NEW YORK (AP) — They were life and death decisions made by politicians, bureaucrats and everyday people. Hurricane Irene was barreling toward the East Coast. It was big. It was scary. Flooding was certain. The choice: Flee or stay put.

Disaster experts unanimously said evacuating was the right choice and it saved lives. But these were tough nail-biting calls that are now being second-guessed.

In New York City, it was debated during a critical staff meeting in City Hall where the deadly specter of Katrina and New Orleans was raised. On Friday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, saying he worried about deadly flooding in low-lying areas, made the first ever call for hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers to leave their homes.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was trademark blunt in his order: “Get the hell off the beach.”

Since Irene didn’t hit most areas with the advertised fury, those decisions and others up and down the Eastern Seaboard are being reexamined. Experts in hurricanes and disaster preparations and risk analysis, though, only had praise Monday, pointing out it takes a long time to evacuate densely populated areas and the hurricane’s forecasts left little room for error.

“Second-guessing is easy, making those evacuation calls is not,” said George Washington University risk sciences professor George Gray, a former senior Environmental Protection Agency official in the George W. Bush administration. “Given available information, I think risk analysts would say the right choices were made.”

Traditionally, larger areas and more people have to be evacuated than turns out to be necessary, said Florida State University professor Jay Baker, who has studied hurricane evacuation.

“That’s just an artifact of the uncertainty,” said Baker.

Meteorologists have gotten pretty good at figuring out a storm’s path, but predicting its strength is a struggle. They nailed Irene’s track but it weakened more than forecast as it moved north.

Irene “was a very dangerous storm,” said Kathleen Tierney, director of the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado, saying this storm was handled far better than 2005′s Katrina. “I don’t think there’s any doubt that lives were saved.”

Jack and Sue Holloway are probably two of those lives. The Delaware residents dithered about staying at their beach home in coastal Lewes. They decided to stay, and then changed their minds when Delaware Gov. Jack Markell urged an evacuation at a news conference.

Saturday night, strong winds from what officials believe was a tornado spun off by Irene damaged several homes in Lewes, ripping off the top of the Holloways’ home, blasting apart the garage.

Along the Connecticut shore, East Haven firefighters went door-to-door to tell residents to leave. Some residents wouldn’t go and needed to be rescued, fire Chief Doug Jackson said. Twenty-five beachfront homes were destroyed.

“They jeopardize themselves when they stay there. They also jeopardize my people,” Jackson said. “Now I have to make rescues that should not have been necessary.”

East Haven’s Bill Cowles, 55, never considered leaving his home. The water rose to just below the electrical sockets on the first floor and he could see neighbors’ houses crashing around him.

“When the water started coming in the front door, I knew we were in trouble,” he said. Still, Cowles said he was glad he stayed because he had to chase away people who were watching the storm and taking pictures from his yard.

New Jersey’s governor was certain he did the right thing.

“I want to make one thing really clear for the folks who will now say, ‘Well, there wasn’t abject destruction up and down the coastline, therefore we shouldn’t have left,’” Christie said Sunday. “Let me tell you those types of second-guessers won’t be tolerated. We saved lives.”

Officials “are always going to err on the side of caution,” said Susan Cutter, director of the Hazards and Vulnerability Research Institute at the University of South Carolina. Emergency officials, in general, plan for a hurricane at least one category higher than what’s forecast, said Dennis Feltgen, a meteorologist and spokesman at the National Hurricane Center.

Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin defended his state’s decision not to do more extensive evacuations before the storm arrived, even though Irene ravaged Vermont in its final hours. He said it would have been impossible to predict which towns would be hardest-hit.

“What are you going to do, evacuate the entire state of Vermont?”"Shumlin asked. “… You can see one community that looks like it didn’t get hit at all, and two miles down the road a community that is totally devastated. And obviously there’s no one that can predict which community, where, why or how.”

New York’s Bloomberg later explained that timing was key in his decision. He was faced with getting 370,000 people out of low-lying areas before the subway was shut down by the governor. He said, “People need time to leave, to make decisions, to plan with their family. You can’t just say ‘go’ and have everybody go.”

His deputy mayor for operations, Cas Holloway, said two factors were forcing officials’ hands: more than half of the city’s residents don’t have cars and the evacuation zone included 7,000 people in hospitals, nursing homes and senior citizen centers.

“We had limited time frames to move the populations we had to move,” he said Monday.

