By Doug Struck

Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 20, 2007

FRESNO, Calif. — Steve Johnson scans the hot, translucent sky. He wants to make rain — needs to make rain for the parched farms and desperate hydro companies in this California valley. But first, he must have clouds. The listless sky offers no hint of clouds.

Inside a darkened room near the Fresno airport, Johnson’s colleagues study an array of radar screens. If a promising thunderstorm appears, Johnson will send his pilots into it in sturdy but ice-battered single-engine planes, burning flares of silver iodide to try to coax rain from the clouds.

This year, there have been few promising clouds, to the dismay of the farmers, ranchers and power companies who hire Johnson’s cloud seeders.

“We can increase the rainfall by 10 percent. But Mother Nature has to cooperate. Ten percent of zero is zero,” says Johnson, a meteorologist and director of Atmospherics Inc.

A few miles south of Fresno, Steve Arthur is looking the other way for water. His company is working around the clock drilling wells to irrigate fields in California’s 400-mile-long Central Valley, one of the most productive food-growing areas in the world.

“People are really starting to panic for water,” said Arthur, whose father started drilling wells in 1959. They must drill ever deeper to tap the sinking water table. “Eventually, the water will be so deep the farmers won’t be able to afford to pump it,” he said. “There’s only so much water to go around.”

As global warming heats the planet, there will be more desperate measures. The climate will be wetter in some places, drier in others. Changing weather patterns will leave millions of people without dependable supplies of water for drinking, irrigation and power, a growing stack of studies conclude.

At Stanford University, 170 miles away, Stephen Schneider, editor of the journal Climatic Change and a lead author for the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), pours himself a cup of tea and says the future is clear.

“As the air gets warmer, there will be more water in the atmosphere. That’s settled science,” he said. But where, and when, it comes down is the big uncertainty.

“You are going to intensify the hydrologic cycle. Where the atmosphere is configured to have high pressure and droughts, global warming will mean long, dry periods. Where the atmosphere is configured to be wet, you will get more rain, more gully washers.

“Global warming will intensify drought,” he says. “And it will intensify floods.”

According to the IPCC, that means a drying out of areas such as southern Europe, the Mideast, North Africa, South Australia, Patagonia and the U.S. Southwest.

These will not be small droughts. Richard Seager, a senior researcher at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, looked at 19 computer models of the future under current global warming trends. He found remarkable consistency: Sometime before 2050, the models predicted, the Southwest will be gripped in a dry spell akin to the Great Dust Bowl drought that lasted through most of the 1930s.

The spacing of tree rings suggests there have been numerous periods of drought going back to A.D. 800, he said. But, “mechanistically, this is different. These projections clearly come from a warming forced by rising greenhouse gases.”

Farmers in the Central Valley, where a quilt of lush, green orchards on brown hills displays the alchemy of irrigation, want to believe this is a passing dry spell. They thought a wet 2006 ended a seven-year drought, but this year is one of the driest on record. For the first time, state water authorities shut off irrigation pumps to large parts of the valley, forcing farmers to dig wells.

Farther south and east, the once-mighty Colorado River is looking sickly, siphoned by seven states before dribbling into Mexico. Its reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, are drying, leaving accusatory rings on the shorelines and imperiling river-rafting companies.

Seager predicts that drought will prompt dislocations similar to those of the Dust Bowl. “It will certainly cause movements of people. For example, as Mexico dries out, there will be migration from rural areas to cities and then the U.S.,” he said. “There is an emerging situation of climate refugees.”

Global warming threatens water supplies in other ways. Much of the world’s fresh water is in glaciers atop mountains. They act as mammoth storehouses. In wet or cold seasons, the glaciers grow with snow. In dry and hot seasons, the edges slowly melt, gently feeding streams and rivers. Farms below are dependent on that meltwater; huge cities have grown up on the belief the mountains will always give them drinking water; hydroelectric dams rely on the flow to generate power.

But the atmosphere’s temperature is rising fastest at high altitudes. The glaciers are melting, initially increasing the runoff, but gradually getting smaller and smaller. Soon, many will disappear.

At the edge of the Quelccaya Glacier, the largest ice cap in the Peruvian Andes, Ohio State University researcher Lonnie Thompson sat in a cold tent at a rarified 17,000 feet. He has spent more time in the oxygen-thin “death zone” atop mountains than any other scientist, drilling ice cores and measuring glaciers. He has watched the Quelccaya Glacier shrink by 30 percent in 33 years.

Down the mountain, a multitude of rivulets seep from the edge of Quelccaya to irrigate crops of maize, the water flowing through irrigation canals built by the Incas. Even farther downstream, the runoff helps feed the giant capital, Lima, another city built in a desert.

“What do you think is going to happen when this stops?” Thompson mused of the water. “Do you think all the people below will just sit there? No. It’s crazy to think they won’t go anywhere. And what do you think will happen when they go to places where people already live?”

The potential for conflict is more than theoretical. Turkey, Syria and Iraq bristle over the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. Sudan, Ethiopia and Egypt trade threats over the Nile. The United Nations has said water scarcity is behind the bloody wars in Sudan’s Darfur region. In Somalia, drought has spawned warlords and armies.

Already, the World Health Organization says, 1 billion people lack access to potable water. In northern China, retreating glaciers and shrinking wetlands that feed the Yangtze River prompted researchers to warn that water supplies for hundreds of millions of people may be at risk.

“The government is talking about harmony between man and nature. But we still haven’t seen the turning point,” Ma Jun, author of “China’s Water Crisis,” said in a phone interview from Beijing. Even where global warming brings more precipitation, it may come at the wrong time. If precipitation that traditionally feeds a glacier comes too early, as rain instead of snow, the result is a quick torrent followed by months of meager trickle. And if the rain comes in torrents, it brings scenes like those this summer from Texas and India.

Humans have long attempted to reconcile nature’s inconstancies with giant plumbing: reservoirs and dams that hold back floodwaters for more gradual release; dikes and other barriers to protect developed areas; canals and pipelines to take water from wet areas to dry.

But that kind of infrastructure is expensive, especially for Third World governments. Environmentalists decry the impact on wildlife. And building dams in earthquake zones tempts disaster.

Even in rich California, “there’s been no significant reservoir construction for many years,” said Dave Kranz, a spokesman for the state Farm Bureau. “Reservoir construction is terribly expensive. It’s easier to block a reservoir than to build one.”

Researcher Seager suggests that humans ought to bend more to nature than trying to bend nature.

“We’re not going to be able to carry on like we are,” he said. “Do we really want to keep growing irrigated alfalfa in the high desert, in New Mexico and Arizona? It really makes no sense.”

But Mark McKean, a Fresno Valley farmer, had to leave some of his fields of cotton unwatered when the flow in the irrigation canals stopped this summer. But he chafes at Seager’s suggestion.

“Sure, my tomatoes can be grown in other parts of the world,” he said. “But do we want to give up the economic base that supports small, rural towns? Do we want to ignore child labor growing our food somewhere else? Do we want to know if pesticides are being used? What are we willing to pay for all that?”

Icy Island Warms to Climate Change
Greenlanders Exploit ‘Gifts From Nature’ While Facing New Hardships

By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, June 7, 2007

QAQORTOQ, Greenland — The biggest island in the world is a wind-raked place, gripped by ice over four-fifths of its land, prowled by polar bears, its coastlines choked by drifting icebergs and sea ice. Many of its 56,000 people, who live on the fringes of its giant ice cap, see the effects of global warming — and cheer it on.

“It’s good for me,” said Ernst Lund, a lanky young man who is one of 51 farmers raising sheep on the southern tip of Greenland. His animals scramble over the cold granite hills of a dramatic fiord, his farm isolated from the nearest town by a long boat ride threading past drifting mounds of ice, followed by a jolting truck trip along seven miles of gravel road.

“I can keep the sheep out two weeks longer to feed in hills in the autumn. And I can grow more hay. The sheep get fatter,” he said.

In few parts of the world is climate change more real — and personal — than here. The Arctic is feeling the globe’s fastest warming. At a science station in the ice-covered interior of Greenland, average winter temperatures rose nearly 11 degrees Fahrenheit from 1991 to 2003. Winters are shorter, ice is melting, and fish and animals are on the move.

A rapid meltdown and fast-sliding glaciers in Greenland could raise sea levels around the world and flood coastal cities and farmland. The infusion of cold water could jolt the Gulf Stream, alter weather throughout the Northern Hemisphere and scatter fish and marine stocks.

Yet this sweeping reworking of humanity’s global accommodations will likely be fickle. While Greenland has many people who fear what warming will bring, it has quite a few others who reckon they may do quite well by it.

Kim Hoegh-Dam is betting a fortune that the changing climate will bring the cod back to Greenland. The effusive 44-year-old businessman has lined up more than $1 million to buy a small fleet of cod trawlers and three processing plants.

“Global warming will increase the cod tremendously and will bring other species up from the south,” he said with confidence.

Hoegh-Dam’s ancestors have lived for 200 years in Qaqortoq, its colorful wooden houses climbing steep hills that the Viking Eric the Red scouted more than 1,000 years ago. In times past, Qaqortoq grew rich on cod; in the early 20th century, the town boasted Greenland’s first public bath, available to residents three times a year — once more annually than was common at baths in sophisticated Copenhagen. The big whitefish fed Europe and nurtured New England, becoming the mainstay of Greenland’s economy.

But in the late 1960s, the Greenland cod catch plummeted, and in 1991 the cod disappeared altogether. Researchers say it was a double blow of overfishing and a 4-degree drop in the water temperature because of shifting currents. Hard-pressed watermen eventually turned their boats and production plants to shrimp, now Greenland’s chief export.

The seas around Greenland now show the highest temperatures since the 1960s. A trawler sent with government inspectors to test the old cod grounds off eastern Greenland this year made a biblical catch. The holds were filled with 25 tons of cod in one hour, and the crew had to stop fishing.

Conservationists are cautious. “If you start fishing this, you could stop the cod from building up,” said Holger Hovgard of the Greenland Institute for Natural Resources in the capital, Nuuk. And if the seas warm enough to bring back cod, he asked, what happens to the cold-loving shrimp?

But for now, many hardy Greenlanders who wrest a living from the harsh environment see opportunities. Kim Hoegh-Dam’s brother, Kenneth Hoegh, 41, is the agriculture advisory agent in southern Greenland. While his brother bets on fish, Kenneth Hoegh is busy developing new and unexpected markets for the small band of farmers in this self-governing dependency of Denmark.

Farmers raised 22,000 lambs for local meat markets last year, and Hoegh soon will host the chef of a renowned Copenhagen restaurant to persuade him to put “Arctic lamb” on the menu. Hoegh has six cows and wants to start a mini-dairy. He packs sheep wool off to England for sorting and then to Lithuania to be weaved into fine blankets labeled Greenland wool, a souvenir lure for tourists visiting the glaciers.

Tables in his office in Qaqortoq are loaded with potatoes to be planted on the warm edges of fiords. At his agriculture station, his staff is growing Chinese cabbage, flowers and turnips in greenhouses and under protective plastic sheets. He dreams of planting a forest someday on the treeless terrain.

“The only limiting factor on human endeavor in Greenland is the temperature,” Hoegh said, while bouncing on a fast motorboat past icebergs to visit the agriculture station in this country of few roads. Warm the temperature a bit, and new endeavors pop out like lambs from ewes, he believes.

Six hundred miles to the north, 170 miles past the Arctic Circle, in the fishing village of Ilulissat, Inuit men gather around barrels of bait one afternoon as they thread hundreds of hooks attached to their long fishing lines. Traditionally, when the winter pack ice closed over the waters of their fiord, the men would take lines and nets on dog sleds and cut holes in the ice to catch Greenland halibut. But in recent winters, the pack ice never closed, and the men worked from their boats all year.

“It is much easier to go by boat than to try to haul everything by dogs,” said Ove Olsvig, 39, a lean fisherman with a soft voice and few words. “We can catch a lot more.” He paused. “I don’t think it’s good,” he added. The higher catch will take its toll on the fish stock, he said. Then, “the fishing will not be so good.”

Cuno Jensen, a 22-year-old teacher, walked by the dock carrying a rifle with a powerful scope. When he was a boy, he said, he and his father would go onto the ice and lie in wait for hours to get a shot at a seal. With the water now open year-round, “we just take a boat out, and it’s easy to get close enough to shoot the seal.”

Ono Fleischer, one of the most renowned dog sledders in Greenland, took a dog team across the huge island in 19 days last spring to marry his companion, Karo Thomsen, in a village in eastern Greenland. They intended to sled back, but a warm rain put a dangerous glaze on the ice cap. They had to give away their 12 dogs and fly back to Ilulissat.

“Already we are starting our sentences by saying, ‘In the days when it was cold,’ ” reflected Thomsen, 45, who in 1991 became the first Greenland woman to ski across the ice cap. “We’re starting to talk about it like it was history, and it’s only been about five years.”

Her husband has mushed for thousands of miles across the northern edges of Greenland, Canada and Alaska to match the record of the legendary explorer Knud Rasmussen. Yet he dismisses with a wave any sentiment over the shrinking ice.

“With the warmer weather, we don’t have to fight the cold so much. Our health is better. Our equipment doesn’t break down so much, and we don’t use so much fuel. The time for industry is longer, and there are more places we can go by boat,” Fleischer, 59, said before a lunch of reindeer meat in his house overlooking Ilulissat. “I can’t think of any negative consequences.”

But others, who depend on the ice, can. One of them is Silverio Scivoli. Up a steep hill from the colorful fishing fleet in Ilulissat harbor, he fishes for tourists. Last year, there were 15,000 — mostly from Denmark — and their spending has brought a spurt of construction in town. Scivoli, 59, a voluble Italian who came to visit Greenland 26 years ago and now runs a tourist agency, worries that the warmer weather will kill the very attractions the visitors come to see.

“The tourists want to see glaciers and huge icebergs. They want to go dog sledding and see an igloo,” he said. “I used to take them on 12-day dog-sled trips from here to Uummannaq. Now, I can’t. There’s no ice.”

In the sparsely peopled far north of Greenland, Inuit wait for the Arctic Sea ice to close on the land each fall. They take their dog sleds and snowmobiles onto the ice to hunt food: seals, whales and polar bears. But the ice now takes longer to come.

One remote ice patrol station, Daneborg, keeps excellent records: The local hunters have long wagered on when the ice would close the summer’s open water. A decade ago, the water was open for 80 days. Now it stays ice-free for 140 days, said Soren Rysgaard, a researcher for the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources.

“It’s a threat to northern Inuit. Already we are seeing immense changes in weather, in birds, in animals,” said Lena Holm, who is documenting hunters’ observations for the Inuit Circumpolar Council. Unlike Inuit farther south who live by fishing, these hunters need ice to stalk their prey on foot.

In three recent years, some of the northern villages appealed for emergency food aid because they could not get on the ice to hunt. Their sled dogs, not eligible for government assistance, were saved by nationwide donations that bought European dog food to replace the missing scraps from seal kills.

“If a seal hunter can’t hunt, what is he to do?” asked Alfred Jakobsen, Greenland’s minister of the environment.

Still, he sees an upside: Global warming could be an opportunity to develop other resources. Four oil companies have applied to explore off shore, mining companies are sniffing out uranium and gold, and two aluminum companies want to build smelting plants and use the gushing glacial meltwater for hydroelectric power.

“Of course there will be negative impacts on the environment,” Jakobsen acknowledged. “But we have to have an income. We cannot just be a living zoo. It would be hard for Greenland not to utilize these gifts from nature.”

Calculating the outcome of changing nature is difficult, however. Stefan Magnusson, 50, a tall cowboy, is one of only two ranchers who raise reindeer commercially in Greenland. He sells the meat to Iceland and Canada.

He thought the disappearing snow would uncover more food for his herd of 2,000 animals. But he found that the melting top layer of snow refreezes at night, forming a hard crust that keeps the reindeer from the lichens below. And the now-spotty surface plays havoc with the snowmobiles and horses he uses to herd the animals. He muses about giving it up.

“This was a successful business” for 17 years, Magnusson said. “Until global warming.”

Researcher Natalia Alexandrova in Toronto contributed to this report.

In Arctic Ice, Lessons on Effects of Warming
Researchers Drill, Map, Blast In Greenland in Hunt for Clues

By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, June 9, 2007

JAKOBSHAVN GLACIER, Greenland

If Manhattan floods, it may start here, on an ice field that stretches in frozen silence to every horizon.

Global warming is working away at the Greenland ice cap. The frozen interior of the Arctic island is shedding ice much faster than simple melting should explain. And George Tsoflias wants to know why.

A sharp wind knifes at the hands of the scientist as he struggles — gloves off in the bitter cold — to make adjustments to his radar. His instrument is strapped to an unwieldy wooden sled adorned with batteries and cables and two sets of flat antennas that extend like flapping wings over the snow. He hopes it will peer through the ice to the ground two miles below.

Dozens of scientific teams are scattered over the frigid Greenland snowscape, sent by the National Science Foundation, NASA and universities around the world. They are drilling the ice to collect samples, flying over it with radar and lasers, listening to its creaks and groans with seismometers, fitting it with GPS receivers to measure its pace, and photographing it as it slides to the sea and breaks into icebergs.

Their quest is crucial: If all the ice on Greenland were to melt, the seas around the world would rise by 23 feet, submerging countless coastal cities. A modest three-foot rise would endanger 70 million people. “Greenland has the potential to put a lot of water, a lot of ice, into the sea,” said Tsoflias, a researcher from the University of Kansas.

Greenland’s ice cap contains 800 trillion gallons of water and several outlet glaciers, huge rivers of ice that act as faucets from the ice cap. Those faucets are running faster. The Jakobshavn Glacier where Tsoflias works has doubled its speed in five years and every day dumps enough ice into the sea to supply 20 to 30 New York Cities with water.

From the air, the Jakobshavn looks like a still-life portrait of a river in white, rippled with frozen waves, sinuous as it moves toward the ocean at a rate of 135 feet per day.

“It’s the fastest-flowing glacier in the world,” said Don Voigt, huddled in a tent a few yards from Tsoflias’ people, on a 3-degree day, trying to warm up with hot chocolate and the tiny blue flame of a camp stove. “The question is, why is it flowing so fast?”

Voigt, 53, a white-bearded veteran of 14 field seasons in Greenland and Antarctica, leads a team from Pennsylvania State University mapping the bottom of the ice by setting off explosives and recording the seismic reverberations.

They will live out here for a month, sleeping in tents in the brutal weather, preparing explosive charges with cold-numbed hands, wiping snow off their instruments. They give nicknames to their jobs: “shooter,” “recorder” and “potato planter” — the one who shoves the small charges into the snow.

Scientists have a working theory for the glacier’s speed. The Jakobshavn is churning toward the sea over land that forms a trough deeper than the Grand Canyon. As higher temperatures melt ice and snow on the surface, the water is pouring down through crevasses to the rock. There, it is acting as a lubricant, lifting and carrying the glacier faster toward the sea.

