An extreme and exhausting year for US disasters

Seth Borenstein in the Associated Press: Nature is pummeling the United States this year with extremes. Unprecedented triple-digit heat and devastating drought. Deadly tornadoes leveling towns. Massive rivers overflowing. A billion-dollar blizzard. And now, unusual hurricane-caused flooding in Vermont.

If what's falling from the sky isn't enough, the ground shook in places that normally seem stable: Colorado and the entire East Coast. On Friday, a strong quake triggered brief tsunami warnings in Alaska. Arizona and New Mexico have broken records for wildfires.

Total weather losses top $35 billion, and that's not counting Hurricane Irene, according to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. There have been more than 700 U.S. disaster and weather deaths, most from the tornado outbreaks this spring. Last year, the world seemed to go wild with natural disasters in the deadliest year in a generation. But 2010 was bad globally, and the United States mostly was spared.

This year, while there have been devastating events elsewhere, such as the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, Australia's flooding and a drought in Africa, it's our turn to get smacked. Repeatedly. "I'm hoping for a break. I'm tired of working this hard. This is ridiculous," said Jeff Masters, a meteorologist who runs Weather Underground, a meteorology service that tracks strange and extreme weather. "I'm not used to seeing all these extremes all at once in one year."

The U.S. has had a record 10 weather catastrophes costing more than a billion dollars: five separate tornado outbreaks, two different major river floods in the Upper Midwest and the Mississippi River, drought in the Southwest and a blizzard that crippled the Midwest and Northeast, and Irene...

Aerial views of the Missouri River in the Bismarck-Mandan, North Dakota area June 8, 2011. The photos were taken from a North Dakota National Guard (UH-60) Black Hawk. The upstream Garrison Dam is releasing water into the Missouri River at a flow of 140,000 cubic feet per second (cfs). About 850 North Dakota National Guard members are on duty assisting with flooding operations in the Bismarck-Mandan area. (North Dakota National Guard photo by Maj. Gen. David Sprynczynatyk). US Army Corps of Engineers. They posted the photo on Flickr, but since I'm a taxpayer, I'm just using it