JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the State Emergency Management Agency (SEMA) are working to identify a small percentage of disaster assistance applicants who have been trying to cash in on the misfortune of others.

Homeland Security Threat Level: YELLOW (ELEVATED)

National Weather

Midwest
An upper-level disturbance moving eastward in the Plains may trigger showers and thunderstorms, some severe, from the western Dakotas to western Kansas.  Flood Warnings continue for numerous rivers in Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, and Michigan.  Highs will be in the 60s in the northern Great Lakes to the 80s in the Ohio Valley.
Northeast
A cold front moving through the region may bring cloudiness and light rain from New England to the Chesapeake Bay.  High temperatures will range from the 50s and 60s in Maine to the 70s in West Virginia.
South  
An upper-level disturbance over the Mississippi Valley will bring more showers and scattered thunderstorms across parts of Arkansas, western Tennessee, Louisiana and western Alabama.
Numerous Flood Watches and Warnings remain in effect for portions of Texas and Louisiana.
High temperatures will range from the 70s and 80s in the Carolinas to the low 90s in Texas.
West  
An upper-level disturbance over the high Plains will bring showers and scattered thunderstorms from Montana to Colorado and in northern Idaho and Washington.  Temperatures will range from the 40s in the northern Rockies to the 100s in the Desert Southwest. (NOAA, National Weather Service, Various Media Sources)

Federal / State Response for Hurricane Ike and Midwest Storms

Region V
Michigan

• State EOC is not activated
• No shelters with populations reported.
• State PDAs are ongoing
• No requests for Federal assistance.

Illinois

• State EOC is not activated.
• Joint PDAs are ongoing.
• 1 fatality; no injuries reported
• 1 shelter; population 7 (ESF 6 as of 9:00 a.m. EDT Sept. 20)

Ohio

• SEMA Assessment Room is activated 7:00 a.m. - 9:00 p.m. CDT
• 7 fatalities; 1 injury reported
• 238,760 customers remain without power. (ESF 12 Sitrep 10:00 a.m. EDT Sept. 20)
• 4 shelters; population 7 (ESF 6 as of 9:00 a.m. EDT Sept. 20)

Indiana

• State EOC is activated at Level III
• Joint PDAs are ongoing.
• 7 fatalities; 19 injuries reported
• 14,333 customers remain without power. (ESF 12 Sitrep 10:00 a.m. EDT Sept. 20)
• 3 shelters; population 122.  (ESF 6 as of 9:00 a.m. EDT Sept. 20)

FEMA Region VI
Louisiana

• GOSHEP activated at Level III
• 5 fatalities; no injuries reported
• 12,114 customers remain without power  (ESF 12 Sitrep 10:00 a.m. EDT Sept. 20)
• Health and Human Services (HHS) reported its Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team (DMORT) is working to secure over 100 casketed remains reported in Louisiana.
• The Louisiana JFO in Baton Rouge transitioned the response and recovery operations to the Louisiana Transitional Recovery Office (TRO) on September 20, 2008. 
• 6 shelters; population 352. (ESF 6 as of 9:00 a.m. EDT Sept. 20)

Texas

• Activated at Level I, 24/7
• 19 fatalities; no injuries reported.(JFO Sitrep #12)
• 1,180,676 customers remain without power. (JFO Sitrep #12 as of 4:00 p.m. CDT Sept. 20)
• There are approximately 34 PODs in Texas (National IMAT East).
• Establishing base camps in Galveston and Orange counties
• 1 Hospital in Houston remains on generator status (50% improvement since yesterday)
• 8 hospitals in Texas remain on generator status (20% improvement since yesterday)
• No public health assistance will be required in Galveston because water is back online
• Registration intakes over 500,000 with 70% submitted online through the web
• American Red Cross (ARC) mobile feeding sites continue; working on fixed sites
• U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) is establishing temporary emergency power for water and waste water; future needs for generator support; and temporary power for roofing.
• Consumers without service has dropped by 90,000; 318 cell sites are back online; all 911 centers are operational
• 175 shelters; population 18,072. (ESF 6 as of 9:00 a.m. EDT Sept. 20)

Presidio update:  Reservoir releases out of Luis Leon reservoir will continue to next week with considerable fluctuations in water levels. Major flooding will continue; however, potential levee failure will not be a catastrophic event due to water level rising slowly. Mandatory evacuations of low-lying areas in effect; approximately 4,500 residents remain at risk. Five Army helicopters and personnel are providing support and placement of “super sacks” sandbags to add an additional foot on top of the levee.

