The roughly 600 residents of Lefors and Bowers City were allowed to return home in the evening and lighter winds helped firefighters contain most of the more than two dozen blazes, officials said.

No injuries were reported.

"You can call that a bullet dodged," said Texas Department of Public Safety spokesman Wayne Beighle.

Higher humidity and slightly calmer winds were forecast for the Panhandle as a cold front moves in Friday. But the fire danger was expected to shift as windy, dry conditions move into a large circular area from the Dallas-Fort Worth area to western Texas and back toward San Antonio, the Texas Forest Service said.

"With the fire weather we're expecting again, people just need to avoid any activity that could ignite a wildfire," said Paul Hannemann of the Forest Service.

Fires also burned Thursday in the western Texas counties of Crane, Upton, Glasscock and Howard, near the Big Spring and Midland-Odessa areas. But Panhandle residents still skittish from March fires that burned nearly a million acres and killed 11 people faced the biggest threats again.

The largest blaze - on about 14,000 acres north of Amarillo - threatened but ultimately did not damage a natural gas plant, Texas Forest Service spokeswoman Traci Weaver said.

Officials temporarily closed several roads because high winds were blowing dust and smoke. A wind gust of 70 mph toppled an 18-wheeler on a rural highway, Beighle said.

Winds also blew ash left by last month's fires, said Matthew Kramar, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Amarillo.

One fire that started in the Texas Panhandle burned across the state line and reached a sparsely populated area in western Oklahoma, officials said.

Officials later said that the floodwaters of the Katherine River might soon recede after threatening to peak more than 19 meters (62 feet) above the riverbed after days of monsoon rains.

"We don't know what we are going to face when the river does back down," Henderson said.

About 600 people were evacuated to two schools in Katherine on Thursday, while another 200 residents of the nearby Jilkminggan community were also evacuated by boat.

Katherine is about 300 km (185 miles) south of the tropical city of Darwin.

"We've been very lucky that there have been no injuries or deaths," emergency official Kate Vanderlaan told reporters in Katherine.

Among the luckiest were three boys rescued in Katherine late on Thursday after being stuck up a tree.

The boys had yelled for help for most of Thursday afternoon before they were rescued by townspeople in boats using shovels as paddles.

One of the boys, an unidentified 16-year-old, required treatment for minor lacerations to his shoulder after he was bitten by a freshwater crocodile.

"During the rescue it had a bit of a nibble," Vanderlaan said.

In 1998, the Katherine River burst its banks when it reached a record peak above 20 meters (66 feet), forcing half of the town's population to flee their homes, after Cyclone Les dumped more than 600mm (24 inches) of rain.

The Mono County coroner has not determined whether the ski patrol members died from the 21-foot fall or from inhaling toxic fumes.

The victims were part of a four-man team inspecting the mountain after heavy snowstorms and fencing off the rock's gap, Gregory said. The snow collapsed under two patrollers and they fell into the fissure on the 11,053-foot peak in the Eastern Sierra.

"It's likely the heat from the gas vent eroded the snow and didn't support the weight of the patrollers working on the fence," he said.

The other two patrollers saw their colleagues fall and came to help, but one of them also fell in, Gregory said.

The fourth person used a rope to lower himself into the hole and was overcome by gas, but three other responders pulled him out, he said. That patroller survived.

The three who died had multiple years of experience, the most senior with more than 20 years, and they were working carefully because of the heavy snow, Gregory said.

"It's not like they were out there cowboying," he said.

The resort and local officials did not release names of the victims.

One of the dead, however, was identified as Walter Rosenthal, a researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who jumped in to help his fellow patrollers, said UCSB spokesman Paul Desruisseaux.

Rosenthal, who was in his 40s, worked at the Sierra Nevada Aquatic Laboratory in Mammoth Lakes and was an expert in snow hydrology and remote sensing of snow. He was also identified as the snow and avalanche analyst for Mammoth Mountain.

The role that gas might have played in the deaths was uncertain, but Mammoth Lakes Mayor Rick Wood said a police detective told him that "the level of carbon monoxide inside this cavity was extremely high."

Gregory said there were no recent increases in gas release.

The mountain, about a six-hour drive north of Los Angeles, is popular with skiers from Southern California. The peak towers over a dramatic landscape in a volcanically active region, but the region has been quiet for six years, said Dave Hill, a scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park.

The accident was not related to any volcanic activity, he said.