“It’s like a slick griddle,” Paul Winberry, 28, a geophysics doctoral student, said as he tested a steam drill to plant explosives. The ice cap stretches to the horizon in all directions, a perfectly scribed white line against the blue sky. “As soon as that water hits the bottom of the ice sheet, the ice sheet hits the gas and starts to accelerate.”

As ice on glaciers moves over rock, it snags and lurches. That creates “icequakes” measurable in the same way as earthquakes. In 1993, there were seven such quakes in Greenland. In 2005, as the ice accelerated, there were 32.

“For a long time it was thought that a change of climate could affect the ice sheets very slowly,” said Meredith Nettles, a scientist from Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, who monitors a large glacier in eastern Greenland. “Now we believe the Greenland ice can respond to changes in climate much more quickly than anyone thought.”

In geologic terms, “quickly” still means decades or centuries. But some scientists say the Earth is approaching a point when the process cannot be stopped. Only in recent years did scientists conclude that sea levels are rising twice as fast as they had estimated, said H. Jay Zwally, a senior research scientist from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

“We are seeing things taking place in the ice now that weren’t expected, that five years ago we didn’t even know about,” said Zwally, who will spend his 14th summer on the Greenland ice cap this year. “I think eventually Greenland will reach a point that the change is irreversible in the current climate.”

By Doug Struck

Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, April 8, 2007

VICTORIA, B.C. — The mystery emerged slowly, its clues maddeningly diverse.

Sally Lester, an animal pathologist at a British Columbia laboratory, slipped a slide under her microscope — a tissue from a dog on Vancouver Island. Her lens focused on a tiny cell that looked like a boiled egg. It was late 1999. She had started seeing a lot of those.

On the eastern side of the island, several dead porpoises washed ashore early the next year. Scientist Craig Stephen, who runs a research center on the island, slit one open. He found its lungs seized by pneumonia and its other organs swollen by strange, flowerlike tumors.

At work at the family trucking firm in Victoria, on the southern tip of the island, Esther Young, a lively 45-year-old mother, was feeling lousy in the fall of 2001. She had headaches and night sweats and was tired, her family said.

The doctor told her she was pre-menopausal and it would pass.

All would become pieces of a medical mystery centered on a tropical disease apparently brought to North America by a warming climate. An alien fungus took root on Vancouver Island eight years ago and has since killed eight people and infected at least 163 others, as well as many animals.

Similar cases have been found elsewhere in British Columbia and in Washington state and Oregon. Scientists say the fungus may be thriving because of a string of unusually warm summers here. They say it is a sign of things to come.

“As climate change happens, new ecological niches will become available to organisms, and we will see this kind of thing happen again,” said Karen Bartlett, a scientist at the University of British Columbia who played a central role in the search for the disease’s cause.

Her investigation eventually would focus on a fungus, a member of the yeast family called Cryptococcus gattii. The microscopic fungus is normally found in the bark of eucalyptus trees in Australia and other tropical zones.

Physicians in North America are familiar with a relative, Cryptococcus neoformans. In humans, it shows up through pneumonia when immune systems already are weak, most typically in AIDS patients. In dogs and cats, it can form abscesses below the eyes. Lester, working in her pathology lab in 1999, was used to seeing tissue specimens from six to 10 pets a year with it.

But by 2000, vets on the island were sending her 10 positive samples a month. Lester knew Cryptococcus causes a disease that, like bird flu and West Nile virus, affects animals and humans. She put in a call to the British Columbia Center for Disease Control.

The call came at a busy time for Murray Fyfe. The head epidemiologist at the provincial CDC was then dealing with a bevy of other public health problems: Peanuts from China had caused salmonella. Some local spinach was tainted. And there was a surge of men coming to hospitals with diarrhea.

Fyfe consulted Pamela Kibsey, a microbiologist at the Vancouver Island Health Authority. Kibsey said she had noticed an increase in human cases of Cryptococcus. And there was something strange about it. It was infecting healthy people, not just the sick.

Fyfe formed a group to begin combing records of veterinarians and hospitals, tracing the first cases back to 1999. He asked Bartlett, at UBC, to join the group. They sent samples of the Cryptococcus recovered from diseased tissue for further analysis. The results showed it wasn’t the familiar form of “crypto.”

“This was an Australian fungus,” Stephen said. “We said, ‘What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?’ ”

More disturbing, the fungus appeared to be more virulent than in Australia. There, it infects about four people per million and is rarely fatal. On Vancouver Island, the rate was 27 per million, and it was more often killing people.

The scientists can only guess how, or when, the fungus arrived. It could have been brought on eucalyptus trees imported by nurseries from Australia. Or it may always have been on the island, quietly clinging to life unnoticed until the warm summers spurred it to proliferate.

“With global warming, it may have finally been able to emerge to a level [at which] it is infectious,” Fyfe said. Humans and animals living in the area, having had no exposure, had developed no immunities to it. Some people reacted to exposure by developing the disease.

Bartlett formed a team of students to try to find gattii in the wild. Armed with new detection kits ordered from Japan, they tramped through back yards on Vancouver Island, digging up soil, taking air samples, swabbing bark on trees. They went out with hour-long questionnaires to talk to survivors of the disease and to owners of infected pets.

One common site came up: Rathtrevor Beach Provincial Park. It is an expanse of moss-covered fir and hemlock trees that reach for the sky, cheered by ravens and gulls, next to the Strait of Georgia. Patient Esther Young had gone to the park to kayak. Several other patients had been there.

Fyfe helped the students swab an old Douglas fir at the park. Two weeks later, Bartlett called him, excited. The swabs had come back positive, the first discovery ofCryptococcus gattii in the wild.

With the summer of 2002 approaching, Fyfe had a problem. The park had a popular campground; families reserved a year ahead for tent spots. Fyfe knew most people could come into contact with gattii with no ill effects. Those few who did become infected could be treated successfully.

So he decided on a low-key information campaign. He posted pamphlets in the park and sent out notices to vacationers who had made Internet reservations. The reaction was prompt: The park got 750 cancellations.

Word was also getting out through the news media. Ken James heard it on TV. At 55, the former millworker in the island town of Duncan had been plagued by a tickle in his chest, a nagging cough, night sweats and an intense desire every day to take a nap. When he heard the report on “this weird fungal disease,” he said, it ticked off the same symptoms.

His doctor was skeptical, but a chest X-ray showed nodules in his lung — either cancer or the fungus. To James’s relief, it was gattii, and after a year of oral medication, he is cured.

“Did I walk past a tree when the fungus was exploding? Who knows,” he said. “If I hadn’t seen that news report, things could have been very different for me.”

By the start of 2003, Bartlett’s students had found the fungus in other spots. They eventually concluded that it had infested a several-hundred-mile range on eastern Vancouver Island. Health authorities agreed with business leaders in the adjacent city of Parksville that it was no longer fair to target the park alone, and warning signs at the Rathtrevor Beach park came down in favor of a wider information campaign.

Health authorities still are struggling to strike the right balance with the public. “It’s serious, but it’s still a very rare disease. Much rarer than influenza, for example,” said Eleni Galanis, epidemiologist at the B.C. Center for Disease Control. “People need to be aware of it, in order to treat it. But we don’t want people to stop going outside.”

If doctors catch the disease early, oral doses of antifungal drugs will kill the cells. Undetected, the fungus can get into the spinal fluid, causing potentially fatal meningitis.

Young went home sick in February 2002. By that summer, she could not walk, had lost her ability to speak, had gone temporarily blind and was slowly starving because she could not keep food down. By the time doctors tested her, the fungus had reached her brain.

“My poor sister couldn’t even tell anyone how she was feeling,” said Deborah Chow, 51, reminiscing with her family. Finally, with Young’s pain clear and the end inevitable, Chow held her sister in the hospital and whispered, “It’s okay to go. Dad will be okay. Your son will be okay.” She died 45 minutes later.

New cases on Vancouver Island have leveled off at about 25 a year. Eight people have died. Bartlett’s focus now is to figure out whether — and how — the fungus is moving.

Five human cases have been found on the British Columbia mainland; two people have been sickened in Washington state; and Oregon has had two fatalities from a similar but not identical strain of gattii. Health authorities in Washington and Oregon say the disease is still too rare in their areas to warrant alarm, but they are watching it. Bartlett said it is unclear whether the fungus has been tracked elsewhere on the bottom of shoes or in wheel wells.

“One possibility for what we are seeing on the mainland is the first colonization, like we had on the island in 1999,” Bartlett said. Another is that those traces will disappear.

The infected porpoises — at least 25 of them now — suggest the fungus is carried by air over the water. Stephen Raverty, a pathologist at the provincial veterinary center in British Columbia, worries that the fungus can attack other species.

Killer whales, whose numbers have dropped sharply here, are cetaceans like the stricken Dall’s porpoises. Raverty and others have been tracking the killer whales in Puget Sound, using glassine slides mounted on long poles to catch droplets from the whales’ exhalations, to see whether the animals have been infected.

So far, they haven’t found the fungus. But animals can act as a sentinel for humans, the scientists say.

“These are the types of things we will see with climate change,” Fyfe said. “As the weather in North America gets warmer, we are more likely to be affected by these public health threats.”

Wealth Beneath the Permafrost Changes the Northwest After the Gold Is Gone

By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 5, 2007

LAC DE GRAS, Northwest Territories — Gold opened this northern land, attracting a rush of prospectors and miners who splayed the earth, built up towns and then, after seven decades, closed up the last exhausted gold mine two years ago.

Now there are diamonds.

The first were found by a stubborn geologist who financed years of searching with money borrowed from neighbors. That prompted the biggest rush to stake mining claims in North America. Today, three mines are open and more are planned, bringing a flush of cash to northern Canada and making the country the third-largest producer of diamonds by value, surpassing even South Africa.

The booming industry is replacing the stigma of “blood diamonds” mined in conflict zones with images of polar bears and maple leaves engraved on snow-pure gems.

The riches have brought a juggernaut of men and machines to the remote tundra. They came to a place with no roads, towns or electricity, and brutal winters. Now giant machines screw into the permafrost, moving and sifting tons of rock 24 hours a day.

The territorial government is cheering them on. “Diamond mining is critical for us,” Brendan Bell, the local minister of industry, said from the capital, Yellowknife. “We don’t want to be a one-trick pony. But if you have to be reliant on one industry, diamonds are perfect.”

In 2005, even before the Jericho mine opened in the adjoining territory of Nunavut, Canada’s first two big diamond mines in the Northwest Territories unearthed 15 pounds of the gemstones, worth $4 million, each day.

At the Diavik Diamond Mine site here, Justin Wedawin, 29, sits in a cab 30 feet above the ground, steering a 240-ton dump truck.

“It’s a bit like driving a ship,” he said of his huge vehicle. It shudders as an even bigger machine loads it with ore in the dim light at the bottom of the open mine pit. He then begins the slow, 22-minute drive up the circular road carved into the side of the pit.

“When I come out of the pit, it’s like going from night to day,” he said.

Diavik’s engineers have drained part of the lake here, Lac de Gras, diked it with 6 million tons of rock and corkscrewed 500 feet beneath the lake bed. They have built a sprawling complex to house hundreds of workers and an airport to get them here, brought machines the size of a house to rework the land, and erected towering structures to crush and sift the rock — all to find diamonds.

Like most of Diavik’s 735 employees, Wedawin works 12-hour shifts for two weeks straight, then goes home for two weeks. His home is in the native community of Rae, 200 miles away. Thirteen air routes serve workers who commute from as far away as Edmonton, 750 miles to the south.

There are a few odd rules to working in a diamond mine. “You don’t bend down to pick up anything” off the ground, said Gordon Kretchmar, 47, a heavy equipment operator who commutes from Kamloops, British Columbia. “A stick, a stone or anything.” Employees are searched going to and from work.

But most workers never even see a diamond, only massive tons of gray stone disappearing into the jaws of machines. The machines sift and sort out the diamonds in an automated “no-hands” operation, removing temptation.

Some people here are wary of the north’s latest call to riches. The gold miners who began migrating here in the 1930s created a boomtown in Yellowknife with large gaps between rich and poor. The companies skimmed the largess, pocked the earth and left a highly toxic legacy of arsenic trioxide in chambers underground.

Native groups, which contend they were cheated by the gold mines, have pledged that it won’t happen again. They are surrendering rights to their land only in return for guarantees of jobs and training. The number of Indians and Inuit enrolled in post-secondary education has soared as skilled and technical jobs beckon at the nearby mines.

Environmental groups are giving the mines much tougher scrutiny. Local native groups are part of monitoring teams that hover over the operations and inspect the companies’ plans on issues from water quality to caribou migration paths.

“This isn’t the gold mining that we saw in the latter part of the last century,” Bell said. “Environmental standards are much higher. There is lots of monitoring. It’s a different era.”

But the prosperity has brought a housing squeeze in Yellowknife. There are new drugs and crime in town. Attempts to establish a gem-polishing industry are flagging. Some of the companies owned on paper by natives have mostly non-natives on staff, and other aboriginal groups still contend mining companies’ profits take precedence over residents’ concerns.

“The thing about diamonds is they make the companies incredibly rich. The question is how much of that they leave behind to the community,” said Joan Kuyek, national coordinator of MiningWatch Canada, an Ottawa-based watchdog group.

“Most of the aboriginal people are desperate for cash, desperate for work, desperate for some opportunities for their young people. Anyone coming in and offering those things cannot really be resisted.”

Environmentalists also say that despite tougher regulations, the mines will leave a long-term scar on the land. Caribou numbers are falling; Indian hunters blame the mines. Long after the diamond mines have closed, their piles of excavated earth will be the tallest features on this subarctic tundra.

“The monitoring agency has said the environmental performance on the ground has been quite good, or very good. But that doesn’t mean there are no environmental impacts,” said Bill Ross, a University of Calgary professor who chairs a committee that reviews environmental management at one of the mines.

“There will always be issues,” said Tom Hoefer, a Yellowknife native and Diavik’s point man with the community. “But if you have to have a mine in your back yard, a diamond mine isn’t bad to have.”

The Diavik mine, co-owned by a Toronto company and mining giant Rio Tinto, and the Ekati mine, run by Australian mining giant BHP Billiton, are among the richest in the world.

In 1998, the BHP mine was the first to open at the site of Canada’s original 1991 discovery by geologist Charles Fipke and a partner, Stewart Blusson. Fipke spent decades pursuing diamonds around the world. Abandoned by companies and a wife who tired of his obsession, he borrowed money from friends and sold stock to neighbors, offering only hope.

Like a detective, he sleuthed out purple garnets and emerald-green chrome diopsides that might accompany diamonds, refined his hunches about where the glaciers might have picked them up, and eventually solved the mystery by drilling near the frigid shores of Lac de Gras, 200 miles northeast of Yellowknife.

Other prospectors moved in quickly after him. Small exploration companies flocked to Yellowknife, rented anything that could fly and raced into the wilderness to plant wooden stakes marking their claims. The Diavik mine, 20 miles from Fipke’s find, was staked out under the waters of Lac de Gras and opened in 2003.

“It was a surprising time. We lived through the largest staking rush the world has seen,” said Yellowknife Mayor Gordon Van Tighem. “There were bales of stakes around town. The local construction companies were churning them out, running out of wood. With the gold mines petering out, it came along at a very good time for us.”

The diamonds lie in ancient magma, called kimberlite pipes, which burst from the earth’s core through fissures in the granite 55 million years ago. Surging to the surface, a very few of them passed through even more ancient beds of diamonds formed 3 billion years ago, carrying the crystallized carbon stones to the surface.

The Diavik and BHP mines are centered over several of those conical pipes. Both operations have now strip-mined in a circle so deep they must move to underground tunneling to follow the pipes further.

Most of the diamonds produced here will be sent to London and then Belgium, the heart of the diamond trade. Some will be returned to three Yellowknife firms that cut and polish the rough stones into gems, and use lasers to engrave on them an emblem of Canadian authenticity.

A system of registering and tracking diamonds worldwide was launched in 2002 to crimp the trade in “blood diamonds” that has financed horrific violence in Africa. While activists have criticized the system’s shortcomings, Canadian retailers are cashing in on the innocent reputation of their stones, marked with microscopic polar bears or maple leafs.

The mines will probably last only about 20 years. But with the optimism of a miner, Diavik’s Hoefer notes that Canada has hundreds of kimberlite pipes that have not yet been fully explored.

Diamonds can dazzle — and disappoint, Hoefer knows.

“But for right now,” he said, “life’s good, everybody’s fat and the mines are rich.”

Special correspondent Natalia Alexandrova in Toronto contributed to this report.

Remote Sites in Subarctic Canada Depend on Rigs Plying Hazardous, Heavily Traveled Winter Road

By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, February 27, 2007

ON THE ICE ROAD, Northwest Territories — Elden Pashovitz eased his big truck and 28 tons of aviation fuel onto the ice of Tibbitt Lake and set out in low gear for his destination, dozens of ponds and lakes away.

Ahead, the scene was bleak, white and flat. The temperature was minus 10. The ice crackled under the 30 tires of his tandem rig.

Pashovitz moved his vehicle to its place in a caravan of heavy trucks, one of many processions now crawling across frozen tundra and iced-over lakes in the grip of the Canadian winter. Their mission is to deliver a year’s worth of supplies to remote sites — mines and drilling rigs and small native villages — that depend on the ice road for all their needs.

The trucks ply the wilderness along a tenuous artery. Maintenance crews work in the bitter cold to flood the road, continually thickening it. The drivers watch for buckling ice rising as pressure ridges on the road. And the heavy trucks bend the ice sheet, creating waves underwater that can blast through the surface in a “blowout,” making treacherous holes.

But there’s no turning back.

“Once you’re on the ice, you’re committed,” said Pashovitz, 35. “You’ve got to keep going. If you stop, little by little the weight of your truck would sink into the ice.”

There are many winter roads through Canada, and some in Finland, Russia and Alaska, short-lived lifelines to places that otherwise can be reached only by plane. But at about 360 miles, this road is the longest in the world that runs almost entirely over water — 85 percent of it is on ice. It also carries the heaviest traffic.

On a typical day, the cold winter sun struggles to the horizon to reveal an unending line of fuel tankers, flatbed trucks and tractor-trailers, all huffing exhaust into the cobalt sky.

This ice road was first built in the winter of 1983 to service the Lupin Gold Mine, 250 miles north of Yellowknife. The gold mine is now closed, but four diamond mines have been opened along the route, each requiring huge construction equipment, vast quantities of fuel and supplies, and thousands of bags of cement for mines and dikes.

“The economic lifeblood of the Northwest Territories depends on these roads,” said Erik Madsen, director of winter road operations for Diavik Diamond Mines, which shares with Billiton BHP most of the cost of getting the road built each year.

