of the weather hits us. Often it turns out badly, that mudslide.

Sometimes it turns out dramatically well. Take the case of Erica Henderson and her 8-week-old son who tried to get out of their mountain cabin with the help of the firefighters in San Dimas, California. A more dramatic few moments would be hard to find.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN (voice-over): The raft appeared to take on water almost immediately. Ms. Henderson, who was clutching her baby, leaned forward trying to maintain her balance.

RICH ATWOOD, LOS ANGELES COUNTY FIRE DEPARTMENT: The choice I made was to lean back and try to counter it and that wasn't working. All of a sudden, boom, the boat is upside down. We're in the drink.

BROWN: When that raft flipped, firefighter Rich Atwood says he had but one thought.

ATWOOD: My biggest concern is where's my, you know, where's my victim? Where's the baby? As soon as I went in the water, it's like, oh my God, where are they at?

BROWN: When Captain Larry Collins saw Ms. Henderson and child wash up on a sandbar downstream, without hesitation he waded into the raging waters.

CAPTAIN LARRY COLLINS, LOS ANGELES COUNTY FIRE DEPT.: I was seeing this as do or die, get them now, especially get the baby now before another wave comes, a wave or flood surge comes in and washes her off that sandbar.

BROWN: Meanwhile, upstream despite almost drowning, Atwood never thought once about his own safety.

ATWOOD: I heard her scream to my side and I ended up going through some downstream hazards that put me under water. I finally got into a safe area.

BROWN: Atwood didn't know then that Ms. Henderson and her child were in the safe hands of his captain.

ATWOOD: For that short period of time the terror in my, you know, my heart just being torn apart thinking, you know, I have two small kids at home, you know, how would you feel? How would you feel? It's just brutal.

BROWN: So what could have turned truly horrible did not this time thankfully and thanks to a team of rescue workers who were just doing their job.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: That one shot, the shot of the big fireman, the fire captain holding that tiny baby that's one of the great shots of all time.

The fine line between life and death is so thin rescue teams across that part of Southern California this week have been called upon to summon all their physical strength to keep people alive. Not far from La Verne in Cerritos, California, another dramatic rescue reported. It is a story that reveals both a fight to stay alive and the battle to throw someone a life line literally so, from Cerritos tonight, Miguel Marquez.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Come on now. Come on now. Come on. Hold on. He's in the water!

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He's in the water!

MIGUEL MARQUEZ (voice-over): It was a rescue that almost didn't happen.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: OK, no, no, he's coming fast. He's coming faster. He's coming faster. Tell him to get ready.

MARQUEZ: The minutes leading up to the rescue are an example of training, ingenuity, sweat and pure luck.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We got him. I think we got him. I think we got him. He's out. Woo-hoo (ph)!

MARQUEZ: The man on top of the BMW is William McGree (ph) an eye surgeon from central California. He and his beamer are floating down a rain-swollen drainage canal called Coyote Creek in suburban Los Angeles. How he got there is a story in itself.

CAPTAIN THOMAS MCCAULEY, SATNA FE SPRINGS FIRE DEPT.: We had a vehicle that was traveling northbound on one of our local freeways that had gone through the barricade and had fallen into the Coyote Creek reservoir.

MARQUEZ: The car stayed still just long enough for McCree's 11- year-old daughter and her 12-year-old friend to be hoisted to safety by people passing by and firefighters who only had seconds to act.

CAPTAIN MARK TUBBS, SANTA FE SPRINGS FIRE DEPT.: There was a bunch of people up top holding onto an old piece of nylon rope and another line that they had fastened together with just tying knots into straps that would normally be used for tying down furniture in a moving van and I didn't have a lot of faith in that equipment.

MARQUEZ: The equipment held but now McCree was headed south, his car now a boat.

TUBBS: Yes, I didn't have a lot of hope for him at that point. I felt that he would be lost in the vehicle going down the river.

