When hundreds of thousands of Southern California residents were evacuated from their homes in the wake of this week's devastating fires, memories of Hurricane Katrina couldn't help but surface as scores of evacuees ended up taking refuge in the city's Qualcomm Stadium.

But after two days, what has developed here in Qualcomm could hardly stand in sharper contrast to the spectacle of Katrina, especially the chaos in Louisiana's Superdome.

Qualcomm is clean. It is organized. It is, in many regards, at times even festive, with clowns to entertain children who are wearing dust-particle masks to protect their lungs from the hanging smoke and blowing ash.

The relentless grip of the Arctic Ocean that defied man for centuries is melting away. The sea ice reaches only half as far as it did 50 years ago. In the summer of 2006, it shrank to a record low; this summer the ice pulled back even more, by an area nearly the size of Alaska. Where explorer Robert Peary just 102 years ago saw "a great white disk stretching away apparently infinitely" from Ellesmere Island, there is often nothing now but open water. Glaciers race into the sea from the island of Greenland, beginning an inevitable rise in the oceans.

Last week, Laura Askew, co-owner of Askew Drilling Co. in Jonesboro, scheduled a homeowner who had spent some $25,000 on plantings and is now past the 30-day window allowed for watering professionally installed landscaping. The total outdoor watering ban took the home-owner by surprise.

"He was real upset about it," she said.

With neighbors now routinely squealing on each other for outdoor illegal watering, drilling a well has become a sensitive proposition. Several homeowners who had wells drilled in recent days did not return phone calls or declined to talk on the record. The Grayson homeowner said she didn't want to call attention to her property.

The rumble enveloped Littleton, Mass., and dozens of nearby towns at 1:23 a.m. yesterday, a grating noise that witnesses said sounded like a truck crashing, a lumbering freight train, or a 747 buzzing 100 feet from the ground. As windows rattled and floors vibrated, people sat up in bed, dogs barked, and weary baseball fans awoke on couches with their televisions still flickering, wondering if the Red Sox had won.

"I thought, oh, my God, the furnace blew," said Ann Carey, 64, who was jarred from sleep in her Westford bedroom.

It was a 2.5-magnitude earthquake with an epicenter near Littleton Common. No injuries or damage were reported, but it rattled homes from Milton to Hollis, N.H. Another minor temblor shook the Merrimack Valley earlier this month.

The emergency switchboard lit up at the Littleton police station with reports of explosions and accidents on Interstate 495. "We had two people working the phones, and we still couldn't keep up," said Sergeant Robert Romilly.

A 0.9-magnitude aftershock followed at 6:04 a.m., said John Ebel, director of Boston College's Weston Observatory. There have been a dozen minor tremors near Littleton since the 1970s, with the last coming on Oct. 8, 2004, the day Red Sox slugger David Ortiz hit a 10th-inning home run during a championship playoff run. Is there a correlation?
[See? I told you so! - TriSec]

"One can only hope," Ebel said.