Tropical Weather Outlook

Atlantic/Caribbean:
Invest 93 - Medium Potential for Development
A tropical wave accompanied by a surface low pressure system over the northeastern Caribbean Sea is producing widespread cloudiness and showers over the Lesser Antilles and adjacent Caribbean and Atlantic waters.  This system continues to show signs of organization and upper-level winds are expected to become a little more favorable for development over the next couple of days.  A tropical depression could form during this time as the system moves slowly northwestward. 
Area 2 - Low Potential for Development
The broad area of low pressure previously over the southwestern Caribbean Sea has moved inland over Nicaragua.  No development of this system is expected.
Eastern Pacific:
Invest 90 - Medium Potential for Development
A broad low pressure area is centered about 275 miles southeast of Acapulco, Mexico.  This system has changed little in organization over the past several hours; however, upper-level winds remain marginally favorable for the development of a tropical depression during the next couple of days as the system moves slowly toward the northwest parallel to the coast of Mexico.
Western Pacific:
No tropical cyclone activity affecting United States Territories.(NOAA, HPC,  National Hurricane Center, Central Pacific Hurricane Center and the Joint Typhoon Warning Center)

Earthquake Activity

No new activity (FEMA HQ)

Preliminary Damage Assessments

No new activity (FEMA HQ)

Wildfire Update

National Fire Activity as of  Saturday, September 20, 2008:
National Wildfire Preparedness Level: 2
Initial attack activity: Light (59)
New large fires: 1
Uncontained large fires: 6
Large fires contained: 1
States with large fires: CA, MT, OR
Predictive Fire: Thunderstorm activity today will be mainly across interior portions of the Pacific Northwest and northeastern California. These storms will be a mix of wet and dry, but this entire area should see a wetter transition to showers later today. Otherwise, it will be seasonably warm and dry across the Great Basin, Rockies, and much of the Northeast. Scattered showers and wet thunderstorms are forecast for most of the Southeast.   (NIFC, NICC)

Disaster Declaration Activity

No new activity (FEMA HQ)

Houston, TX, September 25, 2008 — This utility crew works to restore service to Houston. FEMA helps fund electrical crews from many states to come to Texas and quickly restore power knocked out by Hurricane Ike. This crew came from Gilbert, Arizona. Photo by Greg Henshall / FEMA

Blythe, Calif. - Border Patrol agents assigned to Blythe Station arrested 31 illegal aliens early Friday morning. They were found on two agricultural labor buses.On September 19, at about 6:20 a.m., agents working traffic operations near Blythe, Calif. (more)

Yuma, Ariz. - Border Patrol agents assigned to Yuma Station rescued a man early Friday morning after he began to drown in the Sanchez Canal.Just before midnight agents working west of the San Luis, Ariz., port of entry observed three subjects illegally cross the international boundary. (more)

El Paso, Texas - U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers working at the El Paso port of entry discovered 29.7 pounds of cocaine and 22.2 pounds of marijuana in a car being driven by a 60-year-old man Thursday morning. The seizure was one of many busts made by CBP officers working at area ports during the past week. (more)

Thanks for all your questions and comments on my earlier post about audio-on-demand for the iPhone.

Rather than answer them all independently, here are answers to some common questions:

Is audio-on-demand only available on the iPhone?

iPlayer video and audio-on-demand will also be available on the Nokia N96, which Nokia is due to release on 1 October (see Matthew Postgate’s previous post). We initially launched this service on the iPhone as it’s a very popular device amongst our audio and music audiences, but the BBC’s new media teams are working hard to bring audio-on-demand to other mobile devices in the very near future.

Can I stream live BBC radio on the iPhone?

The iPhone is currently only available on the O2 network in the UK and continuous streaming of audio and video content is not permitted under the terms of O2’s flat-rate packages. We’re currently working on supporting live streaming when you’re connected via wifi.

Can I stream live BBC radio on other mobile devices?

I would love to make iPlayer available on all mobile devices but as the media support and browser functionalities vary so widely, this may take some time. Where we can be certain that a WiFi connection is being used, and that this connection is also used by the device’s media player software, then it’s already possible to access live streams. For more details see here.