MARQUEZ: As they are trained to do, firefighters set up a secondary position at the next bridge, about a mile down the creek.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Where is he?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He's in the center, in the center. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Right in the center of the pylons.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Right in the center Thomas.

TUBBS: We've done a lot of rescues but I don't think any of us in this department have ever seen anything like this before. We trained for swift water rescue but the typical scenario is that you know you have someone in the river and they're coming downstream. You get there ahead of them. You follow prescribed procedures.

MARQUEZ: With minutes to act they only had time to improvise.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Grab the rope! Grab it tight! Grab it tight!

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Get off the car.

(CROSSTALK)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hold on dude.

MARQUEZ: Firefighters set lines on the bridge's front and back side in case the man fell. He held tightly to the first rope, the water rushing so fast it pulled his pants down around his ankles.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Go, go, go! We're going to pull you up. Keep pulling, pulling, pulling! We've got him! Keep coming! Keep pulling! Don't let go! Did he drop it?

MARQUEZ: For a moment firefighters think they lost him.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I don't see him.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Where is he?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Come on back, we got him! We got him! Jesus Christ! Heave, everybody. Come on now! Come on now! Come on!

MARQUEZ: And then they do lose him.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He's in the water!

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: He's in the water!

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A vest.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Grab a vest.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, there you go. Hold on.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hold on! Hold on!

MARQUEZ: A closer view shows McCree literally at the end of the rope. As firefighters try desperately to pull him to waiting hands the rope runs out. CAPTAIN MIKE YULE, SANTA FE SPRINGS FIRE DEPT.: Right about the time that we were attempting to stop the pull on the rope and go, and grab him was when he let go. He just didn't have the strength any longer.

MARQUEZ: McCree was able to grab a life vest tethered to a rope on the far side of the bridge.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hold on.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hey, John, put that other vest behind him. Float it behind him in case...

MARQUEZ: McCree rides the river as though he were on a boogie board. Rescuers inch him to the side.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yeah! Yeah! Right on.

MARQUEZ: McCree asked first about his daughter and her friend.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The girls are OK? You got them up?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.

MCCAULEY: We'll be talking about this for a long time. We'll critique our actions. We'll try to do better. We'll improve but it was just a great day. It's a once in a lifetime career incident and I can't wait to go home and, you know, kiss my wife and the kids and tell them, you know what, we did a great job today.

TUBBS: It's an unusual feeling. I mean it's not something we feel in this line of work a lot. Even now I feel a little emotional about it, you know, but it's a joy that you can't really describe.

MARQUEZ: Miguel Marquez, CNN, Los Angeles.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: That is a great story. That is a -- can you imagine the adrenalin that was flowing and the heart rate, what their heart rates were at? "Hang on dude" he screamed at one point.

Ahead on the program, a horrible hurricane season in Florida, one major storm after another, billions of dollars in damage just now getting repaired.

Also ahead back to the west where parts of the Sierras buried in snow, the most snow in nearly nine decades, so what's going on?

From New York, which is battling fog tonight, this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Florida takes a beating in August and September. It's the West Coast this week. What's going on with the weather patterns or is anything special going on? Could it be we're just more in tune with the weather around us, more aware of the destructive power in this age of 24-hour news?

Patrick Michaels is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. He is also a climatologist for the state of Virginia, which means you get a little hurricane, a little snow but not a whole lot of either, good to have you with us. Thank you.

PATRICK J. MICHAELS, VIRGINIA STATE CLIMATOLOGIST: Hey, nice to be with you.

BROWN: Is it -- is there something big going on or is this just an odd year within the range of normal?

MICHAELS: No, there's not more weather. There's just more people watching the weather and it's very popular. Our society has sort of obsessive (UNINTELLIGIBLE) on the weather. We have a 24-hour weather channel that's very successful.

Its ratings go up when they show what we call tragedy TV weather in the evening. It's entertainment. Weather is entertainment and there's an awful lot of it. You know the United States for a developed country probably has the most violent weather of any nation in the world and there's a lot of cameras to take pictures of it.