This year, the companies hope to send a record 10,500 truckloads out from Yellowknife on this road. The trucks leave in groups of four, every 20 minutes, night and day.

But that is only a hope. Last winter, one of the warmest on record, the road opened late and melted early, stranding tons of needed supplies. Mining companies spent $100 million trying to airlift the cargo. Diavik cut a 500-ton excavating shovel into pieces and rented the world’s largest helicopter from Russia to lift the pieces to its mine site.

“We can’t afford another season like the last one,” Madsen said.

So far, this winter has allayed fears that global warming will make last year’s weather the norm. The winter road opened early, on Jan. 28, after a sustained cold snap, and has strengthened with steady arctic temperatures. Road controllers use ground radar and boreholes to monitor the thickness of the ice, gradually letting heavier trucks onto the road as the ice grows to 40 inches, at which point it can support a 70-ton vehicle.

But the road’s hard appearance is deceptive: Ice bends, cracks, becomes brittle, flows and shrinks in unexpected ways.

“Ice is really kind of funny stuff. We really don’t know” anything about it, said John Zigarlick. That’s quite an admission from the man who built the first road as president of the Lupin mine, retired, then started Nuna Logistics, a company that does arctic drilling and construction, and rebuilds this road every year for the diamond mines.

Zigarlick’s 140 employees here carve an eight-lane-wide path on the ice, build express bypasses for the returning empty trucks, and mend cracks and holes with water.

“We’ve gotten better at it,” said Zigarlick, 69, who leaves his yacht parked in Vancouver to prowl the ice road. “But I think we’re starting to push the limits of what this road will take.”

The radios in his pickup yap away: the truckers on one VHF channel, nudging each other along and chatting to keep awake; the road crews on another, including the squad of retired Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers who spend their winters patrolling the ice road to keep the truckers’ speed down.

The radio barks out news of an accident on portage 27.

“I hope there’s no fuel spill,” Zigarlick said with a sigh. “If you spill fuel, you have to dig up the ground, and it will take six weeks of explaining.”

Zigarlick said no truck driver on the road has ever been lost to the ice, though the dangers are there. Several trucks have sunk, but their drivers scrambled out. In 2000, a snowplow operator died of a heart attack after his machine plunged into the frigid water. In 2004, the son of one of Yellowknife’s major trucking company families drowned while clearing another short ice road near this one.

The drivers, however, say the biggest problem is tedium, as their loaded vehicles crawl along at mandatory speed limits of 6 and 15 mph to keep from damaging the ice.

“It’s a different way of driving,” Pashovitz said. “It’s slow and long. You have to keep occupied.” The radio chatter gets annoying. He has satellite radio and a CD player; others watch movies on mini-DVD players. Pashovitz swears he has seen drivers reading, and one serenaded his pals with a fiddle on the long straightaways.

The radio chirps with drivers reporting a rare sighting of a timber wolf. Caribou cross the road sometimes. Red fox dart tentatively amid the snowdrifts, searching for jack rabbits or ptarmigan. Ravens will fly idly beside the trucks or perch on the big rearview mirrors as the vehicles move, demanding a bite of a trucker’s sandwich.

Pashovitz and his father run an organic grain farm in central Saskatchewan. There is not much to do in the long winter, so he has been coming north every year for 10 years. He works seven days a week for about 10 weeks, sleeping in a bed behind his seat in the roomy cab, with the engine running. He stops at the camps set up along the road to shower and eat, watch some television or call home.

Many of those plying the road are like Pashovitz: farmers or construction workers looking for winter work, or retired hands seeking the novelty and beauty of working in a subarctic winter. And the money: Pashovitz said he can earn $800 for the two-day trip to the BHP mine, more if he goes farther up the road. In a season, he can earn enough to help ease the squeeze on his family farm.

It also gives him some bragging rights, Pashovitz acknowledges. “Nobody back home has done anything like this.”

Quebecers Turn to Church Terms, Rather Than the Sexual or Scatological, to Vent Their Anger

By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, December 5, 2006

MONTREAL — “Oh, tabernacle!” The man swore in French as a car splashed through a puddle, sending water onto his pants. He could never be quoted in the papers here. It is too profane.

So are other angry oaths that sound innocuous in English: chalice, host, baptism. In French-speaking Quebec, swearing sounds like an inventory being taken at a church.

English-speaking Canadians use profanities that would be well understood in the United States, many of them scatological or sexual terms. But the Quebecois prefer to turn to religion when they are mad. They adopt commonplace Catholic terms — and often creative permutations of them — for swearing.

In doing so, their oaths speak volumes about the history of this French province.

“When you get mad, you look for words that attack what represses you,” said Louise Lamarre, a Montreal cinematographer who must tread lightly around the language, depending on whether her films are in French or English. “In America, you are so Puritan that the swearing is mostly about sex. Here, since we were repressed so long by the church, people use religious terms.”

And the words that are shocking in English — including the slang for intercourse — are so mild in Quebecois French they appear routinely in the media. But not church terms.

“You swear about things that are taboo,” said André Lapierre, a professor of linguistics at the University of Ottawa. In the United States, “it is not appropriate to talk about sex or scatological subjects, so that is what you use in your curse words. The f-word is a perfect example.

“In Canadian French, you have none of the sexual aspects. So what do you replace it with? You replace it with religion. If you are going to use a taboo word, it would be anything related to the cult, to Christ, the Communion wafer, Jesus Christ, vestments, and elements of the altar like tabernacle. There’s quite a few of them.”

Visitors from France are dumbfounded at that use of French, said Lamarre. “But that’s because they got away from domination of the church a long time ago. They cut off the head of the king really early. We didn’t do that.”

The Catholic Church was overwhelmingly dominant in Quebec from early in the province’s history — England’s King George III gave the French Catholic clergy enormous power in 1774, in part to counter the growing American insurgency to the south. In the “Quiet Revolution” of the 1960s, Quebecers rebelled. They “just stopped going to church one Sunday,” as Lamarre put it.

The swearwords have persisted even though church attendance has plummeted in the past 40 years. Because of that drop, “when the young kids on the street are swearing, they don’t even know what they are swearing about,” mused Monsignor Francis Coyle, pastor of St. Patrick’s Basilica in Montreal. “They’re baptized in church, and that’s about it.”

Last spring, the Montreal Archdiocese commissioned an advertising campaign that erected large billboards in the city intended to shock and educate. Each billboard featured a word like “tabernacle” or “chalice” — startling swearwords on the street — and offered the correct dictionary definition for the religious term. Such as: “Tabernacle — small cupboard locked by key in the middle of the altar” containing the sacred goblet.

“The point was to try to get people not to use the terms too glibly,” Coyle said.

The campaign ended, but Lapierre said Quebecers continue to use the words in highly inventive ways — as expletives, interjections, verbs, adverbs and nouns. One could say, for example, “You Christ that guy,” to mean throwing a person violently. “I don’t know any other language that does that so well,” he said.

The French here also modify the oaths into non-words, depending on the level of politeness desired. The word “bapteme” — baptism — is used as a strong oath, but a modification, “bateche,” is milder. The sacramental wafer, a “host” in English and “hostie” in French, can be watered down to just the sound “sst” in polite company. “Tabernacle” can become just “tabar” to avoid too much offense.

The oaths are so ingrained that one cannot converse fluently without them, said Lapierre. “I teach them in my class.”

String of Warm Winters Alarms ‘Sentries for the Rest of the World’

By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, March 22, 2006

PANGNIRTUNG, Canada — Thirty miles from the Arctic Circle, hunter Noah Metuq feels the Arctic changing. Its frozen grip is loosening; the people and animals who depend on its icy reign are experiencing a historic reshaping of their world.

Fish and wildlife are following the retreating ice caps northward. Polar bears are losing the floes they need for hunting. Seals, unable to find stable ice, are hauling up on islands to give birth. Robins and barn owls and hornets, previously unknown so far north, are arriving in Arctic villages.

The global warming felt by wildlife and increasingly documented by scientists is hitting first and hardest here, in the Arctic where the Inuit people make their home. The hardy Inuit — described by one of their leaders as “sentries for the rest of the world” — say this winter was the worst in a series of warm winters, replete with alarms of the quickening transformation that many scientists expect will spread from the north to the rest of the globe.

The Inuit — with homelands in Alaska, Canada, Greenland and northern Russia — saw the signs of change everywhere. Metuq hauled his fishing shack onto the ice of Cumberland Sound last month, as he has every winter, confident it would stay there for three months. Three days later, he was astonished to see the ice break up, sweeping away his shack and $6,000 of turbot fishing gear.

In Nain, Labrador, hunter Simon Kohlmeister, 48, drove his snowmobile onto ocean ice where he had hunted safely for 20 years. The ice flexed. The machine started sinking. He said he was “lucky to get off” and grab his rifle as the expensive machine was lost. “Someday we won’t have any snow,” he said. “We won’t be Eskimos.”

In Resolute Bay, Inuit people insisted that the dark arctic night was lighter. Wayne Davidson, a longtime weather station operator, finally figured out that a warmer layer of air was reflecting light from the sun over the horizon. “It’s getting very strange up here,” he said. “There’s more warm air, more massive and more uniform.”

Villagers say the shrinking ice floes mean they see hungry polar bears more frequently. In the Hudson Bay village of Ivujivik, Lydia Angyiou, a slight woman of 41, was walking in front of her 7-year-old boy last month when she turned to see a polar bear stalking the child. To save him, she charged with her fists into the 700-pound bear, which slapped her twice to the ground before a hunter shot it, according to the Nunatsiaq News.

In the Russian northernmost territory of Chukotka, the Inuit have drilled wells for water because there is so little snow to melt. Reykjavik, Iceland, had its warmest February in 41 years. In Alaska, water normally sealed by ice is now open, brewing winter storms that lash coastal and river villages. Federal officials say two dozen native villages are threatened. In Pangnirtung, residents were startled by thunder, rain showers and a temperature of 48 degrees in February, a time when their world normally is locked and silent at minus-20 degrees.

“We were just standing around in our shorts, stunned and amazed, trying to make sense of it,” said one resident, Donald Mearns.

“These are things that all of our old oral history has never mentioned,” said Enosik Nashalik, 87, the eldest of male elders in this Inuit village. “We cannot pass on our traditional knowledge, because it is no longer reliable. Before, I could look at cloud patterns or the wind, or even what stars are twinkling, and predict the weather. Now, everything is changed.”

The Inuit alarms, once passed off as odd stories, are earning confirmation from science. Canada’s federal weather service said this month that the country had experienced its warmest winter since measurements began in 1948. Nationwide, average temperatures this winter were 7 degrees above normal. Some of the larger temperature increases were in the arctic north.

“That is entirely consistent with the long-range forecasts that indicate the effects of global warming will be most felt in the north,” said Douglas Bancroft, director of Oceanography and Climate Science for Canada’s federal fisheries department.

“What we see is very clear. We are going to see a reduction in the overall arctic ice. It doesn’t mean it goes away. But it brings profound changes,” he said by telephone from Ottawa, the Canadian capital. “Weather will get stormier because the more open water you have, the easier it is for storms to brew up.”

Bancroft said there would also be significant changes in the region’s ecosystems.

“You have species that adapted over 40,000 years to a certain regime,” he said. “Some will make it, and some won’t.”

Satellites at NASA have measured a meltdown of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica in the past decade. With other NASA data, scientists in Boulder, Colo., say the retreat of the ice caps in 2006 may be as large as last year’s, which they say was likely the biggest in a century. Earth’s average surface temperatures last year tied those of 1998, the highest in more than a century, NASA says.

In this month’s issue of the journal Science, a team of U.S. and Canadian researchers said the Bering Sea was warming so much it was experiencing “a change from arctic to subarctic conditions.” Gray whales are heading north and walruses are starving, adrift on ice floes in water too deep for feeding. Warmer-water fish such as pollock and salmon are coming in, the researchers reported.

Off the coast of Nova Scotia, ice on Northumberland Strait was so thin and unstable this winter that thousands of gray seals crawled on unaccustomed islands to give birth. Storms and high tides washed 1,500 newborn seal pups out to sea, said Jerry Conway, a marine mammal expert for the federal fisheries department in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.

“We are seeing dramatic changes in the weather systems,” Conway said. “To be honest, we don’t really understand what are the potential impacts. If you look back in history, there have been warming periods that have gotten back to normal. But we don’t know if that will happen this time.”

Metuq, the hunter, fears the worst. “The world is slowly disintegrating,” he said, inside his heated house in Pangnirtung, a community of 1,200 perched on a dramatic union of mountain and fjord on Baffin Island. Seal skins stretched on canvas dried outside his home. The town remained treacherous. Rain in February had frozen solid, and there had been almost no snow to cover it.

“They call it climate change,” he said. “But we just call it breaking up.”

The troubles for the Inuit are ominous for everyone, says Sheila Watt-Cloutier, head of the International Circumpolar Conference, an organization for the 155,000 Inuit worldwide.

“People have become disconnected from their environment. But the Inuit have remained through this whole dilemma, remained extremely connected to its environment and wildlife,” she said. “They are the early warning. They see what’s happening to the planet, and give the message to the rest of the world.”

Researchers Aboard Icebreaker Say Shipping Could Add to Risks for Ecosystem

By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, November 5, 2006

ICEBREAKER CHANNEL, Northwest Passage — The Amundsen’s engines growl low, as if in warning. The ship steals ahead; its powerful spotlights stab at fog thick with the lore of crushed ships and frozen voyagers. Ice floes gleam from the void like the eyes of animals in the night.

The Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Amundsen weaves in graceful slow motion through the ice pack, advancing through the legendary Northwest Passage well after the Arctic should be iced over and shuttered to ships for the winter.

The fearsome ice is weakened and failing, sapped by climate change. Ultimately, this night’s ghostly procession through Icebreaker Channel will be the worst the ship faces on its late-season voyage. Much of the trip, crossing North America from west to east through the Northwest Passage, will be in open water, with no ice in sight.

The Amundsen is here to challenge the ice that has long guarded the legendary Northwest Passage across the roof of the Earth, and to plumb the scientific mysteries of an Arctic thawing from global warming.

A relentless climb of temperature — 5 degrees in 30 years — is shrinking the Arctic ice and reawakening dreams of a 4,000-mile shortcut just shy of the North Pole, passing beside the Arctic’s beckoning oil and mineral riches.

“Shipping companies are going to think about this, and if they think it’s worth it, they are going to try it,” says the captain of the Amundsen, Cmdr. Alain Gariepy, 43. “The question is not if, but when.”

More ships will bring the risk — the certainty, some say — of accidents and black oil spills smeared on the white Arctic.

“This water is our hunting ground,” Maria Kripanik, an Inuit born 52 years ago in a tent on the beach of Igloolik, told researchers who visited from the ship as it passed her village. There, hunters still use harpoons to snag beluga whales. “I don’t know if the people here will like the idea of seeing ships all the time in our hunting ground,” she said.

Equally wary are the scientists packed aboard the Amundsen. They occupy the Coast Guard ship for three months each year to study climate change in the fragile North, where the effects of a warmer globe are being felt first. They began this summer in Quebec City and churned west to the Beaufort Sea. As fall came on frigid gusts, the ship turned east again toward the Northwest Passage.

The Arctic ice pack rarely tolerates intruders in late October. It splintered the wooden ships of early explorers who stayed, seized fast the steel vessels that followed, and mocked dreams of regular transit through any of the routes in the maze of straits and channels of the passage.

British explorer John Franklin, whose search for the Northwest Passage transfixed the Western world, perished on a frigid island near here in 1847. Searching for him, many others fell. Their diaries, sometimes found by their frozen bodies, are grim accounts of waiting for a brief break in the ice, as starvation, scurvy and madness claimed them one by one. The map of the Arctic is littered with their names.

Finessing the Frozen Sea

A cool and careful Norwegian, Roald Amundsen took three years to thread these snowy islands a century ago. The Amundsen was built to follow its namesake. It is 323 feet long, with engines nearly three times more powerful than normal. The propellers, rudder and hull are hardened. The S-shaped bow rides up on the ice, using the ship’s 8,500 tons to crush down through the pack. The Amundsen can maintain a steady march through ice four feet thick and can go through scattered 10-foot floes.

Its nemesis is old ice. Leached of salt, multiyear ice is concrete-hard. Capped by deceptively fluffy coats of snow, its swollen blue belly under the surface can weigh as much as a building. Gariepy recalls with a shudder a Greek vessel limping into harbor with a 65-foot gash in its hull, torn by old ice.

A half-day east of Kugluktuk, once called Coppermine, the Amundsen meets a flat, gray plate on the water, new ice formed this year. The ship’s hull slices cleanly through it. The thinnest ice breaks into a foam of small pieces that skitter on the frozen surface.

Seals poke their heads above water to watch this strange beast. A white Arctic fox, caught in the ship’s spotlight at night on the ice, freezes and then flees. A young polar bear, apparently awakened as it slept on a floe, scampers from the path of the vessel, then ambles on the ice alongside for a while. It stretches its long neck to sniff the air, then turns its attention to holes in the ice in search of a tasty seal.

For one month in September, if the last winter’s ice has finally melted and before the new ice forms, ships nose tentatively into parts of the Northwest Passage. Barges bring supplies to Inuit communities and mines. Last year, seven cruise ships poked around the eastern fiords. Icebreakers from Canada, the United States and Russia ply the waters. Only seven ships made it all the way through last year, two of them icebreakers. And none so late as this voyage by the Amundsen.

Abreast of the island where the frozen skeletons of Franklin’s ice-stranded crew were found, the Amundsen enters Icebreaker Channel. This slim corridor past the southeastern tip of Victoria Island opens into the path of the vast ice pack flowing south from the Pole. The ice pack gripped the vessels of early venturers, holding fast for a year, and now offers the Amundsen its toughest challenge. The ship enters at night, picking carefully through a field of new and old ice.

The darkened bridge of the ship is hushed; orders lowly given by the captain are echoed quietly by the helmsman. The vessel avoids the largest floes and plows over others with a shudder and a bump.

“You can’t just use brute force,” Gariepy explains. “You have to respect the sea, go with it and not fight it. A seven-foot-thick ice chunk the size of the ship weighs 4,000 tons. You don’t just slam into it; you need more finesse. Even in an icebreaker, if you can avoid the ice, you do.”

The ship emerges to head for Bellot Strait, a narrow channel usually choked with ice. Gariepy spends the night before reading old accounts of navigating the risky strait, named for a young French officer swallowed by an ice crevice. Before edging in, he sends the little red Messerschmitt helicopter from his stern deck to scout.

“This is always the worst place for the ice,” says pilot Michel Fiset, 57, as he lifts his aircraft off the ship. He buzzes through the strait, then climbs to view the expanse of gray water beyond. “This is very unusual. We can see 10 to 15 miles and we don’t see even an ice cube. It’s open.”