Unfortunately, many mobile devices swap to 3G or GPRS connections without informing their users - which can be very expensive. The BBC is in discussions with network operators on this issue and hopes that consumer demand will help to drive this change.

Why doesn’t BBC radio podcast all their programmes?

The BBC negotiates rights with collective bodies and artists’ representatives to make streamed material available for up to 7 days after broadcast. Where rights allow, we also make BBC programmes available to download as podcasts. We currently make over 170 titles available as podcasts and this number will continue to grow. The limits we place on this growth are largely down to cost.

Why have on-demand mobile services been prioritised before improving on-line audio quality?

Improving the audio quality of live internet radio streams remains a key priority. This is a much larger piece of work and will take a little longer to complete. There’ll be a post later tonight on the Radio Labs blog detailing progress towards this.

Why do some programmes appear as ‘currently unavailable’?

The audio-on-demand facility for iPhone, giving people the chance to listen to programmes from “the past seven days”, only launched on Monday. So, the complete list of programmes is being built up over this week. All listed BBC radio shows should be available by Monday 29 September.

Once again, please feel free to leave me your comments about how this service affects how you listen to BBC radio.

Mark Friend is Controller, BBC Audio & Music Interactive.

Thanks for all your comments to date - I do read them and mentally log them even where I don’t respond directly to them in my posts.

I want to deal, though, with some of the comments about the channel content, and also to share with you some of the issues we face in making decisions for the channel.

BBC HD aims to broadcast in HD the best of programming available from the BBC.

Clearly, “best” is quite a subjective term. It could mean the content which works “best” in HD. When we make decisions about where to make HD investments, that is one of our considerations, and part of the reason why the first programming to deliver in HD has been our sport, costume dramas and natural history.

But it’s not always possible to predict whether a programme or series will work well in this way - sometimes we can find a strong visual awareness in unexpected places, and sometimes programmes which we expect to look good in HD don’t.

But our promise to look to the “best of the BBC” needs also to reflect the programmes that you (and others) in our audience tell us you really like - either because you watch them in large numbers, or because you tell us in other ways that you think they represent really valuable programming.

And the range of programmes there is much broader - we know that it extends to entertainment shows like Strictly Come Dancing and Jonathan Ross, sport, comedy, documentaries, music and also some daytime programmes.

I believe firmly that the BBC has a responsibility to consider programmes from across the full range of content and channels which we broadcast, and that we should continually experiment with forms of programming which are not available elsewhere in HD.

They may not look as pristine as those programmes for which HD is a more instinctive format, but they add to the range of HD content available to viewers who have invested in HD connections, and they help to ensure that on BBC HD, as on all other BBC channels, we are able to offer programmes which suit as wide a range of tastes as possible.

Even though we’ve been making programmes in HD for some time now, we still have a great deal to learn about the best ways to work with what remains an emerging technology.

A number of you have commented on the picture quality on Jonathan Ross. You’re right - the show doesn’t look as good at the moment in HD as we would like it to. That’s not because - as mwbennett suggests, we’re doing it on the cheap, or because light entertainment or studio shows as a whole have a lower quality threshold.

But the conversion of studio TC4 to HD is very recent, and we took a decision that we wanted to bring you the whole series of Jonathan Ross, rather than sorting all technical issues in advance of starting broadcast.

There are still elements affecting picture quality along the broadcast chain that we are working on (and some of these don’t just relate to Jonathan Ross). I hope that, as we address them, the picture quality will improve across the channel.

Having said that we want to make sure that the best of the BBC’s content is available to you in HD, however that’s defined, I have to tell Dazza124 that, unfortunately, Merlin will not be on BBC HD.

Sometimes, for a whole variety of reasons, the production team decides that it doesn’t want to use the format. Those of us on BBC HD felt that Merlin was a show that we should aim to deliver in high definition, but in the end it was shot in Super 16.

Derek500 asks for the “official” reason for not showing the Strictly Come Dancing results show in HD. I wasn’t aware of an “unofficial” reason, but there is no particular issue in discussing why it won’t be available on the channel this year.

A lot of work was done to try to ensure that the results show as well as the main show could be made in HD. But the nature of the results show, with lots of small camera filming and a fast turnaround, meant that we were unable to guarantee that the show could be delivered with the requisite proportions of HD content.

