Volcano

RAMGATI, Bangladesh Cyclone damage Across Bangladesh's southeast coast, hundreds of thousands of villagers emerged from storm shelters yesterday to find their homes gone and their belongings strewn across ruined crops. Rescuers reported only 67 deaths from Monday's and yesterday's cyclone, which was fully as powerful as a cyclone that killed 139,000 Bangladeshis in 1991. The comparatively low death toll was a triumph for government measures since then - including building the concrete shelters.

Floods, fires and erupting volcanoes: Disaster films have returned with a vengeance. Once a drive-in staple in the '70s, disaster movies have received a whole new life in the '90s, thanks to advancements in technology. Expect to see a full slate of disaster films from Hollywood this year. "Dante's Peak," starring Pierce Brosnan and Linda Hamilton, opens today, winning the race with the similarly themed "Volcano," due out this summer. Right on "Volcano's" heels are "The Flood," starring Christian Slater; "Titanic," starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet; and several air-disaster films.

Alys Willman works with Witness for Peace, an organization bringing disaster relief to victims of Hurricane Mitch. She sends this e-mail from Nicaragua. Hurricane Mitch left its deadliest mark near the Las Casitas volcano in western Nicaragua, triggering a massive mud slide, killing more than 2,500 people and burying two entire communities. When I arrived there with a Red Cross brigade last week, not a house, not a tree, was still standing. Here, nature had turned valley to desert in seconds.

Night was falling on Day Five of Claire and Audrey's Big Adventure. Already that day, we had fed papaya and jelly beans to the iguana outside our cabana, picked two creepy scorpions out of our luggage and said adios to Sweetie the parrot - and to Playa Pan de Azucar (translated: sugar beach) on the Pacific Coast. We had visited a hard-to-find cat shelter - these cats being pumas, jaguars and a remarkably beautiful feline called a margay, all of them dozing in the midday heat.

When you approach by boat, the island of Stromboli appears as a perfectly symmetrical volcano, right down to the smoke flowing out the top. I half expected to see pterodactyls soaring in thermal updrafts over the crater as we drew near, and dinosaurs stalking the lava fields. In the tiny fishing village of San Vincenzo, however, we found instead a few little restaurants and small hotels, and the pretty houses and gardens of the villagers. The volcano has also visited very close to San Vincenzo, judging from the lava flows right at our feet.

If recent history has taught us nothing else, it is that we always seem to plan for the wrong things to go wrong. Remember Y2K? That was the computer glitch that was supposed to turn the turn of the millennium (well, actually, the arrival of the year prior to the turn of the millennium) into instant turmoil. For months before the event, even as teams of experts joined in a frantic eleventh-hour attempt to keep civilization from being plunged into chaos and confusion, citizens were busy preparing for it by stocking their homes with emergency provisions, water, generators and guns.

Antarctica is about the size of the United States and Mexico combined. Its 5.4 million square miles amount to a 10th of the earth's land surface, and during the winter ice doubles its size. The continent is covered almost entirely by an ice sheet that is three miles thick in places. Ninety percent of this planet's ice and 70 percent of its fresh water are locked in this vast accumulation of freezer frost. Antarctica is awesome and, if Wild Ice: Antarctic Journeys is any indication, a monumentally fascinating place.

Volcano a show stopper That pesky Eyjafjallaj?kull volcano - its eruption grounded, like, two-thirds of Europe's air traffic, and now it's also messing up the entertainment world. Last weekend, the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, Calif., lost acts such as The Cribs, Bad Lieutenant and Frightened Rabbit to the ash clouds. The Tribeca Film Festival in Manhattan, which begins Wednesday, might suffer, too, with some stars and filmmakers stuck in Europe. Some say NYC could lose as much as $250 mil. Whitney Houston took matters into her own hands.

Your income-tax return has just arrived in that beautiful brown envelope. You got away with every one of your wildly exaggerated deductions. Yes! It's party time, time to plan a vacation, to choose an exotic locale to scoot with your loot. Since your good luck is on a roll, you may want to gamble on turning your little wad of green into a forest. So where will it be, Las Vegas or Atlantic City? One thing you know for sure - you want to stay at the biggest, the newest, the glitziest, the most-hyped hotel on the sands of the beach or the sands of the desert.

Some of rockdom's most scintillating stars will perform Sept. 15 in London at a benefit concert to raise money for the volcano-ravaged Caribbean island of Montserrat. The London Evening Standard reports that Eric Clapton, Elton John, Paul McCartney, Sting, and Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits have signed up. Beatles producer George Martin (who has a luxury home on the tiny British territory) is organizing the concert. An eruption of the Soufriere Hills volcano killed at least seven people last month.