While the orders came from authorities, the decision was ultimately up to individuals. Unlike Southerners, those in the Northeast aren’t used to the summertime drill of hurricanes and evacuation zones.

Decades of study show that it is not unusual to get only half to two-thirds of the people to actually evacuate, Florida State’s Baker said. And because of that “we’ve been lucky in this country not to have huge losses of life like we saw in Katrina” he said.

Some people fear that storms that seem to peter out — like Irene — will only make that worse. But Baker said that’s not the case. In past storms — such as in 1985, when western Florida evacuated three times and didn’t get hit — the “cry wolf” syndrome did not materialize, Baker said. The same number of people evacuated for each of those storms.

And post-storm surveys show only around 5 percent of people would change their decision.

Every year, emergency managers and elected officials come to the National Hurricane Center in Miami and learn about the complexities of hurricane forecasts. They practice scenarios much like Irene’s, said retired center director Max Mayfield.

Mayfield said the many evacuation orders showed that they understood what they were taught.

“They knew they had to get people out early,” Mayfield said.

Cutter said the death count from Irene, so far around three dozen, is extraordinarily low considering where it hit, the rainfall, tornadoes and the large size of the storm.

For Bloomberg, that’s the real key. He said Sunday, “the bottom line is, I would make the same decisions again without hesitation.”

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Astronauts may need to take the unprecedented step of temporarily abandoning the International Space Station if last week’s Russian launch accident prevents new crews from flying there this fall.

Until officials figure out what went wrong with Russia’s essential Soyuz rockets, there will be no way to launch any more astronauts before the current residents have to leave in mid-November.

The unsettling predicament comes just weeks after NASA’s final space shuttle flight.

“We have plenty of options,” NASA’s space station program manager, Mike Suffredini, assured reporters Monday. “We’ll focus on crew safety as we always do.”

Abandoning the space station, even for a short period, would be an unpleasant last resort for the world’s five space agencies that have spent decades working on the project. Astronauts have been living aboard the space station since 2000, and the goal is to keep it going until 2020.

Suffredini said flight controllers could keep a deserted space station operating indefinitely, as long as all major systems are working properly. The risk to the station goes up, however, if no one is on board to fix equipment breakdowns.

Six astronauts from three countries presently are living on the orbiting complex. Three are due to leave next month; the other three are supposed to check out in mid-November. They can’t stay any longer because of spacecraft and landing restrictions.

The Sept. 22 launch of the very next crew — the first to fly in this post-shuttle era — already has been delayed indefinitely. Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft have been the sole means of getting full-time station residents up and down for two years. The capsule is parked at the station until they ride it home.

To keep the orbiting outpost with a full staff of six for as long as possible, the one American and two Russians due to return to Earth on Sept. 8 will remain on board at least an extra week.

As for supplies, the space station is well stocked and could go until next summer, Suffredini said. Atlantis dropped off a year’s supply of goods just last month on the final space shuttle voyage. The unmanned craft destroyed Wednesday was carrying 3 tons of supplies.

For now, operations are normal in orbit, Suffredini noted, and the additional week on board for half the crew will mean additional science research.

The Soyuz has been extremely reliable over the decades; this was the first failure in 44 Russian supply hauls for the space station. Even with such a good track record, many in and outside NASA were concerned about retiring the space shuttles before a replacement was ready to fly astronauts.

Russian space officials have set up an investigation team and until it comes up with a cause for the accident and a repair plan, the launch and landing schedules remain in question. None of the spacecraft debris has been recovered yet; the wreckage fell into a remote, wooded section of Siberia. The third stage malfunctioned; a sudden loss of pressure apparently was noted between the engine and turbopump.

While a crew may well have survived such an accident because of safety precautions built into the manned version of the rocket, no one wants to take any chances.

One or two unmanned Soyuz launches are on tap for October, one commercial and the other another space station supply run. Those would serve as important test flights before putting humans on board, Suffredini said.

NASA considered vacating the space station before, following the space shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003. Back then, shuttles were still being used to ferry some station residents back and forth. Instead, the station got by with two-man crews for three years because of the significant cutback in supplies.

The space station’s population doubled in 2009, to six. It wasn’t until the space station was completed this year that science research finally took priority.

Even if the space shuttles still were flying, space station crews still would need Soyuz-launched capsules to serve as lifeboats, Suffredini said. The capsules are certified for no more than 6½ months in space, thus the need to regularly rotate crews. Complicating matters is the need to land the capsules during daylight hours in Kazakhstan, resulting in weeks of blackout periods.