BROWN: Well, but we have had, to put it simply, a lot of weather lately. It's not usual to have this much rain in Southern California this time of year or any time of year. It's not usual to have that much snow in the mountains. Is that telling us anything or is it just a cycle that we go through periodically?

MICHAELS: Well, I can tell you there were similar years, even 70, 75 years ago and with today's weather consciousness I think they would have inspired hysteria. The summer of 1930 saw 60 out of 90 days in the mid-Atlantic with temperatures above 90. Half the counties in Virginia didn't have enough drinking water.

The 1931-32 winter was just like the current one only more extreme. It snowed in Southern California all the way down to Orange County where Disneyland is. The eastern United States was 12 degrees above normal in January of 1932. These are records that have never been eclipsed. In 1933, there were 21 tropical storms and hurricanes, get the picture?

BROWN: Yes.

MICHAELS: Six of them hit almost in the same spot in Mexico, eight hit the U.S.

BROWN: Does the fact that we're having a kind of a rugged few months tell us anything about the next few months?

MICHAELS: No, unfortunately it does not, especially in this situation in the United States. Now, the California trough, which has stirred up all this bad weather, has kind of attenuated and it doesn't look like it's going to repeat itself at least in the near future.

But, there's nothing like a big El Nino causing that this year. It just seems to be one of those things that we can't quite explain. The jet stream gets anchored in certain positions that tends to persist throughout the winter. You notice how almost all the storms in the eastern United States have been going up the Ohio River Valley?

BROWN: Yes.

MICHAELS: Or in the Midwest and there are very few of these coastal cyclones this year, the ones that create the big snowstorms along the East Coast. Why we get locked into these patterns is the thing that we're working on and we sure don't have the answer yet.

BROWN: Well call me when you get it. I'm interested.

MICHAELS: I will. I'll be happy to.

BROWN: Thank you, Mr. Michaels, good to have you with us. I had no idea that the Cato Institute had a weather guy on the staff.

MICHAELS: Yes, we do.

BROWN: Thank you. It's good to talk to you.

Five months ago, nature was unleashing its fury on the state of Florida. You remember this. Within a span of six weeks in the late summer, four major hurricanes hit the state. Communities in many cases leveled, lives lost, lots of damage done.

Putting the pieces back together has been and remains an enormous undertaking, so from Florida tonight here's CNN's John Zarrella.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JOHN ZARRELLA, CNN MIAMI BUREAU CHIEF (voice-over): Over the course of six weeks, Florida was pounded. It was an unrelenting onslaught. Florida was in the crosshairs of four hurricanes.

Three of them, Charlie, Frances and Jean crisscrossed the state and found their way through Wauchula, a rural city nestled in citrus and cattle country in central Florida. Like so many other places, Wauchula was wrecked. The scars left behind have been fading slowly.

But the spiritual and physical rebirth has gone on since. The junior high marching band played. Dignitaries cut a red ribbon. In Wauchula, the grand reopening of the city's only supermarket was a very big deal.

REV. JIMMY MORSE, NORTHSIDE BAPTIST CHURCH: It's a symbolic action that Wauchula is going to come back and be better than it's ever been before.

ZARRELLA: For the past five months, the Reverend Jimmy Morse has done a lot of praying and pitching in.

MORSE: Hi, Ms. Staton.

ZARRELLA: Reverend Morse stopped in at Carol Sue Staton's home to see how the rebuilding was coming.

CAROL SUE STATON, HURRICANE VICTIM: This is my beautiful new front porch.

ZARRELLA: Reverend Morse coordinates and helps house the busloads of volunteers here from all over the U.S. and Canada. A team from Mennonite Disaster Services is putting Carol Sue's home back together. She didn't have insurance.

STATON: They're all family men. They all have homes and families that they've left and left their wives and children in charge and come down here, you know, to help us and God only knows how long they're going to be here.