I had to take a decision about whether to pursue discussions and invest money which then couldn’t be used for other programmes in a show which had a high chance of not actually delivering in HD. Reluctantly, I took the view that we should lose the programme from the HD schedule. It’s not a decision I’m particularly pleased about, but in the circumstances it seemed to be the best one to make.

I am discovering that life at BBC HD is full of this kind of tricky dilemma - to a large extent, it is because the channel and technology are so interwoven into the other things that the BBC does, and the life of the rest of the channel portfolio.

This is particularly true when it comes to scheduling the channel. We want to bring you the best content available, and we recognise that most of the time you would like to see it in HD at the same time that it is being broadcast in SD.

But sometimes BBC One and BBC Two both have something made in HD on at the same time, and sometimes the rights we have to broadcast the content mean that our flexibilty is very restricted.

We have at least two instances coming up. Silent Witness is on at the same time as the first episode of Heroes, which we can only play at the same time as one of the other channels broadcasting it because of the rights we can afford to buy on it.

And we also have a clash between the last episode of the BBC Two series The Tudors (which I hope you have been enjoying) and the first episode of BBC One’s Little Britain USA - both also acquisitions.

In both cases, we’ll aim to broadcast both programmes on the channel - but obviously, only one can go out at the time that it is being shown in SD, and the other slots we have available may be less suited to the content and your lives.

We have heated debates within the team about what the best option is, and I suspect that, whichever programme we choose to prioritise, some of you will feel we’ve made the right decision and others the wrong one.

I’m interested as ever to know what you think - but also want you to know that even if you don’t like the outcomes we get to, the decisions don’t get taken lightly.

Danielle Nagler is Head of HDTV, BBC Vision.

Our catch-up TV offer just got a whole lot smarter, thanks to the introduction of the series stacking feature on BBC iPlayer and programme sites on bbc.co.uk.

We first announced this during last month’s Edinburgh TV Festival [see earlier post], where we also talked about plans for live streaming of the BBC’s TV channels - all part of making our programmes and channels available when, where and how audiences want them.

Series stacking, which starts rolling out this week, extends the availability window of selected series from the standard seven days to the lifetime of the series while on air, up to 13 weeks after transmission of the first episode.

It might seem like a difficult concept to get your head around but the reality is altogether more simple: you can now feast on multiple episodes from the same series for longer.

Unlike a PVR, which requires viewers to know what they want to record in advance of it being shown, stacking lets you join a series part way through its run and catch up not just on the most recent episode, but on earlier ones too.

We expect that this will appeal most to viewers who’ve heard about a series from friends or colleagues, or read about it in the papers, and can now go back to the start and see it all the way through.

We also expect that many of the programmes already available for seven-day catch-up on iPlayer will prove as popular when offered for longer as a series stack. While viewers can look forward to stacked episodes of their favourite comedies, dramas and factual programmes, we’re also hoping they’ll be able to enjoy a broader range from across our channels and genres. Imagine, for example, being able to watch a series helping you to learn a new language or skill, at your own pace.

Not everything will be stacked: the offer is restricted to 15% of all content offered on demand, something the BBC Trust determined in its permissions and approvals, granted in April 2007.

We’ll be stacking just first-run series and we’ve also taken the decision not to include soaps, news bulletins, review-based programmes and single events - because of the types of programmes these are and, for the first two categories, the number of times they’re on every week. We’ll also be excluding programmes containing material of a legal nature, such as Crimewatch - in case this could prejudice court proceedings.

Series stacking will initially be available for streamed programmes on BBC iPlayer and via bbc.co.uk programme sites. My colleague Dan Taylor discusses more about what we’re doing on these here.

We’re working on extending this to downloadable programmes and the iPlayer for TV platforms (currently available to all Virgin Media customers). I’ll post again when these are ready to go.

This isn’t a true Long Tail offer, as we’re merely extending the availability of stacked series for slightly longer than the standard seven-day catch-up window.

But it will be interesting to see how this stretched availability window resonates with audiences and helps them discover not only programmes they might otherwise have missed, but also more episodes of both what they already enjoy and those hidden gems.

We’re always keen to hear about what you think of the BBC’s evolving TV on-demand offer, so please use the comment box below.

Troy is Business Manager, Multiplatform & Portfolio, BBC Vision and the editorial architect of series stacking.