It was the latest in a string of accidents at Mammoth, where four skiers have died in a season marked by a record 52 feet of snowfall since October. The latest deaths quickly became the talk of the slopes and around this close-knit community of 7,600 residents.

"It's just guys doing a job and it's just an accident," said Shon Eastridge, a gas station clerk. "They were just trying to protect other people's lives and they lose their own."

The names Dennis, Katrina, Rita, Stan and Wilma will never grace a hurricane again, according to a committee of the World Meteorological Organization, which retires storm names out of sensitivity to the victims, and for historical, scientific and legal purposes as well.

Hurricane names are recycled every six years. Replacing Katrina and the other retirees in 2011 will be Don, Katia, Rina, Sean and Whitney, according to an NOAA news release.

When a storm causes widespread destruction or loss of life, its name is retired, not only to avoid reminding the victims of the horrors they experienced but also to keep the record straight.

It's not likely that a weak storm that swirls harmlessly in the Atlantic before fizzling will be referenced in the future, but once a large storm ravages a coast, its name becomes infamous, Vaccaro said.

"There will be only one Hurricane Andrew," he said, referring to the Category 5 storm that slammed into south Florida in 1992, causing $26.5 billion in damage and killing 26 people in the United States and Bahamas.

The retirement of five storm names speaks to the severity of the 2005 hurricane season, which saw an unprecedented 27 named storms and 15 hurricanes. Never have five storm names been retired in one season, Vaccaro said.

Since 1953, when tropical cyclones were first assigned monikers, 67 storm names have been retired. Thirteen percent of those have come in the last two seasons.

Four storm names were retired in 1955, 1995 and 2004, Vaccaro said, noting that Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne earned the distinction last year.

The 2005 season fell one shy of witnessing the most major hurricanes, classified as having winds of more than 111 mph, Vaccaro said. That was behind the 1950 season, which had eight major hurricanes, according to the NOAA.

But the storm doesn't necessarily have to be a major one to have its name retired, Vaccaro said. Tropical Storm Allison, which never reached hurricane status, had its name retired after it dumped more than 3 feet of rain on the port of Houston, Texas, over five days in 2001.

Here's a look at this year's retirees:

-Hurricane Dennis crossed Cuba in early July with winds of about 140 mph. It made landfall on Santa Rosa Island, Florida, on July 10 with winds estimated at 120 mph. At least 54 deaths have been attributed to Dennis, including 15 in the United States.

-Katrina is considered one of the deadliest and costliest hurricanes in U.S. history, with damages exceeding $50 billion and about 1,300 deaths. (In 1900, a hurricane in Galveston, Texas, killed 8,000; and in 1928, a hurricane hit Lake Okeechobee in Florida and killed 1,836, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.) Katrina first struck near Miami, Florida, on August 24 before making landfall in Buras, Louisiana, five days later with top winds of 125 mph.

-Rita struck southwestern Louisiana near the Texas border with winds of 115 mph on September 24. It had weakened significantly since being measured as a Category 5, with 180 mph winds, as it made its way between Cuba and the Florida Keys to the Louisiana coast. Nonetheless, its storm surge -- joined by heavy wind, rain and tornadoes -- left a swath of destruction from east Texas to Alabama.

-Stan dumped torrential rains on Central America and Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, killing as many as 2,000 people. Stan was a tropical storm when it hit the peninsula, but had escalated into a Category 1 by the time it made landfall October 4 about 90 miles southeast of Veracruz, Mexico.

-Wilma turned into a Category 5 storm, with 185 mph winds, over the Caribbean Sea, registering the lowest-ever recorded central pressure of any storm in the Atlantic. Though it dwindled to a Category 4, it still devastated the Yucatan Peninsula and later raced ashore October 24 in Cape Romano, Florida, with winds estimated at 120 mph.

The virtual tour used geographic mapping by Google Earth to start with a view from space and swoop in on the 300-mile (483-kilometer) rupture along the San Andreas Fault that caused the 1906 earthquake.

"You watch it on a screen and zoom along on a map," said Leslie Gordon of the survey. "We are using the centennial to remind people they live in earthquake country and need to be prepared."

"Some people can be told, or read it and it doesn't sink in until they visualize it."

There was a 62 percent chance of another major earthquake occurring in the San Francisco area within the next 30 years, according to Gordon.

"It is all lessons learned for today," Gordon said of the presentation viewable online here.