ZARRELLA: The Mennonites expect to be here for two years that's how long rebuilding will take. Kathleen Manekis came from Michigan to help. She worked for the United Way. She asked for a leave of absence but couldn't get one, so...

KATHLEEN MANEKIS, MENNONITE VOLUNTEER: I quit my job after 18 years, shed a few tears, packed up my car and left.

ZARRELLA: Do you think you did the right thing?

MANEKIS: Absolutely. I have no doubt.

ZARRELLA: For the storm victims, like Carol Sue, it's hard to express their feelings. Saying thanks is often left to Reverend Morse.

MORSE: We want to thank you guys for coming so far and helping us, leaving your families behind. Only eternity will be able to determine what you have done for our county.

ZARRELLA: There is still so much to be done in Wauchula. Everywhere you look there are reminders of the storms.

MORSE: If you look out the rear view mirror, if you just take a couple of glances of that remember where you'd been but in front of you you've got the windshield and the space is wide open, no telling how far we can go.

ZARRELLA: In Wauchula hope is built on looking forward.

John Zarrella CNN, Wauchula, Florida.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: Coming up on this special edition of NEWSNIGHT, we'll take you to Squaw Valley, California, there it is, where the problem is too much snow, too much even for the most avid skiers, dangerous amounts of snow, extreme weather on a special edition of NEWSNIGHT on CNN.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK) BROWN: Well, that's a familiar scene, a terrible reminder that, for all its beauty, the snow can be deadly as well, two Seattle TV stations reporting tonight that a skier was killed in an avalanche at Snoqualmie Pass east of Seattle up in the Cascade Mountains of Washington state. The avalanche occurred in an area that was off limits to skiers.

Farther down the coast, high up in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, avalanches are the concern tonight. Simply put, parts of the region haven't seen this much snow in nearly 90 years. Of course, you expect snow in the winter in the mountains, but this much, this fast?

Reporting from Squaw Valley tonight, CNN's Rob Marciano.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ROBERT FROHLICH, AUTHOR: You know, coming to Squaw is like tugging on Superman's cape.

ROB MARCIANO, CNN METEOROLOGIST (voice-over): Locals call him Fro. Author Robert Frohlich has lived in these mountains for the last 30 years.

FROHLICH: But it gets ugly real quick. It can be in these storm periods.

MARCIANO: Squaw Valley in the Sierra Mountains boasts some of the best skiing in north America. It also gets some of its most dangerous winter storms.

FROHLICH: We get these big storm systems coming in usually once a decade, when the low pressure systems come in. The doors open and it just rocks. You have a series of storms come here like we just had. In 14, in the last 14 days, we had over -- close to 160 inches of snowfall.

MARCIANO: Estimates already put the region's total snowfall at over 21 feet. And winter isn't even half over yet. Reno, Nevada, hasn't seen weather like this since 1916, roads closed, leaving commuters stranded in their cars for hours. And businesses suffered significant losses.

FROHLICH: They were on some record business I know right around the Christmas period, and then all of a sudden just the bottom fell out.

MARCIANO: With this much snowfall comes the potential for deadly avalanches. The ski patrol has been working round the clock to detonate areas most prone to collapse.

FROHLICH: In a 14-day period, they have had a 75-millimeter Howitzer up on Gunner's Knob, and they fired over 100 shells.

MARCIANO: Not just shells, but also hand-tossed explosives.

(on camera): How many explosives do you think they threw off yesterday?

FROHLICH: Well, not yesterday but in the 14-day storm period, they threw 9,400 pounds of explosives. That's over 4,200 bombs.

MARCIANO (voice-over): Ski patroller Will Pedan is responsible for keeping the ski area safe for visitors. He took us for a snowmobile ride and explained what to do if you're ever caught in an avalanche.

WILL PEDAN, SQUAW VALLEY SKI PATROL: But you want to fight for your life and try to swim to the surface. And should you get feel like you're going to get buried, try to cover your mouth to give yourself a little bit of an airway to breathe.