‘Less and Less Ice’

Satellite imagery has shown that the Arctic ice cap is thinning and already is nearly 30 percent smaller than it was 25 years ago. In the winter of 2004-05, the Arctic’s perennial ice, which usually survives the summer, shrank by 280,000 square miles, the size of Turkey. This past August, a crack opened in the ice pack from the Russian Arctic to the North Pole, an event never seen before.

Arctic ice reflects sunlight; its absence may accelerate global warming. The intricate chemistry that occurs in the rich Arctic waters could go haywire with unaccustomed heat and sunlight. Whole species seem destined to disappear while others move northward in their place. Inuit who thrived here for millennia are finding the thin ice and changed wildlife inhospitable.

“People tend to think there’s not much life in the Arctic. But it’s an incredibly diverse ecosystem,” says Gary Stern, the chief scientist on the Amundsen. He was aboard when the ship was deliberately frozen in Franklin Bay in 2003. They spent the long winter doing experiments on the ice. The Amundsen has a pool to access the water through the hull; it became a favorite hangout for ringed seals.

This year is “amazing. No ice,” Stern says.

Estimates vary widely on when the passage will be open to shipping all summer because of the ceaseless warming. The Canadian Ice Service conservatively predicts the southerly drift of even a shrunken ice pack will keep the passage clogged for most of this century. Other experts predict it will be open as soon as 2020; Canada’s defense agency says 2015. Those who visit regularly say the evidence is before their eyes.

“You can see it. You come every year and you see less and less ice,” says Marie Emmanuelle Rail, 30, a researcher who has been working in the Arctic for five years.

ArcticNet, the Canadian university consortium organizing the voyage, believes the interwoven effects of global warming may be revealed as shipmates, from students to noted scientists, discuss their work over galley tables. The vast Arctic out the portholes is a constant reminder of the stakes.

“It’s huge. It’s all about saving the world,” says Stephane Thanassekos, 26, a French researcher pursuing his doctoral degree at Laval University in Quebec City.

A scientist with infectious enthusiasm, Thanassekos operates a contraption that looks like an automatic milker from a dairy barn. It has 24 cylinders that can each be controlled to collect water at a different depth, up to 3,000 feet, and a bevy of sophisticated probes.

“These measurements are used to calibrate the models that tell us, for example, when we won’t have ice in the Arctic,” he says. His own work calculates the survival prospects of Arctic cod, “which are right in the middle of the food chain” of the Arctic.

Jody Deming, 54, a professor at the University of Washington, studies “hot spots” in the ocean that are now being overtaken by a gradual warming, and microbes in super-cold ice that may help reveal life in space.

Stern, 47, is trying to figure out how mercury and other chemicals are making their way into animals of the Arctic. Julie Viellette, 27, a graduate student at Laval University, is studying viruses and bacteria. Even in the harsh Arctic environment, a thimbleful of water contains 100,000 bacteria. Robbie Bennett, 29, a geologist, pokes through muck hauled from the seabed 300 feet down, alive with tiny, pale creatures.

A Still-Treacherous Shortcut

The Amundsen cautiously approaches Baffin Island at Fury and Hecla Strait, a dangerously narrow half-mile-wide passage. No ship has gone through this late, the captain says. But the Amundsen sails through in clear water. “This was easier than expected,” Gariepy acknowledges. At the eastern mouth of the strait, the residents of Igloolik are surprised the ship is coming through the Northwest Passage in late October. They are not pleased at the weather. They count on a frozen strait to travel to Baffin Island to hunt caribou.

“We get tired of eating seal meat and walrus by this time,” Michael Immaroitok, 38, tells visitors from the ship who helicoptered over to Igloolik, a village of about 1,600. Fishing boats are pulled onto the shore; dogs are gnawing on the carcass of a whale.

When hunters bring in whale or narwhal, villagers share, and the animal ends up boiled, pickled, chopped like salad and served raw — muktuk. But the hunting has been disrupted by “weird, crazy weather in the last five years,” Immaroitok complains.

Some believe the worries are overblown. “I think the passage is going to be used, but I don’t think it’s going to be a navigation highway,” says Frederick Lasserre, a professor of geography at Laval University, onboard the ship. Costs of operating in the North are high, the ice cover is never certain and shipping companies do not want to risk delays, he says. “In 20 years, there might be less first-year ice. But there might also be more icebergs breaking off the ice cap that would be navigational hazards.”

Michael Byers, an international law expert at the University of British Columbia who is also on board, sees the open water passing under the bow in more ominous terms.

“The reputable shipping companies would not come here” until the risks of icebergs are low, he acknowledges. “But my worry is the tramp steamer with a single hull under a Liberian flag and Philippine crew. You dangle a 4,000-mile shortcut in front of them — that means time and money. There will always be someone who rolls the dice.

“They run into an uncharted rock, and all of a sudden it’s Exxon Valdez times ten,” he says.

“We can’t afford to wait until disaster hits,” says Stern, as the Amundsen pitches in the open Hudson Strait near Iqaluit, the eastern destination of its voyage through the passage. “Before, you were wondering if anyone was listening. Now, they can’t ignore it. Global warming is here.”

By Doug Struck

Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, August 28, 2006

GAZA CITY, Aug. 27 — As the sun beat down on the city’s central market, Khitam Shahleen, 37, glumly picked through a pile of cheap pencil sharpeners, searching for something — anything — she could afford to buy her two sons for the start of the new school year.

“We don’t have money,” Shahleen said, eyes downcast beneath her head scarf. Her husband, who works as a laborer in Israel, has been trapped inside the Gaza Strip by a blockade. “We are imprisoned here,” she said.

The war in southern Lebanon has overshadowed Israel’s second front, a military and economic siege of the Gaza Strip that is deepening the poverty and desperation in this dense area of 1.4 million people.

More than 200 Palestinians, at least 44 of them children, have been killed in the past 8 1/2 weeks. Three Israeli soldiers have been killed. Huge Israeli bulldozers and “pinpoint” missiles have razed at least 40 houses and dozens of other buildings, according to the army, leaving many families homeless.

Daily skirmishes regularly result in new casualties. The Israelis attack with tanks, F-16 jets and artillery. [Early Monday, an Israeli airstrike killed four members of the Hamas-led security force in the Gaza Strip, the Reuters news agency reported, citing medics and witnesses. An Israeli army spokeswoman confirmed the report, but said two of the men were apparently killed by gunfire from ground troops.]

The Palestinians launch an average of about six crude Qassam rockets a week into Israel, causing minimal damage, no fatalities and about a dozen injuries since June 28, an army spokesman said.

“Any Qassam fired toward Israel is one too many,” said Maj. Tal Lev-Ram, a spokesman for the Israeli army’s Southern Command. “Every act of terrorism against Israel will be dealt with severely from our side.”

After Israel completed its unilateral withdrawal from Gaza last September, ending a 38-year presence, Palestinians expected an explosion of commerce and opportunity in this sandy strip, which is about twice the size of Washington with almost three times the population.

But after the election in January of a parliament dominated by Hamas, the radical Islamic movement that refuses to recognize Israel’s right to exist, international donors led by the United States cut off aid to the Palestinian Authority. Israel stopped transferring the tax revenue it collects for the Palestinians, and the Palestinian Authority’s monthly income dropped from $150 million to $20 million or less, according to the United Nations.

Since then, the Gaza Strip’s economy has been strangled. The largest employer, the Palestinian Authority, has been unable to pay more than token salaries to its 160,000 employees — teachers, clerks, health care workers, police officers — in six months.

Israel has enforced a blockade, allowing almost no goods to leave Gaza and only limited food supplies to enter. Most industry has shut down. Electricity and water services have been intermittent since Israel bombed the main power station here.

“Gaza is heading down the tubes,” said John Ging, director of operations for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA. “We are now down to a subsistence existence. It’s down to getting containers of food into here.”

In the market in Gaza City, Mohammed Abu Aqleen, 37, held his head morosely Saturday, leaning on a pile of blue jeans. “Nobody has any money. Nobody buys,” he said, adding that he is lucky to make $7 a day.

“Under this siege, I feel like I am in a big prison,” he said. “No one can leave. The country is closed now. We are under the control of someone else. You can’t even go to the edge of your country safely.”

On June 25, Palestinian gunmen burrowed under a fence around the Gaza Strip and attacked an Israeli outpost, killing two soldiers and capturing Cpl. Gilad Shalit, 19. Israel responded with force. Seventeen days later, Hezbollah guerrillas from southern Lebanon seized two more Israeli soldiers, igniting warfare there. The fighting in Lebanon largely ended with a cease-fire on Aug. 14, but the Gaza conflict continues.

Israeli artillery units are poised outside the borders of the Gaza Strip. Fighter jets no longer make low-altitude sonic boom runs to keep Gazans unnerved at night but still overfly the strip and launch missiles toward it. Heavily armored patrols and tanks periodically pierce the warrens of Gaza City and the refugee camps, drawing gunfire and rocks in response.

“We are determined to continue the military operations against the terrorist organizations in order to create the conditions necessary for the safe homecoming” of Shalit, Lev-Ram said.

Rumors persist of negotiations to exchange Shalit for some of the estimated 10,000 Palestinians being held prisoner by Israel, but no deal has been struck.

“The siege is continuing for six months, and people are suffering, but no one talks of giving up,” said Sami Abu Zohri, a Hamas representative in Gaza. “We have no other options but to wait until the siege is over. Gaza lives in the darkness like something in ancient times.”

Zohri said the rocket attacks into Israeli territory were “efforts to protect ourselves with very limited armaments.” Israel’s response to the corporal’s capture, he contended, was disproportionate.

“If one Israeli is wounded, it’s a big deal,” he said. “But they have eradicated whole families in Gaza.”

Hamas and its chief rival, Fatah, have discussed forming a joint government in hopes of restarting the flow of aid from international donors. So far, Hamas has balked at giving up the leading role it won in the election.

“Hamas has led us into a dark tunnel. The way out is not clear,” said Maher Megdad, a Fatah spokesman here. But he, too, expressed irritation with the international pressure to undercut the elected government.

“The international community does not have the right to punish Palestinians for exercising democracy, even if the result is Hamas,” he said. “While Israel pressures us, the whole world stands by.”

The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said 202 Palestinians have been killed since Israel launched its “Operation Summer Rain” after Shalit’s abduction. The Palestinian Health Ministry puts the figure at 246.

Capt. Noa Meir, an Israeli military spokeswoman, said: “It’s a very complicated combat area. Just like in Lebanon, they are using civilians as human shields. We do everything possible to avoid civilian casualties.”

The deteriorating situation has forced many foreigners to leave. UNRWA moved its headquarters from Gaza to Jerusalem in October, and most of its 78 international staff members left with it. Other aid agencies have done the same. A spate of kidnappings, including the 13-day captivity of two Fox News journalists released Sunday, has reduced the numbers of aid workers and foreign reporters here. An Israeli missile attack Sunday on a truck with “TV” marked in large black letters seriously wounded two Reuters journalists.

“It’s really depressing. I don’t know how people are managing,” said Tom Garofalo, the country director for Catholic Relief Services.

Gaza has been under pressure at least since the 1967 war, when the Israeli army seized the area from Egypt. But the siege is taking its toll, even on a populace accustomed to isolation, Garofalo said.

“There’s more and more internal conflicts between families, more and more basic crime,” he said. “The Palestinian Authority is trying to maintain order. But around the edges, things crumble. Desperation drives people to do things they wouldn’t normally do. There is less respect for security.”

Israeli fighter bombers made a pinpoint attack June 28 on Gaza’s power plant, a modern 140-megawatt station built with international aid in 2001 that provided about half the power for the Gaza Strip. Now, power bought from Israel provides service for only about six to eight hours daily for most residents. Water service, dependent on electric pumps, is also sporadic.

UNRWA and the U.N. World Food Program are providing food to more than 1 million Palestinians. Aid agencies have created short make-work programs, but thousands of people apply for each job. The agencies have given out cash and fuel to needy families.

“People are not starving or emaciated. But that’s not what it’s about,” said Ging, the UNWRA director of operations. “It’s about having 1.4 million people who have no job, no money, no prospects and an acute sense of imprisonment. You have children growing up in a violent and uncivilized society, without the things most countries would take for granted as a normal existence.”

At the Gaza market, Mohammed Abdul Rahman, 36, picked carefully through the stalls looking for school supplies for his four children. A government worker, he has not been paid since March, he said. He borrowed money from a bank, but now that is due.

“It’s a very, very bad situation,” he said. “As a father, it’s hard to tell my kids that I can’t get what they need. The pressure at home is rising. Everyone feels it. I think there will be a massive strike, and the whole thing will explode. We can’t keep living like this.”

Retreat of Once-Mighty Glacier Signals Water Crisis, Mirroring Worldwide Trend

By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, July 29, 2006; A01

QUELCCAYA GLACIER, Peru — In the thin, cold air here atop the Andes mountains, the blue ice that has claimed these peaks for thousands of years and loyally fed the streams below is now disappearing rapidly.

Mountain glaciers such as this are in retreat around the Earth, taking with them vast stores of water that grow crops, generate electricity and sustain cities and rural areas.

Farmers here say that over the past two decades they have noticed a dramatic decrease in the amount of ice and snow on their mountaintops. The steady supply of water they need to grow crops has become erratic.

“There is less water now. If there is no water, this land becomes a desert,” said Benedicto Loayza, a 52-year-old farmer, standing under pear trees fed by channels dug on the mountain centuries ago to collect runoff.

Cuzco, a city of 400,000, has already resorted to periodic water rationing and started pumping from a river 15 miles away for its drinking supply. In Peru’s capital, Lima, engineers have urged successive governments to drill a tunnel through the Andes and build big lagoons to ensure that the city’s 8 million residents have water. Citing the expense, authorities have dawdled. Cities in China, India, Nepal and Bolivia also face drastic water shortages as the glaciers shrink.

“You can think of these glaciers as a bank account built over thousands of years,” said Lonnie Thompson, one of the first scientists to sound the alarm, as he stood by the largest ice cap in the Andes. “If you subtract more than you gain, eventually you go bankrupt. That’s what’s in process here.”

Thompson arrived at the blue-white face of the Quelccaya glacier this month after a two-day hike from the nearest road, climbing into the oxygen-thin air of 17,000 feet above sea level. Since he started his annual visits here in 1974, he said, the huge ice cap has shrunk by 30 percent. In the last year, the tongue of the ice has pulled back 100 yards, breakneck speed for a glacier.

He examined it as if it were a sick patient. The mountain of ice was pocked with holes where the surface had melted. A large chunk had broken off in March, crashing into the meltwater lake below and sending a flood wave into alpacas’ lower grazing grounds. The face of the glacier, once frozen so perfectly that Thompson could identify the yearly snowfalls back 1,500 years, now sagged and dripped.

“It’s not just a retreat,” he said. “It’s an accelerating retreat.”

Since Thompson’s first reports, he and others have confirmed a rapid recession of glaciers worldwide. Snows on Africa’s Mount Kilimanjaro, extolled by Ernest Hemingway as “wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white,” will be gone within 14 years, Thompson estimates. Glaciers in the Alps, the Himalayas and throughout the Andes are also shrinking, he and other researchers have found.

The dramatic rise in carbon dioxide that has accompanied the industrial age has brought a spike in global temperatures. Scientists have found that the jump in temperatures is even greater in the upper atmosphere, where the glaciers reign on silent mountain peaks.

Glaciers store an estimated 70 percent of the world’s fresh water. Water that falls as snow moves through the slowly churning ice and may emerge from the glacier’s edge thousands of years later as meltwater. Humans have long depended on the gradual and faithful runoff.

The melting of glaciers in the Himalayas, which feed seven great Asian rivers, will bring “massive eco and environmental problems for people in western China, Nepal and northern India,” a World Wildlife Fund report concluded last year.

“The repercussions of this are very scary,” agreed Tim Barnett, a climate scientist with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. “When the glaciers are gone, they are gone. What does a place like Lima do? Or, in northwest China, there are 300 million people relying on snowmelt for water supply. There’s no way to replace it until the next ice age.”

At least three times a day, Eva Rondon, 38, walks the 18 worn steps carved out of the hillside of a shantytown on the far outskirts of Lima. She carries a plastic bucket to an old Shell Oil barrel with a rusty top and lid fashioned out of a few boards nailed together. She has paid a private water trucker to fill the barrel with water — the only source for her family and neighbors — and even that water is often dirty.

An estimated 2 million of Lima’s 8 million people have no water service. Some live decades without it, buying water at as much as 30 times the price per gallon paid by customers whose homes are connected to the government-owned water utility. They are organizing to demand service from a government they say is corrupt and uncaring. But they have no doubt who will be deprived if the melting glaciers make Lima’s water even scarcer.

“The poor will suffer. Our children will suffer,” said Adolfo Peña, the local representative of the grass-roots political movement Peruvians Without Water. “Lima is built on a desert, and in 20 years, there’s not going to be water.”

If every home were connected to the utility system, there would not be enough water to pump through the pipes, said Romolo Carhuaz. He is the engineer for Sedapal, the capital’s public water company, and is in charge of monitoring the reservoirs that feed Lima its water.

Each week, Carhuaz puts on a baseball cap, grabs an oxygen bottle and drives out of Lima up a jolting dirt road into the Andes mountains. He negotiates past bulls, llamas and fierce sheepdogs on his 13-hour circuit, finally grinding to a halt at a mountain plateau where cactuses bake in the cold sun. There, at 15,000 feet, lies a series of brilliant blue lagoons filled by rainwater and glacial runoff from the peaks above. Both sources, the historic lifelines for arid Lima, are now fickle, he said.

“Look at those mountains,” Carhuaz said, gesturing to the rocky heights that tower over his reservoirs. White patches of snow and ice cling to some of the higher crevices. “They used to be covered with glaciers to halfway down the mountains 20 years ago.”

“We call that Cat’s Eye,” he said, pointing out one small circle of ice left on a mountain. “It used to be huge.”

Carhuaz blames the changing weather. He said average temperatures here have risen significantly in little over a decade. What used to fall as snow, adding to the glaciers, now comes as rain. And that rainfall is erratic, he said.

The changing rainfall and shrinking glaciers have also alarmed the companies that operate Peru’s hydroelectric plants, which supply most of the country’s electricity. “What we have seen in the past three years is a pattern that is quite different from the 40-year average,” said Mark Hoffmann, the head of ElectroAndes, a private power company. “The historical data is not particularly useful in projecting anymore. We are hoping it’s a blip.”

Uncertain of the water supply, electric companies are building plants to generate power by using natural gas, relying on a new gas field discovered in southern Peru and government controls on prices.

“The ‘wise men’ believe natural gas is going to be the solution. They are clearly wrong,” said Guillermo Romero, an official of Electroperu, which operates the two largest hydroelectric plants in the country. Natural gas eventually will run out, he said — sooner rather than later if the government builds a liquefied natural gas port to export the gas. He expressed hope that the recently elected government would return its attention to building reservoirs and hydro plants.

“The problem isn’t with us. It’s with the government,” he said.

