Everett families blame city for sinking neighborhood By 20 hrs ago, KING5 Seattle Videos When families in Everett’s Valley View  neighborhood first started hearing their homes creak in the middle of the night, they thought it would be temporary. But four years later, one home is completely destroyed, two others are crumbling and others may be next. They’ve now decided to take the city to court. „You can’t just ignore it,” said Jay Himmelman. His home is feet away from what’s become a 10-foot cliff in his back yard. „I’ve turned the corner and I’m going after the city in what I think is a right and wrong issue.” Damages are not only financial, he says, but emotional too. „We are thinking of walking away from our home,” Himmelman said. Himmelman and others hired private engineers to examine the ravine below their homes in an effort to prove the sliding is not natural. They are convinced the city is funneling more storm water into the ravine than it can handle, causing the deep-seated shift in the hillside. According to Everett spokesperson Kate Reardon, there is nothing to show the slide is anything but a naturally occurring event. She said the city is very concerned about the safety of the neighborhood and engineers have kept a close watch on it for years. The problem area, located in a culdesac on Burl Place off Panaview Boulevard, is blocked off to prevent anyone from getting close to the slide. Rob and Margaret Lund have had to abandon the home they finished making payments on just five years ago. „We are in a new place now with a new 30-year mortgage,” Rob said. „To be honest, we’re not losing as much sleep as we used to. Our biggest concern is our neighbors.”

Washington Great Shakeout set for 10:18 a.m. By 21 hrs ago, KING5 Seattle Videos Washington’s Great Shakeout is scheduled to take place at 10:18 a.m. Thursday morning. More than 713,000 people are signed up to drop, cover, and hold on. The main goal of the Washington Shakeout is to teach residents how to prepare for major earthquakes. Most of Washington is prone to earthquakes and you could be anywhere when one strikes: at home, work, school, or the store. In 2001, the Nisqually Earthquake that hit Western Washignton was one of the worst quakes in recent history. Washington joins a number of other states and countries for the first time in participating in the Great Shakeout. Also taking part October 18 are Calif., Nevada, Oregon and Southern Italy. Anyone can participate in the Great Shakeout by signing up at the website. For more information on how to prepare for an earthquake, visit Ready.gov.

Tornadoes, severe storms swat Southeast; 7 hurt By JACK ELLIOTT JR. | Associated Press – 44 mins ago JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — At least four tornadoes were part of the storm system that raked northern and central Mississippi on Wednesday night and Thursday morning, injuring at least seven people, the National Weather Service said.The biggest of the four storms was a twister that traveled 16 miles through several counties east of Jackson. With a half-mile-wide damage path, it was rated EF-3 on the Fujita scale, with peak winds estimated at 140 mph, the weather service said. That storm blew down trees as well as three electrical transmission towers.Another tornado in Mississippi that injured three people was rated an EF-2, running seven miles with a quarter-mile-wide debris path before lifting off, the weather service said. It had top estimated winds of 125 mph.The tornadoes accompanied a line of severe storms that swept across the Southeast overnight Wednesday and early Thursday, downing power lines and trees and damaging homes around the region.In Mississippi, a woman was trapped temporarily in her bed when a tree came crashing through her roof. Rescuers had to cut the tree to get her out, said Scott County Emergency Management Director Alvin Seaney.In Sharkey County, Miss., Coleman Jenkins, 20, spent Thursday morning looking for his mother’s telephone and car keys around her destroyed mobile home. He said his mother broke her back and wrist and had cuts on her face, but she’s expected to survive. Jenkins wasn’t home at the time, but he said his two sisters, ages 5 and 10, managed to make it out of the trailer without serious injuries.”Everything’s gone,” Jenkins said. „I’ve never seen anything like it.”Sharkey County Emergency Management Director James Ross said a total of eight mobile homes in the county were destroyed or heavily damaged. He said officials are trying to help those families find a place to stay.At one point Wednesday night, Entergy Mississippi reported more than 11,000 customers without power. Late Thursday, more than 4,000 Entergy customers remained without power, almost all in Greenville.Nearly 900 customers lost electricity in Arkansas, where some buildings were damaged but no injuries were reported. Storms also raked western Tennessee, toppling trees in a mobile home park north of Memphis and forcing some residents out of their homes.In Louisiana, authorities reported trees down in at least two parishes and one home with a damaged roof when part of the front swept through that state.Radar weather maps overnight showed a huge, arcing front that swept across Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, and parts of states such as Louisiana and Alabama on its march eastward on a jagged slant._ Associated Press writers Jeff Amy and Holbrook Mohr contributed to this report.

U.S. winter likely to continue hot weather trend By Deborah Zabarenko and Ayesha Rascoe | Reuters – 9 hrs ago WASHINGTON (Reuters) – After a hot spring and a scorching summer, this winter is likely to continue a U.S. warming trend that could make 2012 the hottest year since modern record-keeping began, U.S. weather experts said Thursday.Drought that ravaged much of the United States this year may spread in the coming months, saidMike Halpert at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center.”The large majority of that drought we expect to persist,” Halpert said. „We even see drought expanding westward … into Montana, Idaho and part of Oregon and Washington.”Dryer-than-usual winter weather is expected in much of the Pacific Northwest, with higher-than-normal precipitation predicted for the Gulf Coast, according to NOAA forecasts.For much of the country, a three-month (December-February)winter forecast is hard to pin down. The vast majority of states have what the experts said was an equal chance of below-normal, normal or above-normal precipitation.The densely populated East Coast, along with the southern tier of states from Texas to Florida and the upper Midwest also have an equal chance of colder, normal or warmer weather this winter, according to the forecasters.Still, there is enough data to predict a warm winter overall, said Deke Arndt, chief of climate monitoring at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center. The first nine months of 2012 were the warmest of any year on record in the contiguous United States, and this has been the third-hottest summer since record-keeping began.”The main issues facing the U.S. going into this (winter) outlook period stem from persistent heat and drought,” Arndt said at a telephone briefing. „It is likely that 2012 will be the warmest of the 118-year record for the contiguous United States.”An El Nino pattern — a recurring patch of warmer than usual water in the equatorial Pacific that can have a potent effect on U.S. weather — gave hints of developing in September but then subsided, the first time this has happened in approximately 60 years of record keeping on this phenomenon, Halpert said.”This is one of the most challenging outlooks we’ve produced in recent years because El Nino decided not to show up as expected,” he said.A record-warm winter would be in line NOAA’s latest report on global temperatures, which found September 2012 tied for the hottest September in world records going back to 1880.However, Arndt said that the signal of human-spurred climate change is less apparent now in some U.S. regions, especially in winter. This is due in part to the changing baseline forecasters use.U.S. government experts look back 30 years to figure out baseline temperatures for the country. In the past, they used the 30-year period from 1971 through 2000; this year, they used 1981 through 2010. That latest period shows little sign of a warming trend in areas like Florida and other parts of the southeast, Arndt said.That updated baseline helps to „mask” the signs of climate change on a regional and seasonal basis, Arndt said.(Reporting by Ayesha Rascoe; editing by Sofina Mirza-Reid and Bob Burgdorfer)