MARCIANO: Fro says people here are ready for a break.

FROHLICH: I guess you could compare it to the folks down in Florida that suffered through that series of hurricanes. Here you have all this big weather come in and just hammers on you. And it finally breaks. You come up for air and you think, oh, man, that has to be the worst of it, and the next thing you know it gets socked in again and you're just getting your potatoes peeled.

MARCIANO: For now, the worst may be over and the best is on its way, the best skiing of the year, that is.

FROHLICH: This weather isn't disastrous, by any means. It's very welcome. And it ensures a great season for us. It's been more of an inconvenience. I really don't think it's anything more than Mother Nature shrugging its shoulders.

MARCIANO: For some, however, Mother Nature has been shrugging a little too often.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MARCIANO: Well, today was the first day that it didn't snow in the Tahoe Basin since Friday. And tonight, it's a cold but beautiful night. The mountain sits calm, but snow-covered behind me.

And I suppose, Aaron, with all this coverage in the last hour of extreme weather, this snow story probably has the best news, in that the incredible snow pack that we've built is going to do a couple of things. It will help the drought conditions out here, out West, and also, once the danger of these storms pass, as far as the ski resorts are concerned, any snow is good snow. And they've got a ton of it, enough to last them at least through this season.

BROWN: Now, further up in the Northwest -- you know Portland pretty well -- I know Seattle pretty well -- this would all be welcome, because, ultimately, this would turn into electricity. The snow pack would melt and flood the river. Do they get electricity out of this or is it just irrigation water and the water that Southern California ends up using?

MARCIANO: Absolutely. California gets a quarter of its power from hydroelectric dams. So snow pack incredibly important not only just for reservoirs and drinking water and irrigation, but, as far as California is concerned, a quarter of its power comes from basically the snow pack. So this means good news for electricity customers as well, Aaron.

BROWN: Rob, good to have you with us tonight. Thanks a lot.

Still to come on the program, a wager. Who's better at forecasting this weather, the weatherman with all his maps and satellites -- that could be the weather woman, too, couldn't it? -- I'm sure it could -- or the good old-fashioned "Farmer's Almanac," which I'm certain is male.

And remember the headline the day after tragedy struck. We'll look back, a special edition of morning papers dealing with the weather. This is extreme weather. It's NEWSNIGHT around the world.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: It's supposed to be 60 in New York tomorrow.

Any program about the weather needs a good weather yarn and a guy to spin it. We have both. The guy is Norm. The yarn is both legend and legendary.

Norm's tale reported tonight by CNN's Jason Bellini.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JASON BELLINI, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Norm Sayler knows snow.

NORM SAYLER, NORDEN RESIDENT: When you push the snow, it doesn't take the air out of it.

BELLINI: Norm lives in Norden, California. Norm knows most of his customers don't love snow the way he does.

SAYLER: I will get -- I will get them there. They'll be there in the morning. All right. God (EXPLETIVE DELETED) that guy.

BELLINI: Of course, at the summit of the Donner Pass, few if any towns in the Sierra Nevada Mountains get as much snow as Norden, 10 to 15 feet of it this past week alone.

SAYLER: Maybe it's such a big storm, someone will have to open an arm-and-a-leg restaurant because people are going to eat each other to survive.

BELLINI: His off-color joke a reference to the Donner Party. The winter of 1846, 1847, half the Donner Party perished trying to get over the mountains, some of the group resorting to cannibalism. Norm believes the Donner Party got trapped in a snowstorm right here in Norden. SAYLER: You can almost get the feeling and the sensation of being with those people.

BELLINI: In 1866, the first transcontinental railroad was built through Donner Pass; 40 feet of snow that winter made it the most difficult section to build. Decades later, motorists on Interstate 40, the first highway linking the East and West coasts, ran into trouble here.

SAYLER: It was a lot harder then because we didn't have the equipment that we have today. That's the main thing. Today, it's a piece of cake to go out there and go to work, because the equipment is so good. It's so strong. It's so powerful.