The government has put off projects to relieve Lima’s looming water deficit. Such large initiatives are expensive for a poor country, and some plans — including the one to drill a tunnel through the Andes — carry risks in this earthquake-prone region. In 1970, an earthquake shook loose a wall of ice and rock from the Huascaran mountain in the Andes north of Lima, burying the town of Yungay and killing tens of thousands of people.

Politicians find the scientists’ broader warnings easy to ignore amid the more immediate water problems posed by burgeoning populations, increased agricultural development and contamination of water sources by mines. Some authorities acknowledge the looming crisis; others deny it.

At the local power company in Cuzco, “we are conscious that it will affect us a lot,” said Mario Ortiz, a top director. But Ortiz acknowledged the company does not really know how much of its main source, the Vilcanota River, originates from glaciers. What would it mean in the dry season if the glacier is not there? Ortiz simply looks down at his desk and shakes his head.

“We’re like firefighters. We only move when there is a fire,” he said sadly.

The warming climate is causing other effects. In the Andes mountains north of Lima, Hugo Osoria, 32, used to work as an “ice fetcher,” walking two hours from his village of Paria to cut off a chunk of glacier ice, haul it down and take a short minibus ride to the city of Huaraz to sell it. But the glaciers have retreated so much, the longer walk each way is no longer worth it. Osoria noticed changes in the local crops — potatoes were not growing well, and worms not seen in the area before were attacking corn. So he experimented by growing flowers that were also new to village. His wife puts them in a wheelbarrow to sell them at hotels and markets in Huaraz.

“Only a few of us are trying to take advantage of the changes and make it positive,” he said. For most, the climate change portends hardship.

“We are in a real critical situation,” said Vincente Velasquez, 42, who grows potatoes in an area near Cuzco that the Incas called the “sacred valley” because it was so fertile. “We are talking about the melting glaciers, but we don’t know what to believe. If the glaciers go away, people will think it’s God’s punishment.”

Loayza, the 52-year-old farmer who grows fruit trees and rosemary on his land north of Cuzco, said he and his neighbors often discuss the bleak future.

“Everyone in the valley is worried about the melting ice,” he said, standing in his fields, now thriving with winter sun and irrigation. “Without water, how can you work? How can you live?”

Correspondent Monte Reel in Buenos Aires, special correspondent Lucien O. Chauvin in Lima and researcher Natalia Alexandrova in Toronto contributed to this report.

Tiny Beetles Destroying Pines

By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, March 1, 2006

QUESNEL, B.C. — Millions of acres of Canada’s lush green forests are turning red in spasms of death. A voracious beetle, whose population has exploded with the warming climate, is killing more trees than wildfires or logging.

The mountain pine beetle has infested an area three times the size of Maryland, devastating swaths of lodgepole pines and reshaping the future of the forest and the communities in it.

“It’s pretty gut-wrenching,” said Allan Carroll, a research scientist at the Pacific Forestry Centre in Victoria, whose studies tracked a lock step between warmer winters and the spread of the beetle. “People say climate change is something for our kids to worry about. No. It’s now.”

Scientists fear the beetle will cross the Rocky Mountains and sweep across the northern continent into areas where it used to be killed by severe cold but where winters now are comparatively mild. Officials in neighboring Alberta are setting fires and traps and felling thousands of trees in an attempt to keep the beetle at bay.

“This is an all-out battle,” said David Coutts, Alberta’s minister of sustainable resource development. The Canadian Forest Service calls it the largest known insect infestation in North American history.

U.S. Forest Service officials say they are watching warily as the outbreak has spread. The United States is less vulnerable because it lacks the seamless forest of lodgepole pines that are a highway for the beetle in Canada. So far, U.S. officials say, the outbreaks have been mostly in isolated clumps of remote wilderness areas of northern Washington.

“It’s a rapid warming” that is increasing the beetles’ range, said Carroll. “All the data show there are significant changes over widespread areas that are going to cause us considerable amount of grief. Not only is it coming, it’s here.”

“We are seeing this pine beetle do things that have never been recorded before,” said Michael Pelchat, a forestry officer in Quesnel, as he followed moose tracks in the snow to examine a 100-year-old pine killed in one season by the beetle. “They are attacking younger trees, and attacking timber in altitudes they have never been before.”

The tiny beetle has always lived in high areas from Arizona to northern British Columbia, and occasionally populations have grown in limited outbreaks. In Canada, where the beetle’s favored lodgepole pine thrives, it has been controlled by winters with early cold snaps or long killing spells of 20 degrees below zero. But for more than a decade, forestry experts say, the weather here has not been cold enough for long enough to kill the beetle.

Scientists with the Canadian Forest Service say the average temperature of winters here has risen by more than 4 degrees in the last century. “That’s not insignificant,” said Jim Snetsinger, British Columbia’s chief forester. “Global warming is happening. We have to start to account for it.”

The result is a swarm of beetles that has grown exponentially in the past six years, flying from tree to tree. The advance is marked by broad swaths of rust-red forest, the color pines turn before they drop all their needles to become ghostly grey skeletons.

“It’s depressing to see,” said Steve Dodge, a British Columbia forestry official whose office is along the Quesnel River. This town of 10,000 sits in the heart of the province’s vast evergreen woodlands. Steam billowing from the kilns of a half-dozen sawmills and pulp plants enshroud the town, which proudly calls itself the “Woodsmart City” in homage to the timber industry that sustains it.

In an attack played out millions of times over, a female beetle no bigger than a rice grain finds an older lodgepole pine, its favored host, and drills inside the bark. There, it eats a channel straight up the tree, laying eggs as it goes. The tree fights back. It pumps sap toward the bug and the new larvae, enveloping them in a mass of the sticky substance. The tree then tries to eject its captives through a small, crusty chute in the bark.

Countering, the beetle sends out a pheromone call for reinforcements. More beetles arrive, mounting a mass attack. A fungus on the beetle, called the blue stain fungus, works into the living wood, strangling its water flow. The larvae begin eating at right angles to the original up-and-down channel, sometimes girdling the tree, crossing channels made by other beetles.

The pine is doomed. As it slowly dies, the larvae remain protected over the winter. In spring, they burrow out of the bark and launch themselves into the wind to their next victims.

British Columbia is a buffet laid out before them. Years of successful battles against forest fires have allowed a thick concentration of old lodgepole pines to grow — a beetle feast that natural wildfire would have stopped.

“It was the perfect storm” of warmer weather and vulnerable old trees, coupled with constraints that slowed logging of the infected wood, said Douglas Routledge, who represents timber companies in the city of Prince George.

At the province’s Ministry of Forests and Range in Quesnel, forestry officer Pelchat saw the beetle expansion coming as “a silent forest fire.” He and his colleagues launched an offensive to try to stop or at least delay the invasion, all the while hoping for cold temperatures. They searched out beetle-ridden trees, cutting them and burning them. They thinned forests. They set out traps. But the deep freeze never came.

“We lost. They built up into an army and came across,” Pelchat said. Surveys show the beetle has infested 21 million acres and killed 411 million cubic feet of trees — double the annual take by all the loggers in Canada. In seven years or sooner, the Forest Service predicts, that kill will nearly triple and 80 percent of the pines in the central British Columbia forest will be dead.

Pelchat is now spending his time trying to plan recovery through replanting. In this area, a mature pine forest takes 70 years to grow.

Meanwhile, the beetle is moving eastward. It has breached the natural wall of the Rocky Mountains in places, threatening the tourist treasures of national forest near Banff, Alberta, and is within striking distance of the vast Northern Boreal Forest that reaches to the eastern seaboard.

“If that beetle is allowed to come any further, it will absolutely devastate our eastern slope forests,” said Coutts, in Alberta. “If we’re not prepared, it’s going to infest all Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and then northern Ontario in 20 years. This is the battlefront.”

Ironically, Quesnel is booming now. The beetle has killed so many trees that officials have more than doubled the allowable timber harvest, so loggers can cut and haul as many dead trees as possible before they rot. The icy roads are choked with giant trucks growling toward the mills, loaded with logs marked with the telltale blue stain fungus.

In town, two sawmills and the plywood and pulp plants of the largest company, West Fraser Mills, are “running flat-out,” with shifts round-the-clock, said Tom Turner, a manager there. He walked the catwalks of a sawmill as whirling machines below grappled and twirled the offloaded trees. Computers sized up each log, instantly figured the best cut, and shoved it at furious speed through giant disk saws and planers to produce lumber that rail cars would carry to home builders in the United States.

West Fraser is spending $100 million to upgrade the mill. Other companies have added shifts and proposed new plants to make chipboard or wood-fuel pellets. Property values in Quesnel are rising, rents are up, the local shopping center is flourishing again and unemployment has dropped, said Nate Bello, the mayor of Quesnel.

But the boom will end. When what people here call “beetlewood” is removed or rots out — and no one is sure how long that will take — the forestry industry “will be running at about half speed,” Bello acknowledged.

He sees his chief challenge as figuring out how to convert Quesnel from a one-industry town to something with a more diverse economic base. He and city officials talk of attracting retirees and small, computer-based businesses, and even of luring tourists to the area, despite the stark industrial tableau of sawmills and pulp plants.

Some people in town say those are quixotic plans. “This town is going to die,” scoffed Pat Karey, 62, who spent 40 years at the sawmill. Other men in the Quesnel cafe — “Smokers Welcome” said the sign in the window — nodded in assent.

“A mill job is $20 an hour, or $30 with benefits. The jobs they are talking about bringing in are $8-an-hour jobs,” said Del Boesem, whose runs a business dismantling heavy logging machinery.

By Doug Struck

Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, December 7, 2005; A01

BAGHDAD, Dec. 6 — According to Saddam Hussein, the would-be assassins who ambushed his car near an Iraqi village in 1982 were working for Iran, his trial for destroying that village afterward is just an excuse for Americans to stay in Iraq, and the Iraqi judge and prosecutors are underlings preoccupied with unimportant matters.

“Do you think Saddam Hussein has no work? I have no time,” the former dictator scoffed during the fourth day of his trial Tuesday, implying that the killing of more than 140 villagers, and the torture and imprisonment of hundreds more, was a trivial matter and that he had larger issues to worry about.

By his comments and demeanor during his trial, which is being conducted in Arabic, Hussein has made clear that he sees the proceedings through a potentate’s prism. His current predicament, he suggests, is another plot by the foes he faced as president of Iraq and his place in the defendants’ dock is a temporary setback.

“America wants to execute Saddam Hussein. It is not the first time,” he said, referring to himself regally in the third person.

The performance has heartened his followers. In Tikrit, the hub of Hussein’s home region, a large crowd of demonstrators chanted their loyalty on Tuesday. Several marchers said they were emboldened by his courtroom bravado in defiance of a possible death sentence.

The proceedings Tuesday painted a sordid picture of authorities exacting brutal punishment on the village of Dujail, 35 miles north of Baghdad, after shots were fired at Hussein’s motorcade there 23 years ago. Five witnesses told of relatives being killed and of horrific imprisonment and sadistic torture visited on the villagers after the incident.

But as he has listened, Hussein has not conceded an inch. Far from acting as a deflated tough stripped of power, he has exuded the haughtiness of a man who says — and appears to believe — that he is still the president of Iraq.

“I didn’t say ‘former.’ I said I am the president of the Republic of Iraq,” he admonished the judge on the first day of the trial, Oct. 19. “If you are an Iraqi, then you know.” The trial was then adjourned for more than a month, resuming last week.

On Tuesday, as he started a disjointed cross-examination of a witness, Hussein lectured the courtroom lawyers on procedure as though he were still the country’s leader. “Pay attention, young men,” he said.

And he appears to revel in that role. Most of the co-defendants stand to respect him when he enters. His half brother and former secret police chief, Barzan Ibrahim, kisses his head in respect.

In his lectures and outbursts, Hussein has wrapped himself in the cloak of a noble, pan-Arab leader still bearing the burdens of power.

“Even if I were thrown into the inferno . . . I would not show a sign of pain, all for your sake,” he said expansively to the judge Tuesday.

The subject of the immediate charges against him is in essence the extermination of a village. Yet Hussein acts as though he can barely remember the events and would be appalled to have sullied his hands with them.

“Is it my job to investigate Iraqis?” he asked.

He has treated court officials with contempt, sometimes tempered with forced magnanimity. The court, he charged Tuesday, is “a stooge of the occupation.”

“I’m your president. I’m your leader for more than 30 years,” he told Rizgar Mohammed Amin, the chief judge, who has the authority to sentence him to death. “I never saw you before this court. If I saw you on the street, I wouldn’t know you.”

Ibrahim has joined the strategy. On Tuesday, he addressed the chief prosecutor, Jaafar Mousawi, as “comrade.” When the black-robed Mousawi objected, Ibrahim gleefully reminded him that they were in Hussein’s Baath Party together.

“Is it shameful to be called comrade? You are my comrade. You were with me in the party.”

Rather than paying for a crime, Hussein implies that he might be hanged at the altar of the global power game that preoccupied him for years. The United States and his other longtime nemesis, Iran, might have finally gotten him, he suggests.

Hussein pointed out that the assassination attempt near Dujail was carried out by members of the Dawa party, a Shiite religious organization, as if that made it obvious that a much more powerful force was at work than village peasants.

“Iran ordered them to assassinate Saddam Hussein. That’s why they did it,” he said. And while not quite confessing to the executions that followed, Hussein on Monday sounded perplexed that anyone would bother to investigate the event.

“Isn’t it Saddam Hussein’s right as a president, or the right of any president of Hungary or other country, to follow those aggressors who shot at him?”

The bigger opponent, Hussein has said repeatedly during the trial, is the United States. He said Tuesday that the United States’ professed reasons for invading Iraq were false and that “to stay in Iraq a long time, they have the task of a trial.”

“Do the American people know what kind of crime their nation committed against humanity?” he wondered aloud.

Then he said, with regal resignation: “I will not complain. I will do that for Iraqis’ sake, and the nation, because I am full of faith.” He added, “The biggest concern of mine is my people and my nation.”

Sometimes, though, he loses his presidential composure. On Tuesday, he observed courtroom decorum for the most part, addressing the judge with a modicum of respect. But after a 10-hour session, the judge’s announcement that the trial would resume Wednesday was too much for Hussein.

Proclaiming himself “exhausted,” he declared his temporary prison quarters in Baghdad to be unacceptable. “I stayed in the same shirt, I have no underwear, there is no space,” he complained.

When the judge stuck to the schedule, Hussein vowed, “I will not be in a court without justice.” And as the chief judge left the court, Hussein yelled, “Go to hell, you and all the agents of America.”

Special correspondents Salih Saif Aldin in Tikrit and K.I. Ibrahim in Baghdad contributed to this report.

Scandal Renews Debate on Program to Import ‘Exotic Dancers’

By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, December 5, 2004; Page A12

TORONTO — Coiled around a brass pole on a barroom stage, clad only in towering stiletto heels, a 31-year-old Romanian woman named Veronica is helping to fill what has suddenly become Canada’s most talked-about shortage: a scarcity of strippers.

A government program to import hundreds of “exotic dancers,” which was already controversial, took center stage recently when Canada’s immigration minister, Judy Sgro, was found to have given preferential visa treatment to a nude dancer who did volunteer work in her reelection campaign for Parliament.

Critics say the program turns Canada into a pimp, while local employers assert it serves a legitimate business, and dancers from struggling countries say it’s a way to better their lives.

“This has been a great job,” said Veronica, a native of Brasov, who declined to identify herself further. “This has given me a better opportunity for life. I could never go to school and work in Romania.”

Nude dancers come here under one of several programs aimed at recruiting foreign workers with specialties sorely needed in Canada. Last year, the country imported more than 19,000 construction workers, almost 5,000 nannies and 1,560 university professors. In addition, 661 work permits were issued or renewed for foreign exotic dancers.

Immigration agents selected the dancers from portfolios that showed past work experience, a legitimate job offer and usually a publicity photo. A large majority have come from Romania, partly because a study showed female Romanian immigrants tended to be well educated and make few demands for public services.

Many of the immigrants come to clubs in Toronto, where they strip on stage and perform private dances at customers’ tables or in “VIP rooms” for extra tips. Critics say the women are exploited and pressured to perform sexual services. The club owners deny it.

“No sex goes on here,” Michael, manger of the glitzy, chrome-and-glass club where Veronica dances, said on condition that his surname and the club name not be used. “We are a legitimate business. We pay lots of taxes. We employ people who buy homes and cars and pay taxes. We are just offering fantasy, just like lots of other entertainment businesses. Just like the Dallas Cowgirls,” referring to the cheerleaders for the Dallas Cowboys football team.

Prostitution is not illegal in most of Canada, but soliciting for prostitution is, and sexual acts at a club could bring legal charges of running a “bawdy house.”

“We always say we sell the sizzle, but not the steak,” said Tim Lambrinos, executive director of the Adult Entertainment Association of Canada. “No sex is allowed. Can I say it never happens? It happens in broadcasters’ offices, in teachers’ lounges, in government offices, in airplanes. It probably happens less often in our clubs.

“I think this whole thing has come up because some people are uptight and uneasy about nudity.”

The uproar over the importing of strippers has intensified in the past several weeks, with newspapers chiding the government for being involved in an unseemly business, and Sgro and others like her fighting to keep their jobs. This past week, the government announced it would end the special program, though exotic dancers can still obtain visas by applying individually for jobs if their employers prove they cannot find Canadians to fill the positions.

Jack Layton, a member of Parliament and head of the opposition New Democratic Party, said government involvement should be ended altogether. “When you get money for helping to get young women to be available for the sexual desires of Canadian men, it’s called pimping,” he said.

Sgro said she did not like the program either, but that it filled a “labor market need” and that without it, “you’d have to wipe out the whole industry.”

Maria Iadinardi, a spokeswoman for the Citizenship and Immigration department, said it granted the work permits because “exotic dancing is a legal occupation. The employers own legal businesses. But we are very vigilant to ensure they are bona fide dancers, to avoid trafficking of individuals for prostitution.”

Richard Kurland, a Vancouver immigration lawyer, said that ending the program would only force the trade to go underground. He started studying the program a decade ago, seeking to close it down, but later concluded that the legal process, which included official inspections of clubs, protected women from gang-controlled sex traffickers.

In fact, the government steered the recruiting of exotic dancers to Romania after studying female immigrants from that region. The study showed the women often spoke English or French, drew little medical care and became good Canadian citizens if they stayed in the country, Kurland said. Eighty-three percent of the exotic dancers given work permits in 2003 came from Romania.

Many eventually find legal ways to stay. Alina Balaican, 25, arrived two years ago from Romania and married a Canadian a year later. But when she ran into visa problems, she and her husband went to Sgro’s office for help. They both wound up volunteering in her reelection campaign in June, after which Sgro signed papers giving Balaican temporary residency, effectively jumping a queue of 700,000 applicants. When the case was leaked to the news media, it brought howls of favoritism.