BELLINI: Even so, over this past weekend, California had to close the modern road west running through here, Interstate 80. Norm knows in the end he'll benefit from the epic snowstorm. He owns the Donner Ski Ranch.

(on camera): It's kind of funny. The owner of the ski mountain's out plowing the parking lot.

SAYLER: Well, that's because the owner of the ski resort has fun plowing the parking lot.

BELLINI: Norm also knows, of all things, snowboarding. He says his was the first resort to welcome snowboarders.

SAYLER: All I wanted was $10. I didn't care if he was on a snowboard or whether he had skis or what he was on. I just wanted his money. And that's how snowboarding truly got started.

BELLINI: At 71 years old, Norm tries with his albums, with his stories, to keep the history of his mountain and of Donner Pass from being buried, a history of snow.

Jason Bellini, CNN, Norden, California.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: When we come back on this special edition of NEWSNIGHT, the weather stands still -- photos, that is.

We'll take a break first. This is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Extreme weather is by definition fierce. There is nothing still about it. Floodwaters rage. Hurricanes batter. Throw in weather's cousins, like earthquakes and tsunamis, and you have both power and destruction on a scale hard to describe.

And yet some of the most powerful images we've seen of nature flexing its muscles do not move at all. They're still photographs you're about to see. They speak for themselves.

Steve Stroud, the photo editor of "The Los Angeles Times," speaks to the challenges of making the pictures.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

STEVE STROUD, PHOTO EDITOR, "THE LOS ANGELES TIMES": Sort of a wide range of weather became a real challenge to us because of the geographic distances and because they were such different stories between snow and rain.

And then, when we had the landslide, the story turned from being an expensive inconvenience to being a life-threatening, and, in some instances, a life-costing news event. So it radically transformed in the matter of a couple of minutes.

Gathering all of that information into one picture is a goal that we always strive for. And sometimes we hit that, and sometimes stories like this work better in multiple pictures, where they interact with one another. California always seems to sort of be living these biblical scenes of flood and fire.

When the fires do break out, they can be very severe, as we saw this last summer. And most of our photographers are trained in how to cover fires. All of them are outfitted with protective clothing, boots, goggles, etcetera. So, this is something that we prepare for, and, unfortunately, we have a great deal of experience in covering.

We've had varied luck with hurricanes. Because they are so fickle, we don't know, nor does anyone know, when and where exactly they're going to come ashore and where the greatest problems are going to be. And unless we were to dispatch a dozen photographers, it would be very difficult for us to feel secure in being at that right place in the right time.

We sent a very experienced photographer, Francine Orr, who's been on many international assignments for us, we sent her to Colombo, Sri Lanka, because it was ground zero for the number of fatalities as a percentage of the population. And we were basically able to tell that story in a microcosm from Sri Lanka.

It is those pictures that show the Sri Lankans walking amidst the ruins of what was once their community and the extent of that devastation, which I think all of us have trouble imagining.

I think, with any one of those events, there are pictures that pop into my mind, and most of them have an emotional quotient to them. I think those are the pictures that hang with all of us, those that touch a nerve and bring home a story to us.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN: I love those still photos.

Still ahead on the program, forget the barometers and the radars and the storm watchers. When we come back, we'll look at the forecast many farmers swear by.

We'll take a break first. This is a special edition of NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BROWN: Extreme weather, as that graphic proves, has always been a fact of life; 117 years ago today, in 1888, tremendous blizzards swept across the Great Plains on a day that began so mild, the children had walked to school without their coats and gloves.

By the following morning, some 500 people lay dead on the prairie, many of them children who perished on their way home from school. The culprit was an unprecedented cold front and the capriciousness of nature.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

BROWN (voice-over): Weather and nature have always been matters of life and death. We just tend to forget that until we're hit. Because we've always depended on weather so much for life and livelihood, we've long tried to make sense of it, even before we had the science to do so.