“Giving special favors because you do something for a politician is the hallmark of a banana republic,” complained Diane Ablonczy, an opposition member of parliament.

The political frenzy grew when newspapers reported that Sgro’s top aide, Ihor Wons, had prowled a Toronto strip club to discuss work permits for nude dancers with the owner. Sgro said the aide was just doing good constituent service. Kurland mocked that assertion: “A drunken chief of staff handing out immigration passes in a strip club is a problem.”

Both support and opposition of the visa program have come from unexpected sources. Some women’s groups, for instance, say the program’s abolition would curtail the rights of immigrant women.

But Mary Taylor, a former exotic dancer in Toronto who now sells videos and books to teach stripping, said she favors stopping the program.

“It’s not dancing,” she sniffed. “I want to bring entertainment back, dancing back. Sitting on somebody’s lap in a dark VIP room . . . is not dancing.”

Nuns Labored for Days in Fatal Heat to Get Help for Patients

By Anne Hull and Doug Struck
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, September 23, 2005

NEW ORLEANS — As Hurricane Katrina swirled closer, the elderly nuns who were among the patients at Lafon Nursing Home of the Holy Family packed their medicine and emergency supplies in preparation for evacuation. A sign-out sheet at the nursing home’s front desk recorded their departures on the morning of Aug. 27. Sister Paulette signed out at 7:24 a.m., Sister DeSalle at 7:25, Sister Trahan at 7:27, Sisters Jolivete and Miriam at 7:30 and Sister Brinkley at 7:32.

Across the street, 60 more nuns of the Sisters of the Holy Family were also evacuating the convent where they lived, under instructions from their mother superior.

But at Lafon, the nursing home run by the order, more than 100 other elderly patients stayed where they were. Sister Augustine McDaniel, the nursing home’s administrator, had weathered other hurricanes in her 68 years and decided that she — and the patients in her care — would tough this one out, too.

Faced with moving her fragile patients on jammed roadways, or keeping them at Lafon, a sturdy, low brick building that had survived other hurricanes, McDaniel decided her staff and patients would be better off staying. If things got rough, she would move everyone to the second floor.

Taped under receptionist Gloria Williams’s desk were “urgent” instructions to recite in case of a hurricane: “Our Father who art in heaven, through the powerful intercession of Lady of Prompt Succor spare us from the harm during the hurricane season.”

No prayer could stop Katrina’s rushing waters or ease the fatal heat that followed. When rescue workers finally arrived five days later, bodies were found wrapped in bedsheets in the chapel. Originally told 14 had died, officials eventually recovered 22 corpses.

Three weeks later, Lafon is being investigated by Louisiana’s attorney general, along with other nursing homes where people died after a failure to evacuate. The state has charged the owners of one home — St. Rita’s — with 34 counts of negligent homicide after corpses were found floating in brown storm water. Of about 60 nursing homes affected by Katrina, only 21 evacuated before the storm, according to a list compiled by the Louisiana Nursing Home Association.

McDaniel and the other nuns on the staff have been advised by their attorney not to talk about the ordeal. The story of what happened at this New Orleans nursing home — pieced together from dozens of interviews with employees and patients, family members of patients, and rescuers — defies easy characterization.

Those stranded inside watched McDaniel and her staff perform with desperate heroics. When countless rescuers were told of the dire situation inside Lafon and none came to help, employees resorted to looting a Family Dollar for peroxide, alcohol wipes and clothes. A savior finally appeared in a red Ford Explorer towing a boat.

But for children and other family members who had entrusted their parents and elderly relatives to the Sisters of the Holy Family, there is confusion and anger. “I know it’s a herculean effort to evacuate people from a nursing home,” said Judith Heikes, who finally located her 91-year-old mother in Nashville after she was evacuated. “It would have been traumatic on patients. But they made too conservative of a judgment. And that is putting the best spin on it.”

Berita Leonard still has not located her 85-year-old father. “I tried to please my father in every way,” says Leonard. “He loved the nuns. But if he is deceased, he did not deserve to die this way.”

Hunkering Down

Sister Augustine McDaniel ran a tight ship. She wasn’t shy about lecturing employees who showed signs of sloppiness, asking one delinquent staffer to write an essay about why she wanted to keep her job. A stocky woman with graying hair, McDaniel was a constant figure in the hallways, greeting visiting family members by name. Lafon had a waiting list and a rich history in New Orleans, run by an order of black nuns, Sisters of the Holy Family.

Lafon had 130 patients in 81 rooms on the first floor. Some of the residents could walk to the dining room for meals. In the wing where bedridden patients lived, their photographs were hung on a bulletin board with little stickers that said “You are my sunshine.” Upstairs, several nuns who worked at Lafon had small bedrooms and living quarters.

Lafon clearly envisioned the possibility of an evacuation. A state health department form filed in June asked the nursing home, “If an evacuation was called for your parish,” where would patients be taken? McDaniel listed two addresses outside New Orleans, in St. Benedict and Franklinton, La.

To ride out the hurricane, McDaniel had a staff of about 22, including five or six nuns. It would be fortuitous that the group included men.

On the weekend of Aug. 27-28, as the hurricane approached, Berita Leonard stopped by to visit her 85-year-old father, Victor Nelson Sr., a retired furniture upholsterer who was staying at Lafon — Room 239 — while he recovered from hip surgery. He was 6-foot-1 and wore a wooden cross on a string around his neck. He wore a little black cap that he took off when his daughter came for her daily visits so she could comb his hair.

Leonard told her dad that she was evacuating to Houston. She assumed Lafon would be evacuating — she’d signed a form authorizing the nursing home to move her father in case of emergency — but when she ran into McDaniel in the hallway, Leonard said the nun suggested she bring her dad to Houston with her. Leonard thought to herself, “He’s 85 years old with a broken hip; where in the world am I going to take him on the highway?” She decided he should stay.

Before leaving that night, Leonard dashed in to check on one of her favorite patients, Sister DeSalle, a nun Leonard knew from her Catholic school days. Leonard was surprised to hear Sister DeSalle say that she and the other sisters who were patients were being evacuated.

The next morning, a Sunday, New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin issued a mandatory evacuation for the city. Judith Heikes called from Illinois and was told that Lafon was hunkering down, with plenty of staff. Karen Cullins called from Baton Rouge and was told the same. A few people drove to Lafon to pick up their elderly relatives.

The staff prepared for the night shift. McDaniel had stocked her “hurricane closet” with medicine, flashlights, batteries, diapers and extra supplies. A generator was at the ready, and an abundance of food and water. Some employees brought their family members with them to Lafon that night. A dietitian, Dora Spencer, brought her two children. Beverly Greenwood, a social worker training to be a nursing home administrator, brought her mother, her stepfather and her 91-year-old grandmother.

Evelyn Leal was also bedding down at Lafon. A seventh-generation New Orleanian, Leal had not wanted to evacuate her home in the Gentilly neighborhood near Dillard University — she had her little dog, Samson, there — but her daughter had wrung a compromise from her: Go stay with Dad at the nursing home. Jules Leal was in Room 236A at Lafon, and that is where Evelyn Leal, 85, settled into a chair next to her husband’s bed.

It was still dark out the next morning when Leal was awakened by voices. “It’s beginning to flood,” she heard someone say. Leal put her feet down; she was ankle-deep in water.

A Rush of Water

Outside the wind was growing in force and fury. Greenwood was in the kitchen helping the dietary staff prepare a breakfast of scrambled eggs and grits when someone said, “Oh, my God, water’s coming into the kitchen.”

Even in the descending desperation of that dawn, the orderliness McDaniel had instilled in her staff was reflected in a logbook at the front desk.

“5 a.m. Called Entergy and spoke w/Ms. Desire. She stated that she will report the power outage and the power should be restored as soon as possible.”

“5:07 a.m. Power is restored.”

“5:20 a.m. Power outage reported. Spoke with Suzy.”

Eleanor Shelmire, a registered nurse, was filling out paperwork when brown water started gurgling up from the drains. Shelmire and her co-workers began moving patients to the large central dining room, the place where McDaniel said they would gather in case of emergency. Greenwood and others tried to hold the glass front doors shut against the wind and water. Pictures were blowing off the walls, and water began seeping into the dining hall where the patients were gathered. The generator failed.

McDaniel directed the staff to move all of the patients to the second floor. With the power out and the elevator not working, stairs were the only option.

“Come on, now, I know you can walk,” Shelmire told those who were ambulatory. Gladys Cronin was in her wheelchair as she watched the water “coming in all the cracks in the building and the windows.” A pair of staffers would grab either side of a wheelchair and hoist it up the stairs, struggling one step at a time. The water kept coming. Carmelite Cogan — 91 and in a wheelchair — was up to her chest in water.

Greenwood used mattresses to float the patients closer to the stairs. The sun was up and they could at least see. Evelyn Leal was beside her husband as he was lifted by his bedsheet and splashed toward the stairs. An Alzheimer’s patient, Jules was fussing and disoriented. “Just be quiet, honey. Everything will be okay,” Leal told him.

Others were confused or frightened and fought their rescuers. Some patients were so heavy that four staffers — men and women working side by side — labored to lift them, pausing to rest halfway up. By now the heat was stifling, and the staff was sweating and panting, racing against the water that sloshed higher.

McDaniel maintained her composure, but Greenwood could see she was upset. “She kept saying, ‘I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,’ ” Greenwood remembers. After an hour, everyone was upstairs. In a final act of civility, the still-warm breakfast of eggs and grits was served on paper plates.

Their refuge was a 50-yard-long hallway. The seven nuns who ran the nursing home had bedrooms here with two large lounges, a small laundry and kitchen, a room with a sewing machine and exercise treadmill, and a guest bedroom. Now the lounges and main hallway were a makeshift MASH unit, with a field of wilted bodies laid on the floor or propped in wheelchairs.

The staff gathered sheets and pillows for those on the floor. Many of the patients were soiling themselves, and the staff worked to keep them clean, washing their bodies and disposing of the soiled linens and clothes in large plastic bags.

Shelmire took stock of her supplies; she had medications such as insulin, Tylenol and suppositories. The food in the freezer and refrigerator would keep for a day. Ham sandwiches were made first. The staff poured water into cups with straws and insisted the patients drink. The heat was sapping them.

The first patient to die was a woman who’d been on hospice care before the storm. When her breathing grew more shallow, the nuns prayed over her, then wrapped her body and the staff carried her downstairs to the chapel, a modest room with an altar and 12 pews.

Nightfall brought heat and steam. The staff tore up cardboard boxes to fan the patients. Towels were dampened to cool foreheads. Evelyn Leal’s husband was without his medication, and he hollered throughout the endless night, “Evelyn! Evelyn!”

Shelmire and others walked the floor with flashlights, checking on people. “Can I have my pain medication?” one asked. Unable to match their prescriptions, Shelmire could offer only Tylenol. The dietitian’s children stayed in a nun’s bedroom, but others who were offered rooms refused, including Shelmire, who considered the rooms sacred. Even in this defiled and muddied environment, the nuns still held a special place.

Daybreak Tuesday brought an incredible sight: The water downstairs was receding. By afternoon, the parking lot that had earlier been swamped was drying, and more amazing, the road that ran in front of Lafon — Chef Menteur Highway — looked passable. Help would certainly be on the way.

Passed By

Soon vehicles began to rumble by on Chef Menteur Highway. Greenwood and other employees ran outside to flag them down. A National Guard truck kept rolling. Police and fire vehicles sped by. When a Wildlife and Fisheries vehicle eased over, Greenwood said she begged, “Please help us, we have 103 elderly people in a nursing home.” The rescue workers said they were trying to get to submerged neighborhoods where people were stuck on rooftops.

Two other Lafon employees, Pete and his wife, Precious, who both worked in housekeeping, stood in the middle of the street, trying to get anyone to stop. McDaniel and some of the men went across the street to the motherhouse of the Sisters of the Holy Family, and broke in to get more food and supplies.

That night, fires and looting erupted along Chef Menteur Highway, and gunshots popped in the distance. McDaniel and a male employee went out to the parking lot and got one of the cars to start. Still wearing her habit, she and the man rode out for help. They found a New Orleans police officer who promised assistance. A stickler for details, McDaniel wrote down the officer’s name and returned to Lafon to wait.

One hour passed, then two, then three. Upstairs at Lafon, Shelmire focused on her patients. She administered suppositories to keep temperatures down. Dirty diapers were changed. Many patients became quiet and stopped eating. Many more were without their glasses and hearing aids, their essentials for making sense of the world. A Spanish-speaking patient had palsy. Evelyn Leal cleaned his face and lifted a water cup to his lips.

At one point, two New Orleans cops did pull into the Lafon parking lot. But they were in search of gasoline. “You could have my gas — I have gas in my car,” Greenwood said. One of the officers called for backup, and when the additional officer arrived, they tried siphoning gas from Greenwood’s tank. It was empty. Same with all the other employees’ cars in the lot. Someone had stolen all the gas. Before leaving, the officers promised they would radio that Lafon needed help.

On Wednesday morning, Greenwood and some of the others walked to a Family Dollar that had already been looted, and took supplies back to the nursing home. Beneath pictures of saints, they dressed some of the patients in stolen gowns.

Day Three was a day of more promised rescue attempts that never materialized. McDaniel camped out in front of Lafon to stop cars. Two patients who were having trouble breathing were taken out to a van where there was more air and comfortable seats. Even with this macabre and surreal scene, no one stopped.

They finally caught a break. Someone’s cell phone chirped to life, offering communication with the outside world. Greenwood made contact with one of her brothers; that call turned out to be Lafon’s most important SOS.

Irvin Boudreaux lived outside of Atlanta. In 35 hours, he would manage what no government agency or rescue team could pull off.

Rescue

With his brother and a friend, Boudreaux arrived at the chaotic perimeter of the city Thursday morning, towing a boat and a load of supplies. They were stopped at a checkpoint where only official vehicles could pass. His brother flashed his badge from his job with the sewage and water board. They claimed they were going in to check on sewer lines.

When Boudreaux got to the nursing home, he saw his sister first, and then his mother, sitting on a bucket in the driveway.

He simply could not believe their stories that no one would stop to help. He unhitched his boat and drove off in search of a police officer, a paramedic, anyone, but he saw for himself the futility of the mission. He returned to Lafon, where he took in the gruesome sight. By now, nearly a dozen patients were dead. The heat was stifling, but the smell was worse.

Boudreaux loaded his truck with the children who’d been trapped at Lafon, and his own mother, stepfather and grandmother. He crossed back through a checkpoint and found a state police officer, but the officer refused to take the group. Boudreaux then drove to the Superdome to see if he could use it as a staging area to drop off Lafon patients, but there was too much water to cross, and where it was dry he could see thousands of disoriented wanderers. The old people would never survive this scene. He turned back for Lafon.

The problem was transportation. Boudreaux called his employer, Marathon Oil Corp., and anyone else he could think of. Church buses were being commandeered from other states, but finding a driver who would brave the pandemonium of New Orleans was proving impossible.

By now the emergency operations center in Baton Rouge was aware there was a crisis. Jelynne Burley, a San Antonio woman whose grandmother was at Lafon, called a friend who worked in the Louisiana governor’s office. The Nursing Home Association, a trade group that was keeping track of its 53 member nursing homes during the storm, was camped inside the emergency operations command in Baton Rouge. Lafon didn’t belong to the organization, but Executive Director Joe Donchess said his employees “told many people many times that we had 50 patients, 70 patients or 100 patients and we needed help immediately. And we were left to figure it out ourselves.”

Boudreaux would be their best shot. He found a bus company and a driver for $1,000. Leaving nothing to chance, he found three vans in Lafayette, too. The nursing home group scrambled to find a place to bring the evacuees, but even in the emergency operation center, simple communication was difficult.

When Boudreaux escorted the bus into the parking lot of Lafon, darkness had fallen. Inside the nursing home, flashlights were used as people gathered the patients. Those who were able, walked, such as Evelyn Leal, but her husband and others had to be carried out. Some were laid in the aisle of the bus on pillows. Boudreaux noticed how they “perked right up” in the air-conditioned bus. One patient did not make it; he died before he was loaded. He was the man with palsy, whose face Evelyn Leal had washed every day.

With more than 40 on board, the others would have to wait for the second run. McDaniel, her habit off and wearing a sweat-soaked T-shirt, stayed behind with them.

Ninety minutes later, the bus arrived at Chateau Terrebonne nursing home in the town of Houma, southwest of New Orleans. The staff was waiting. One man had raced to Chateau Terrebonne when he heard that buses were on their way. He saw Greenwood and asked if his father was on this bus or coming on the next.

The man’s father was the person who died just before being loaded. “Your father did not survive this ordeal,” Greenwood said, and the son grabbed her and held her and cried.

It was after midnight when the charter bus set out for Lafon for the second batch of patients, with Boudreaux in his truck leading the way.

They reached the Mississippi River bridge when the sky boomed with explosions, sonic and bright — one person who saw it thought it was from a refinery, but that could not be confirmed. Boudreaux said a policeman told him to run for his life. They turned the vehicles around and parked on the shoulder of the road. After a couple of hours, the police opened the roads again.

But the bus driver was too afraid to venture forth. He told Boudreaux he wouldn’t make the second run to Lafon.

The sun was coming up. It was Friday. Boudreaux sat on the side of the road. “I was just thinking about them people,” he would later say.

He would get a second bus, but it wouldn’t arrive until late that afternoon.

The Cavalry

On Friday, Dan Martinez and Jim Chesnutt were riding down Chef Menteur Highway when they noticed a dazed man in a hospital orderly’s shirt standing under a tree. The two FEMA officials had orders not to stop for anyone without an armed escort, but they pulled over and asked the man if he needed help.

“Don’t worry about me,” he said, pointing to Lafon behind him. “There’s people back there in worse shape.”

Lafon wasn’t on the list of nursing facilities and hospitals that rescue teams in this part of east New Orleans were searching. Even odder, the parking lot was dry and full of cars. Chesnutt and Martinez decided to take a look.

McDaniel greeted them at the door, and in urgent efficiency she described the gruesome tableau at Lafon: 12 dead bodies were in the chapel, two more dead were upstairs, and there were 59 others who needed immediate evacuation.

Chesnutt bolted up the stairs and took in the landscape of the elderly, lying on mattresses pads, slumped in wheelchairs, everywhere. Some wearily looked up at him. Most did not.

Martinez radioed for help. Ken Wilson was directing medical operations for the area from a nearby highway overpass when he heard the sobering radio call. An emergency medical physician and medical director for the Orange County, Calif., fire department, Wilson knew they had to get the patients out of there, but he had only three ambulances and he knew that was not enough. There were helicopters in the air, but radio communication with the state authorities was out.

He got an ambulance driver to call his dispatcher in Lafayette, who called someone at the Superdome, who was sitting beside a military liaison with communications to the Air National Guard and Army. Twenty minutes later, the first Black Hawk was fluttering toward Lafon, and soon, an armada filled the sky.