Farmers learn to rely on their instincts, their observations, and sometimes their animals. Horses are said to run fast before violent storms, while cows reportedly just lie down and refuse to go out to pasture. Zuni Indians believed that reddish moons meant rain, while sailors have long said, red sky at night, sailor's delight, red sky in the morning, sailor take warning.

For nearly two centuries, the "Farmer's Almanac" has had a more systematic, though top-secret formula, for long-range forecasting, which is still used by the man making the almanac's predictions today.

SANDI DUNCAN, MANAGING EDITOR, "FARMER'S ALMANAC": He uses a formula that dates back to the beginning of the almanac, which is back in 1818, and it takes things like sunspot activity, tidal action of the moon, the position of the planets into factor, and he makes these predictions based on this formula. And it's been used for almost 188 years now.

BROWN: But although the almanac claims an accuracy rating of about 80 percent in its forecasting, it didn't exactly nail the weather devastating the West when it made its predictions for 2005 18 months ago.

DUNCAN: We said a winter of extremes throughout the country. However, in the Southwest states, we did see a little bit more mild and dryer conditions. It's just a reminder that nature can kind of throw us all a curve ball. Even though we might make predictions of something, she can come in and change it all around.

BROWN: But while the almanac missed the savage California weather, it was right about one thing. It got the East right, a mild spell this month it dubbed "Junuary." The temperature in New York tomorrow, expected to reach 60 degrees.

(END VIDEOTAPE) BROWN: And very rainy.

Still ahead on this special edition of NEWSNIGHT, a special edition of morning papers.

From foggy New York City, this is NEWSNIGHT.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(ROOSTER CROWING)

BROWN: Okeydoke, time to check morning papers from around the country and around the country today.

First, just some weather things that have gone on in the past few days that we haven't gotten to. "Las Vegas Journal Review" today, January 12 -- that's today, right? "Scores Evacuate Homes. Overton Residents Watch River Overthrow." Yesterday, they led "Ski Resort Avalanche Rare." That was their lead yesterday. And they led that way yesterday because the day before, "Teen Dies in Avalanche." That's "The Las Vegas Review-Journal" and their last three headlines.

Then, last summer and early fall, "Charley Rips Across Florida" the lead on the 14th of August in "The Orlando Sentinel." On the 15th of August, the day after, "Powerless" was the lead. And they were for a while. "Thirteen Died." At least, that was the count at that point.

By mid-September, September 17, Ivan had hit, and "The Rampage Kills 21. Pensacola Hit Hard as Storm Moves Inland." And then in -- two weeks later, well, nine days later, not quite two weeks, "Slammed Again" is the way "The Sentinel" led, as another hurricane, this time Jeanne, made sure.

"The Indianapolis Star" on Christmas Day, "Holiday Travelers Get Frosty Reception." Ha, ha. Get it?

"Salt Lake Tribune" yesterday, or today, actually. "Rivers Rampage." They've got bad weather out there.

This one just because. You'll get this right away. "The Washington Times." The date, the 27th of November -- of December, rather, Monday: "11,000 Dead in Asian Quake." That's where we were on the day after, at 11,000. We are at 155,000 today. My goodness.

Somebody else led that way, too. Well, anyway.

Now a couple papers from today to get in. We were doing "The Washington Times," so we might as well stay with that. How are we doing on time, guys? Got it.

This is a huge story today, complicated story. "Chaos Seen on Sentencing Guidelines. Supreme Court Makes Federal Limits Voluntary." Let's see if I can explain this in 10 seconds. The court said that, if a jury hasn't heard about it, the judge can't use it in sentencing. And it throws out sentencing guidelines or part of the sentencing guidelines. That will create a big mess. We'll look at that some tomorrow, I do believe.

You know, the weather, we ought to end on the weather, don't you think? Weather in Chicago tomorrow, "whiplash."

Good to have you with us tonight. We'll see what tomorrow brings weather wise and program wise. Until then, good night for all of us.

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