David Shatz, a trauma surgeon with the Miami search and rescue team, looked in the back of the green van parked to the left of the entrance. Two patients were lying on blue foam mattresses in the van. Someone said they had been moved down there because it was cooler than upstairs. Shatz could see one of them was comatose and on the verge of death.

Shatz walked upstairs. Triage, from the French word “to sift,” meant making decisions about who was likely to live and die, and Shatz figured there were more to be made. To his surprise, the nuns had largely done the sorting for him. The first patients at the top of the stairs were the fittest. Walking down the hall, he found they seemed progressively weaker. Three or four at the end, he thought to himself, “were clearly on the way out.”

At the nursing home parking lot, rescue workers jammed the stalled cars into neutral and pushed them out of the way to make room for the choppers.

A few patients were carried out on hard plastic stretchers, but most grabbed sheets and bedding for a makeshift sling. “Don’t drop me,” one patient said. Carmelite Cogan, 91, was naked except for a diaper. She later told her daughter that she crossed her arms over her chest for dignity.

One by one, they were brought out to wait for what was now a stream of Black Hawks that took most of the patients to the makeshift hospital at Louis Armstrong International Airport. McDaniel and her staff would not leave until the last patient was taken. One FEMA official told McDaniel she had done a “heroic job.”

At the airport, some of the Lafon patients waited for as long as 15 hours before being flown to nursing homes and hospitals around the country. Many waited on stretchers on the dirty floor. Who would ever know their histories. Among them was 100-year-old Rosalie Daste, who suffered from dementia. No one at the airport would know that she had never missed a Southern University football game, that she was famous for her shrimp and okra, and that she made her grandchildren pick up pecans in the hot Louisiana sun because she wanted them to know what life would be like without a college education.

Two days after being airlifted from the New Orleans airport to a hospital in Monroe, La., Rosalie Daste died.

Aftermath

Family members were on their own to locate their loved ones. Many say they made repeated attempts to call McDaniel or her mother superior, Sister Sylvia Thibodeaux, in the days after the evacuation.

The more than 65 nuns evacuated before the storm had fled to a religious retreat center in Alexandria, 190 miles northwest of New Orleans. In an interview, Thibodeaux said she customarily evacuates the nuns in the face of severe hurricanes. She refused to say why Lafon didn’t make the same choice.

“They made their own plans,” Thibodeaux said. “I assign the sisters, but I do not make the decisions.”

Lafon is now an archaeological site of everything that happened there: metal bed frames pushed against walls, the brown watermark, mattresses on the floor, strewn water bottles and stinking carpet.

Flies buzzed on the screen door of the chapel — with the sign that said “morgue” after 22 bodies were recovered.

But one day last week there was remarkable order, too. The water had stopped short of the desktops, where paperwork remained neatly in place. Pencils still in their holders. Coffee cups half-full. A sweater draped over the back of a chair. The good and careful order of lives interrupted. Patient Alma Koehl still had a stuffed tiger on her bed. Patient Hilda DeMouy’s room had a note reminding nurses to take her blood pressure from the right side.

In Sister Benjamin’s room, a yellow ribbon from her jubilee party celebrating 50 years of religious life. On a counter in a nurse’s room, an open Bible next to a copy of the Times-Picayune with the screaming headline, “Katrina Takes Aim.”

Staff writers Jacqueline L. Salmon in Houma, La., and Lisa Rein in Houston and research editor Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.

Remembering Gunny and the Kid, a Hard-Hit Unit Goes Back on Patrol

By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, August 13, 2004; Page A01

QAIM, Iraq — Word spread fast. It was Gunny. And the young kid, Nice.

The news was passed in low voices, quiet conversations. No one wanted to say it loudly. The Marines heard it and looked away. They squinted at the heavy sun, kicked their boots in the dust. Their faces hardened. They spat their dip and shifted the guns on their shoulders. They swore. What else was there to say but goddammit.

Gunnery Sgt. Elia Fontecchio, 30, was killed by a roadside bomb, set off by someone who was watching a U.S. Marine foot patrol finish its work on Wednesday, Aug. 4. A half-hour later, Lance Cpl. Joseph Nice, 19, was stringing concertina wire across a road when a single sniper bullet passed through his body.

They were deaths 14 and 15 for the 3rd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment since it arrived in February. With 156 Purple Hearts as well, the casualty count for this battalion is higher than that of any other unit in Iraq, save for fellow Marines in turbulent Fallujah.

But to the men here, this is a forgotten war. They are at the western edge of Iraq, the last stop before Syria. The world hears what happens here only in a faint whisper. They are far from the headline cities — Najaf, Baghdad, Fallujah, Ramadi — where every spasm is seen by a thousand eyes.

Isolated at this far-flung outpost, the men live packed bunk to bunk, they guard one another’s backs, they depend on the group to help ward off fear and loneliness. And they face losses in their own searingly personal way. When one man is killed, the rest are asked to go back where he died, to face the same danger, in the name of duty. They do it, they say, for their comrades, for themselves and for a country that expects it of them.

Fontecchio didn’t have to go out. His duties taking care of the company meant he was usually busy at the camp, with no time to patrol. Gunnery sergeants, always called “Gunny,” occupy a special place in the Marine Corps. Part supply officer, part morale booster, part problem solver, the gunnery sergeant is responsible for the well-being of the unit. He ranks high enough to get things done, but not so high that he doesn’t work and play with the enlisted men.

Fontecchio was ideal for the job. He led with humor, which made him popular. When the company commander, Capt. Trent Gibson, gave him his most recent evaluation, the two men smoked cigars as Gibson told Fontecchio his only fault was he sometimes was too nice. Glowing reviews had moved Fontecchio up the ranks quickly; to be a gunnery sergeant after 12 years in the Corps was impressive.

So was his physique. A weight lifter, he kept a detailed calendar by his bed of his near-daily workouts, along with Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding,” with pages marked by Post-its. “He was what you think all Marines are supposed to look like,” said the assistant operations officer, Capt. Rory Quinn, 29, of the Bronx. “He was a physical stud.”

He also did not like to stay in camp too long. As his comrades recalled the events in interviews, that Wednesday Fontecchio joined a patrol.

At an Iraqi police station, they were told that Checkpoint 43, a two-room cinder-block police shelter, had been bombed. The checkpoint is in a lush fringe of the Euphrates River, where the desert suddenly yields to green fields of corn, okra, peppers and tomatoes. It is a pretty spot. And low: Small cliffs nearby offer a clear view of the road below. Four vehicles — with about 25 men — went to investigate.

As trained, the Marines dismounted and dispersed, scouting for clues or other bombs. After about 25 minutes, they started to pull back. The men walked toward their Humvees. Someone — perhaps on the cliffs above, perhaps hidden in a field, maybe passing on a nearby road — decided this was the moment to explode the foot-long, 155mm artillery shell that had been buried near Fontecchio’s vehicle.

“You don’t hear the blast. It doesn’t register,” said Staff Sgt. Shelby Lasater, 32, of Plano, Tex., who was about 150 feet away. “It happens so fast. You see a ball of fire, black smoke, then shrapnel, dirt, trees and branches flying. You feel the heat.”

Lasater followed his sprinting medical corpsman toward the center of the blast and found Gunny. “I asked him how old was his son. He told me. I said, ‘You’re going to see him.’ ”

Within minutes, one of two attack helicopters that were supporting the patrol dropped onto the road. Marines shoved in Fontecchio’s litter and loaded two of the wounded into seats. The “golden hour” so critical for survival of trauma victims was barely 20 minutes old when Gunny arrived at Camp Qaim. The Marines who unloaded him said he was talking. He would be all right, they believed.

The patrol resumed its hunt. A half-hour later, the men heard the blast of another roadside bomb about a mile away, near the police station. A patrol from W Company was closest and began to block off the area. Lance Cpl. Nice pulled off a roll of the razor-sharp concertina wire strapped to the hood of one of the Humvees. With heavy gloves, he unfurled the coil of wire, dragging it across one of the roads to stop traffic.

Like all the Marines, Nice wore a heavy vest with hardened plates in the front and back, the body armor that has saved many lives in this war. But as he turned to grapple with the wire, a single shot rang out. It pierced his side, under his raised arm, where the vest has only canvas webbing to allow flexibility. The bullet passed through his lungs and heart and exited the other side. He dropped on his back in the dust.

Staff Sgt. Chris Bengison, 31, heard the “crisp, clear pop” and calculated that the shot came from a cluster of two-story buildings in the distance. He and others laid down withering fire with their M-16 automatic rifles and a machine gun. Cpl. Jason Lemcke, 23, a squad leader, raced his Humvee toward the fallen Marine. Just as he opened the door, a shot crashed into the side mirror, just missing Lemcke’s head. He fell back.

Another Humvee pulled beside Nice, and Cpl. Robert Wells dragged him with one hand, firing an M-16 with the other. They raced toward the open area where Fontecchio had been airlifted. A Black Hawk helicopter was on the way.

As they waited, corpsmen Adam Clarke and John Patrick Crate began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. For each breath they gave, they got a mouthful of blood. They took turns, vomiting between their efforts. Nice’s eyes were glazed, his heart stopped, the life drained from the gaping wounds in his sides. He was dead before the helicopter landed.

The Marines assaulted the buildings. The sniper was gone.

‘The Wild West’

Anbar province, where the Marines are responsible for security, is larger than Virginia. It is a creased desert with hills and wadis — dry riverbeds this time of year — cut by the Euphrates River. Towns and clay-house villages follow the river south.

The 3rd Battalion is split between Qaim and Husaybah, which sits on the border with Syria. The men deal with the same shadowy enemies found elsewhere in Iraq: ex-army officers and Baath Party functionaries who saw their power evaporate with the fall of Saddam Hussein; Muslim zealots who slipped into Iraq; and Iraqis willing to fight for anyone who pays them. Added to the mix is a long tradition of smuggling and lawlessness.

“This is the Wild West, the frontier,” said Capt. Dominique Neal, a Naval Academy graduate whose Lima Company is in Husaybah. Neal, 29, became the company commander April 17 when Capt. Richard Gannon was killed in a gunfight along with four other Marines. When he got the news on the radio, Neal, the executive officer, followed procedure and took the call sign of the commander: “Lima 5 is now Lima 6,” he transmitted.

“It was the hardest message I ever sent,” he said. Their base is now named Camp Gannon.

A Tough Loss

The helicopter that whisked Fontecchio toward Camp Qaim settled onto a concrete landing pad 150 feet from the tents of FRSS — the Forward Resuscitative Surgical System. This is the modern version of the M*A*S*H unit, where surgeons operate as close to the action as they can get. There are only three such units in Iraq; Qaim’s casualty rate merits one of them.

Marines sprinted from the helicopter with a litter bearing the gunnery sergeant. “He was in very bad shape,” said Navy Capt. H. Don Elshire, 53, a surgeon who left a private practice in Orange County, Calif., to come to Iraq. “He was 15 feet from a high-explosive shell designed to destroy a tank. He should have come in here in pieces. It’s probably only because he was in such good shape that we even got him at all.”

Gunny was talking, trying to sit up, but he was pale, his heart was racing, and he had almost no pulse in his extremities. To the doctors, these were the neon-bright signs of shock; they meant massive loss of blood, somewhere. When Gunny’s uniform was cut away, it was clear the blood was not going out the wounds in his legs. But his belly was horribly distended, filled with internal bleeding.

Navy Capt. Kermit Booher, 60, an orthopedic surgeon, would assist in the surgery. When he saw the patient, he was startled to recognize a man he had met a day or two before, in the gym, who had been gregarious and friendly.

“He’s laying there, and you think, ‘Why is it the nice guys?’ ”

Fontecchio’s litter was lifted onto the brackets of the portable operating table in the tent. Halogen lights were swung over the patient. With no blood circulating, Fontecchio was already getting cold, so Elshire turned off the tent’s air conditioning. The 118-degree heat quickly nuzzled in.

Elshire slit open Gunny’s belly. “It is kind of like slicing into a water balloon. You can’t see what’s going on. You have to visually imagine where the blood’s coming from, and you have a few precious moments to do it.”

Elshire did the best he could. He found a sliced aorta, the body’s largest artery. He was able to stitch that. Then he found shrapnel that had entered Gunny’s leg and swept through the thin-walled veins in the pelvic region. “It had turned that area to shreds.” With no single wound to stitch, Elshire furiously packed the area to put pressure on the bleeding. As the minutes became an hour, then two, Elshire was sweating, soaked and starting to feel dizzy from the heat. Finally, he closed the incision.

“We had done everything we could,” Elshire said. Already, outside, the blades of a Black Hawk were spinning to take Gunny to the Army hospital in Baghdad. But Elshire and the others knew his odds were bad. They had already pumped nearly eight liters of blood into him — replacing his body’s entire volume.

Booher described it: “All of a sudden everything stopped. His heart stopped beating, the blood stopped oxygenating. He died almost immediately.”

For the doctors, it was a tough loss. In five months, the unit had seen 90 shock-trauma patients and operated on 20 of them. “Every single Marine who has come in here alive has left here alive,” Booher said. “With Gunny, it was more personal because we couldn’t save him. We spent a lot of time thinking about everything we did.

“People say, ‘You did your best. You did everything you could.’ All those platitudes — they are all true. But it still hurts.”

A Different War

Last year, this Marine battalion began the war in Kuwait and fought its way north to Baghdad, without losing a single member in combat. The troops had about five months at their home base in Twentynine Palms, Calif., then returned to Iraq. They came back to a different war.

“I knew it was going to be more deadly. But nothing to this degree,” Gibson, the Kilo Company commander, said over midnight rations of beans and rice. A wiry, intense man with a shaved head, Gibson, 35, said that on their first day out, a roadside bomb went off beside another captain’s vehicles. The next day, Gibson’s vehicle was hit. “I told the men, ‘This is a guerrilla war, an insurgency. Marines are going to die. But we have a duty and we’ll do it.’ ”

The Americans insist the majority of residents want them here to keep peace. Abed Ali Habad, who works for the Marines as an interpreter, disagrees. “People feel they suffered from the dictatorship of the Tikritis,” he said, referring to Hussein’s hometown clan. “Now we suffer from the dictatorship of the mujaheddin and the Americans. We need both to go.”

Lt. Col. Matthew Lopez, commanding officer of the nearly 2,000-man battalion, says he has seen Iraqis’ lives improve since the Marines arrived. Shops have reopened in Husaybah. An Iraqi police force is struggling to its feet. More than 80 schools have been rebuilt, along with water and electrical facilities. Violence, while still fitful, has generally decreased.

“By all accounts, we have been very successful,” he said. “But the success has come at a cost.”

The Debriefing

Back at the base, the Kilo Company platoons gathered for a debrief, an exhaustive minute-by-minute rehash of what happened. This is standard — the U.S. military lives by script, rehearsal and review — but this meeting was heavy with loss. The men sat in plastic chairs in a room with filthy walls, their faces still smudged with dust, their eyes downcast, their guns beside them on the linoleum floor.

They debated the moves they had made. They reviewed their positions. They compared their observations. In the end, they concluded, the fatalities did not happen because of something they did wrong.

“We took casualties today,” Staff Sgt. Lasater told the men. “But you did your job.”

Gibson, the company commander, looked ahead: “There’s a sniper out there. We need to find him and kill him.”

Saad Ali, a grizzled Iraqi military veteran now part of a special unit working with the Americans, spoke through an interpreter. “The people of the area, I can read their faces,” he said. “They hate the American forces. Even pregnant women want to give birth earlier to fight you. The respect we show them, they don’t deserve. We should kill from every house one person and not be sad. We should kill from every house one man. The enemy is ruthless. We must be as ruthless.”

Silence greeted him as though he had thrown a dead dog on the floor. The Marines looked at one another in amazement at this Hussein-era prescription and rolled their eyes.

After the meeting, the platoon officers and the sergeants lingered to discuss how to handle the losses.

“Hell, I don’t want to get killed,” said Staff Sgt. Chris Bengison, 31, of Frederic, Wis. “But I’ve got a whole platoon that is looking at me. I can’t go soft on them. So you put your uniform on. You put your boots on. You put your flak jacket and helmet on and get back into the vehicle and do it again. That’s the only way you can make it.”

‘He Was a Kid’

Later that night the men were in their barracks, a train depot divided with plywood and hanging tarps to create an illusion of privacy. No one is more than an arm’s reach from the next bunk. The place is decorated with pinups and slogans painted on the wall, and jammed with gear and heaps of clothes and magazines.

“When you are back here, you think, ‘I was standing right next to Nice,’ ” Bengison said. “Why him, and not me? What if the sniper had a little different angle?”

In Marine parlance, Nice was a “boot drop” — someone who had just joined the unit from basic training. He was raised in Ohio, and when his parents divorced, he went to Oklahoma with his mother and grandmother. He got good grades in high school but decided to follow his father and grandfather into the service, as many Marines do.

“Nice was a good kid. That’s what he was — a kid,” Lasater said gently. “He grew up fast being here for six months, but . . . he was a kid. He didn’t smoke. He didn’t drink.”

“He always had a smile on his face,” added Lt. Chris McManus. “He was one of those guys that you ask to do stuff and it’s already done.” Others in the barracks used him as a “scribe,” to write letters. He was a whiz with a computer and figured out the unit’s complex new electronic tracking system in a day.

“He was the kind of kid his father and mother could be proud of,” Lasater said.

In the officers’ section, a four-foot-wide corridor packed with four cots, 1st Lt. Rudy Salcido, 29, of Tucson, slowly sorted through the items in the empty bunk below his — Fontecchio’s bunk.

The first group from the 3rd Battalion was supposed to begin flying back to Kuwait, and then California, in two weeks. Within a month, the whole battalion, including Fontecchio, would have been on its way home.

“He was going to read these on the plane home,” said Salcido, thumbing through two how-to books on child-rearing. “He talked about his kid all the time. He would sit and chat about how he has been away so long and wanted to make it back to them. He was really devoted to his family.”

The men knew that just about then two Marines in dress uniforms were giving the news to Fontecchio’s wife, Kinney, who was visiting her mother in Virginia Beach with 2-year-old Elia Jr. Two more Marines were at the home of Nice’s mother in Prague, Okla.

1st Sgt. Michael Templeton, 40, was a longtime friend of Fontecchio’s. He shook his head. “I held Gunny’s hand as he came in on the litter. I told him his last lie: ‘You’ll be okay.’ ”

Back on Patrol

The sun rises. The war goes on. Patrols go out. By the next day, the 6 a.m. touch football game had resumed in the parking lot. A squad jogged by in unison, wearing rifles, chanting in cadence. The e-mail blackout imposed after every casualty to stop rumors from flying home was lifted, and within minutes, 26 Marines lined up at the computer tent for their turn to send messages home.

“The first killed-in-action we had, everybody was quiet for a long time,” said Lt. Daniel Casey, 30, a former Peace Corps volunteer from Chicago. “They stood around the hallways here, and nobody even thought of going for chow. It’s sad what you get accustomed to. Unfortunately, now we have a casualty and the routine just goes on. You feel guilty, but that’s how it is.”

Two days later, a Kilo Company patrol rolled out of the gates. The men called it an “H and D” patrol — a search for “hate and discontent.” They would stop anyone who looked suspicious, search any house where their waves were returned by a sullen glare. Maybe they would find some weapons. Maybe someone would react.

“We’re out there trying to draw fire. That’s the only way we can get them, if they come out to fight,” said Cpl. Jack Self.

Their work space was a hot, jammed vehicle covered inside and out with dust. The interior was crowded with metal ammo boxes, a rocket launcher, grenades, boxes of water, radios sprouting plugs and cords. In their vehicle, a gunner stood in the swiveling turret with a 7.62mm machine gun and a TOW missile launcher. The other men rode with their M-16 rifles at the ready.

They said little as the Humvees rolled, turning off the main highway and prowling the dirt roads of the village of Sadah. Children poured out of the houses to watch. Some waved and clapped. One little girl put her thumbs in her ears and wagged her hands, sticking out her tongue. In the back seat, Lance Cpl. Christopher Blissard, 21, of Brandon, Miss., shrugged.

The insurgents’ rocket launchers and roadside bombs are often ingeniously made, so the patrol stopped at a machine shop in the village. The Marines rousted eight workers, standing them in a line, checking their identity papers. One door was locked. A Marine with a hammer broke the padlock, revealing a small shop stocked with candy and ice cream.

The patrol moved on, their trail of dust drifting over the surrounding houses. They passed heaps of garbage, trucks and tractors in disrepair, vegetable gardens and sheep.

The village seemed placid, pastoral. The residents sleep at midday, awaiting the relative cool of evening. But it is not always calm here, the Marines said. There have been six roadside bombings at a spot near where Gunny was killed. And see that alley? It was rocket alley a few weeks ago, when an American patrol was met by a volley of rocket-propelled grenades.

As they climbed a bumpy street, one Marine said he saw a young man hastily throw something over a low wall. The Marines surrounded a house and brought out seven young men. The Americans ordered them to lie on the ground facedown, with their hands behind their heads. Other Marines searched behind the low stone wall and went through the house, room by room. Four children, two women and an old man sat on the porch, apprehensive and silent.

The Marines found nothing and left. The young men got up, dusting off their clothes and glancing sidelong at the departing Humvees.

House after house was like this. Young men lined up sullenly when ordered. Only the old women were fearless, scolding the Americans in loud Arabic. “Shut up,” a Marine snapped in English.

The Marines returned to their Humvees. In the heat, rivulets of sweat appeared from under Kevlar helmets, mingled with dust and disappeared under armored vests. The discomfort added to the tension of being exposed to attack.

“Having a sniper out there scares the hell out of me,” confided one Marine. “He’s a pretty good one, too. Only three shots, and he got one of ours — Nice. And he almost got Lemcke.”

Four hours after leaving, the patrol returned to base. The Marines had found no weapons, made no arrests. Some were disappointed.

“It’s always nice to get a bad guy,” said Cpl. Travis Struecker, 21, of Algona, Iowa. “It’s pretty frustrating when we can’t find them. A lot of the guys were pretty pissed after Gunny’s death. They wanted to kick some ass.”

Roll Call

The men of the 3rd Battalion formed up Saturday morning in crisp, straight lines. The first notes of the “Star-Spangled Banner” brought them rigid, their arms cocked in salutes. In front of the formation, 1st Sgt. Templeton called roll three times. At the names Fontecchio and Nice, the only answer was the snapping of the American and Marine Corps flags.

An honor guard stabbed the absent Marines’ rifles, bayonets down, into sandbags on the parking lot. Their helmets were placed on the rifle stocks. Empty boots in front. “The more of these we do, the harder it gets,” said Lopez, the battalion commander. “And the harder we get.”

The officers said a few words. Gibson, the company commander, acknowledged Fontecchio’s priorities: “He was a father first and foremost. And he was a Marine.” Nice, he said, “never said much, but you always knew he was there, taking care of your back.”

Templeton added: “If there’s a gym in heaven, Gunny’s there.”

Fontecchio was never much for sermons. At the last ceremony, the chaplain’s words didn’t capture what was important to the men, he thought. So he wrote out detailed instructions for his own ceremony — just in case. No sermons. He added a few words of goodbye:

“I loved every one of you. You will forever be my brothers in arms.”

The Marines broke ranks and filed past the upended rifles, each man touching the helmets in farewell. They were slumped. A few shed tears. Salcido crossed himself. Lopez, the last before the honor guard broke, saluted each rifle.

Slowly, the men drifted back to their bunks. Those on duty picked up their helmets and shrugged on their heavy flak jackets.

Sixteen minutes later, the next patrol headed out the gate, trailing a plume of dust in the desert.

By Doug Struck

Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, August 3, 2004; Page A10

Thirteen town fathers sat cross-legged on blankets arranged in a rectangle on an improbably green lawn. They wore headdresses andjalabaya robes and ran loops of smooth worry beads over and over through their fingers. Their faces showed skepticism.

They were waiting for a tall, eager Midwesterner with a degree in telecommunications and more than 14 years of service in the U.S. Army.

Capt. David Krzycki, 35, commands an infantry company. He is trained for that, and his men say he is good at it. He was not trained to teach civics to reluctant strangers in a farming village in Iraq — or to get them to put the principles into practice.

In the unscripted drama that is Iraq today, U.S. soldiers have an ambiguous role. They are fighters still facing deadly attacks. They are midnight raiders and bridge builders. They rain bombs on insurgents and deliver candy to kids. They are hated as occupiers and, occasionally, appreciated as nation-builders.

Krzycki was a little late for the meeting, which was held at the home of one of the town elders. He had made a side trip to show a visitor a school that had been a filthy, broken place when his A Company, 2nd Platoon, began patrolling this dusty village of 750. Now, largely because Krzycki got the school on the short list of projects being financed for reconstruction, the classrooms are clean and newly painted, the lights fixed, the broken windows that let in rain and sandstorms replaced. New blackboards and desks are on the way.

The first time his patrols came here, Krzycki explained, they were met by hostile stares and rocks thrown by children. They worked hard to overcome that. Once, their patrol came across a man whose car had run out of gas. Krzycki did what he would have done at home in Sturgis, Mich.: He jumped out and helped the man push the car to his house.

“He said it was right down the street. It turned out to be on the other side of town,” Krzycki said with a laugh. But practically everyone in town saw the American soldiers sweating as they pushed the car. “People said, ‘Hey, these guys aren’t so bad.’ ”

But this evening, Krzycki’s task was different. Rather than having his troops do what needed to be done, the officer wanted to persuade the town fathers to do it.

Krzycki arrived at the elder’s house, sweating and weighed down by the tools of his trade: steel helmet, steel-plated armored vest, automatic rifle, ammunition vest with 210 bullets, first aid kit, goggles, glasses, camera, pistol. Several of his platoon members, similarly hot and heavily laden, entered with him, as their Humvee purred outside the gate.

The Iraqis had put out plastic lawn chairs, a thoughtful gesture for their encumbered guests. Krzycki shook the hand of each man, took off his helmet and laid his M-4 assault rifle casually beside his chair. The other soldiers kept their weapons on their laps, a matter of habit and training.

Arab conversations are a kind of courtship, initiated by kisses and inquiries as to the health of each party. Krzycki started out with business. If the town fathers winced at the abruptness of it, they hid it well. They had met with him before; they knew his ways.

“All right, do you remember your homework?” Krzycki began. The Army interpreter glanced at him with a frown, then put the question to the elders more politely. “Last week, I asked everyone for one thing that you could do individually to make the town better. We had 16 people there, so we should have 16 good ideas. What have we got?”

There was silence.

And more silence.

Krzycki waited patiently. The men before him shifted uncomfortably on their blankets.

Finally, Ahmad Salmon, 36, a stocky man in a tan robe sitting toward the more junior edges of the group, spoke up. “I had an idea to clean out the road,” he said. “There is rubble on the road. But we need a dump truck and backhoe to take it away.”

Krzycki leapt at the suggestion. “Good! Now, does anyone have a dump truck?” Someone in town had one, he was told, but who would pay for it?

“Why would you need to pay anyone to use it to help clean up the town?” Krzycki asked, pleased at the opportunity to make the point. The men fell silent, contemplating this concept. Communities are not defined in this way here. Allegiances go first to one’s family, then to one’s clan. And then, maybe, to one’s friends. But to work, free, for the town?

There was a murmur as the men on the blankets talked among themselves. Finally, one of the older men, Ahlan Farhan Fihan, 63, decided to share a thought. “I have an idea that everyone should clean out in front of their own house,” he said.

“Yes! Yes! That’s the idea,” said Krzycki, cheerleading the tentative group. “These are great ideas! And you don’t even need me! You don’t need me to tell you how to clean up your town.”

The sheiks looked pleased.

“I’ll tell you what,” Krzycki said, as his interpreter strained to keep up with his enthusiasm. “I’ll do one of those projects if you do the other. I’ll give you a contract to get a front-end loader to load the rubble, if you agree that everyone will clean in front of their house.”

Soon he had a promise. But he wanted to close the deal, to make it happen. He asked Sgt. Todd Carlsrud for an envelope.

“Now, I’m a man of my word,” Krzycki said. He fished out three U.S. $100 bills and a $50 bill and slapped them on the plastic table in front of him with a flourish. “I’m prepared to sign a contract right now so you can rent a backhoe. That’s my end of the bargain. But I hold you accountable. When I come back next week, there should be a big improvement in the town.”

Dusk had come. The men were becoming shadows, and the sky, drained of its ferocious heat, came alive with darting bats.

Salmon, in the light of a flashlight held by one of the soldiers, signed a receipt for the $350. It would not be enough, he demurred, but he would take it. It was the second such job Salmon had accepted. Krzycki was impressed with his evident ambition. He thought the work would get done. If it didn’t, no more contracts.

“Let’s come up with three ideas a week,” he urged the men. “If we do, Awynat will be a better place.”

The soldiers strapped on their helmets. Krzycki started to leave, remembered his manners, and did a slow round of handshakes with the men. Outside, he was enthused. Two ideas was progress, he said. He had made a deal, and he had the leverage of future contracts to enforce it.

Maybe this was not what he was trained to do, not even what he was sent here to do. Maybe he had stepped on a few cultural sensitivities. But they were getting the point, Krzycki said. They were learning to do for themselves. When the Americans left, he concluded, they would leave Awynat a better place.

For Krzycki, that was reward enough.

“There’s no better job than this,” he said with a grin.

By Doug Struck

Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 1, 1997; Page A01

Fifty-two years later, tears still tumble down June Stephens’s cheek when she recalls Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death. She is embarrassed for a moment. She is not usually so emotional. But the recollection brings too many memories, both painful and warm.

Memories of her father, desperate to get work as a wallpaper hanger. Memories of rural poverty in Pennsylvania: “It was hard to put food on the table and clothes on your back.” And memories of a young man working on a WPA road crew in front of her house who became her husband.

The FDR Memorial being dedicated Friday has as much to do with a time — a time that seems lost in this much-changed world — as with the man himself. The dedication has opened a floodgate of memories of how the country was. For about 63 million Americans, the memories are of How We Were.

“They want to see their own lives as much as his,” Verne W. Newton, director of the Roosevelt Presidential Library, said of the visitors to the FDR home and library in Hyde Park, N.Y. Most of the visitors are old enough to remember Roosevelt, he said.

“Part of the reason Roosevelt endures is that he symbolizes what a generation went through — both the Depression and the war,” Newton said. “People feel that the younger generations don’t understand what they went through. There is an apprehension that `when we go, will the people understand?’ ”

They want younger people to understand times that were difficult but somehow less morally cluttered, times that raced from the darkest apocalypse to the relief of salvation, times that molded this nation into what it is.

Roosevelt embodies those memories. He presided over those times during 12 years as president. And, after all, said Stephens, now of Cartersville, Ga., as though stating the perfectly obvious, “he was the greatest president that lived on Earth.”

The man who designed the FDR Memorial, landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, recognized that memories of a time — 1933 to 1945 — would be the central focus, not just Roosevelt.

Unlike the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials, the tribute to Roosevelt does not revolve around a solitary statue of one man. Halprin says in a forthcoming book on the memorial that he wanted “to highlight the experience of living through the FDR presidency” as well as the influence FDR had on the country.

“Somehow I needed to evoke in each visitor a deep and emotional understanding of how these years changed the lives of the people who lived through them,” he said.

Halprin’s own recollections of the times include summer stints in the Civilian Conservation Corps and World War II service on a destroyer that was split by a kamikaze plane at Okinawa.

“Maybe when my kids go through it, it may cause them to ask me some questions and I could explain some things,” said William Bailey, 75, who worked at a CCC camp in rural Nebraska in 1940 for $30 a month. “A lot of younger folks have no idea what the memorial is about or what we went through. And everything’s a circle. I expect there will be some more bad times.”

The monuments to Washington and Jefferson were opened (in 1888 and 1943, respectively) long after contemporaries of those presidents had died. The Lincoln Memorial was dedicated 57 years after the president’s assassination. The FDR Memorial is being dedicated 52 years after Roosevelt’s death, and in an age of greater longevity, the dedication will be watched by many with their own memories of his times.

The dedications of the Vietnam Veterans and Korean War memorials in Washington also brought outpourings of personal memories, though for different reasons. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, dedicated in 1982, helped cauterize what was still an open wound in this country. The Korean War Memorial, dedicated in 1995, was a melancholy tribute to the sacrifices of an incomplete war in an unheralded time.

But the Great Depression and World War II were the cataclysms in which modern America was shaped. Those who are old enough to remember find the reflection an affirmation of their survival and a measure of the changes they have seen since then.

“I remember air raid drills . . . blackout curtains . . . air raid wardens. . . . I recall my mother being very discouraged over rationing coupons, not being able to buy shoes for one of my siblings,” recalled Ann Colliver, 63, of Frederick, Md. “I remember a hush fell over the living room at our house when the president spoke over the radio. I remember people applauding in the movie theater when the newsreels showed pictures of him.”

Unless you were there, perhaps it is hard to feel fully what America went through. When Roosevelt took office, 12 million people were unemployed — one in four able-bodied workers. In some cities, the jobless rate was 50 percent. Nearly 1,300 local governments were in default. The stock market was at 17 percent of its level three years earlier. The banks had failed. Forty percent of home mortgages were in default. The income of farmers had dropped 70 percent.

Economic depression had gripped the world, confounding the usual assumptions about labor and productivity and supply. No one was sure what to do or how to do it.

Not even Roosevelt, but at least he did something. His First Hundred Days set a standard for action that presidents ever since have envied. Not all of his alphabet soup of New Deal programs were good ideas — some economist-historians argue that some of Roosevelt’s moves actually hindered the economic recovery. But eventually they worked, and — just as importantly — Roosevelt made people feel that they could work.

“Roosevelt swallowed our depression. He has inhaled fear and exhaled confidence,” political satirist Will Rogers said of Roosevelt’s fast-from-the-gate start.

“My father and grandfather, both Pennsylvania coal miners, would sit in a chair, listening to those fireside chats,” recalled Robert Jenkins, 72, who grew up in Houtzdale, Pa., and now lives in Waldorf. “They never criticized Roosevelt. My dad said, `He’s just a man who’s trying to do the best for the country. He’s an honest man.’ ”

Even as the country’s economy was slowly rising from its knees, America was rocked by Pearl Harbor and thrust into World War II. Here, too, Roosevelt was a reassuring figure. He did not underestimate the size of the task or the loss that would be suffered. But he kept the country fixed on the necessity — and in his unflagging optimism, the inevitability — of winning the war. He inspired.

“Roosevelt was dinner table conversation,” recalled Carl M. Levin, who was only 11 when the president died in 1945 but clearly remembers flattening cans and collecting cigarette wrappers for the war effort. “He was one of my parents’ heroes in the family. He was the guy who is leading our nation against enemies — one of them a mortal enemy. He gave us confidence that we could do it.

“You could even hear it in his voice. Even as kids, we knew there was someone strong, a parental figure who would help make sure that it would come out okay,” said Levin, now a Democratic U.S. senator from Michigan and member of the FDR Memorial Commission. “He assured us if we pulled together as a people, we could lick the Depression and the enemy in World War II. I think that is what this monument, and America, is all about — our ability to overcome challenges.”

Certainly there were critics of Roosevelt, and much to criticize. His attempt to pack the Supreme Court by adding to its membership provoked an outcry. The courts rejected some of the New Deal’s most ambitious plans, especially the National Recovery Act, which many saw as an attempt to put the government in charge of the economy — for which FDR also was criticized.

Many critics, especially Republicans, believe Roosevelt’s rapid creation of federal agencies — which spawned the slang word “boondoggle” — is still today the root of government evil. And historians looking back have faulted FDR on a variety of issues, from his decision to build an atomic weapon to his internment of Japanese Americans and his failure to act on evidence of the Holocaust.

But for the voting majority, Roosevelt captured a feeling that Americans today can only vaguely recall, a memory briefly reawakened for some by President John F. Kennedy. Roosevelt was admired and trusted. His jaunty grin was a torch in very cloudy times.

Barbara Handman was a teenager in Philadelphia when she saw Roosevelt for the first time as he campaigned against Thomas E. Dewey in 1944 at a rally in old Shibe Park. She sold fliers for $1 a day to get into the rally, and what she saw stretched a youthful adoration of Roosevelt into what is now her 69th year.

“There was this magnificent creature — full of charm, full of connection with the people. They went wild for him,” she recalled. “He had a contagious smile. It just lit up everything. It made you feel good about yourself and your times. It was so awesome, so vigorous. It was almost interactive.”

Such a description of politicians seems alien today. Peter Kovler, a local investor and philanthropist, is only 44 but has championed Roosevelt’s legacy and contributed $500,000 to the memorial. He said he understands why older Americans cherish their memories of FDR and why younger Americans puzzle over them.

“We have two or three generations that are so cynical, based in part on Watergate and Vietnam, that they can’t even conceive that an American president could be the grandest figure of the century in the world,” he said.

“Anti-heroism is in full force in this country. But how can you blame people whose life experiences as adults start in the mid-1970s? They haven’t seen that much to cheer about.”

For those who lived in the Roosevelt times, though, the memories of him are wrapped up in the triumphs of the time, Kovler said.

“What memory is more important to the country than winning World War II, and overcoming the greatest financial disaster the country had? A man who can’t get out of his chair but beats Adolf Hitler, a man who takes a country from a 15th military power in the world to the mightiest military power in the history of Man, who electrified the country, gave us schools and dams and even football stadiums, the National Airport, Fort Knox . . . so many of the things you see and touch and feel in this country. That’s why there is such appeal.”