NASA wants American private companies to take over crew hauls, but that’s three to five years away at best. Until then, Soyuz capsules are the only means of transporting astronauts to the space station.

Japan and Europe have their own cargo ships and rockets, for unmanned use only. Commercial front-runner Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, plans to launch a space station supply ship from Cape Canaveral at the end of November. That would be put on hold if no one is on board to receive the vessel.

Suffredini said he hasn’t had time to consider the PR impact of abandoning the space station, especially coming so soon after the end of the 30-year shuttle program.

“Flying safely is much, much more important than anything else I can think about right this instant,” he said. “I’m sure we’ll have an opportunity to discuss any political implications if we spend a lot of time on the ground. But you know, we’ll just have to deal with them because we’re going to do what’s safest for the crew and for the space station.”

NEW YORK (AP) — In a television rarity, the most popular show during the past week was on a cable channel and not a broadcast one.

MTV’s annual Video Music Awards on Sunday were seen by 12.44 million people, the Nielsen Co. said. That’s MTV’s biggest audience since at least 1993, the extent to which its viewership records stretch, and likely in the network’s history.

Meanwhile, broadcast’s most-watched show last week, NBC’s “America’s Got Talent,” logged just under 12 million viewers on Tuesday.

The feat shows how the distinction between broadcast and cable has grown meaningless for many viewers, particularly younger ones. It’s not clear how often a cable telecast has beaten anything broadcast has done during a week; Nielsen records show it hasn’t happened during the past two years. In 2007, the Disney Channel premiere of “High School Musical 2″ brought more than 17 million viewers to the screen and finished on top during its opening week.

It didn’t hurt that broadcast was airing mostly reruns and reality shows during the late-summer week.

MTV took advantage of the VMA interest to run a special episode of “Jersey Shore” on Sunday, reaching more than 8 million viewers. Its new scripted comedy “I Just Want My Pants Back” had 5.1 million viewers. Except for four shows on CBS, that was more than any other sitcom on broadcast TV.

CBS was the most popular broadcast network, averaging 6.4 million viewers (4.0 rating, 7 share). NBC had 5.5 million (3.4, 6), ABC had 5 million (3.1, 5), Fox had 3.1 million (1.8, 3), ION Television had 1.1 million (0.8, 1) and the CW had 780,000 (0.5, 1).

Among the Spanish-language networks, Univision led with a 3.7 million viewer average in prime time (1.9, 3). Telemundo had 1.1 million (0.6. 1), TeleFutura had 430,000 (0.2, 0), Azteca had 210,000 and Estrella had 180,000 (both 0.1, 0).

During a busy news week with the Libyan fighting, East Coast earthquake and Hurricane Irene, NBC’s “Nightly News” topped the evening newscasts with an average of 8.8 million viewers (5.7, 12). ABC’s “World News” was second with 7.7 million (5.2, 10) and the “CBS Evening News” had 6.1 million viewers (4.1, 8).

A ratings point represents 1,147,000 households, or 1 percent of the nation’s estimated 114.7 million TV homes. The share is the percentage of in-use televisions tuned to a given show.

For the week of Aug. 22-28, the top 10 broadcast shows, their networks and viewerships: “America’s Got Talent” (Tuesday), NBC, 11.99 million; “America’s Got Talent” (Wednesday), NBC, 11.12 million; “NCIS,” CBS, 9.43 million; NFL Exhibition Football: San Diego vs. Oakland, NBC, 9.27 million; “NCIS: Los Angeles,” CBS, 8.39 million; “Big Brother 13″ (Thursday), CBS, 8.15 million; “60 Minutes,” CBS, 8.09 million; “Big Brother 13″ (Wednesday), CBS, 7.95 million; “Big Brother 13″ (Sunday), CBS, 7.87 million; “NCIS” (Tuesday, 10 p.m.), CBS, 7.49 million.

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ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Co. CBS is owned by CBS Corp. CW is a joint venture of Warner Bros. Entertainment and CBS Corp. Fox and My Network TV are units of News Corp. NBC and Telemundo are owned by Comcast Corp. ION Television is owned by ION Media Networks. TeleFutura is a division of Univision. Azteca America is a wholly owned subsidiary of TV Azteca S.A. de C.V.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Justin Bieber and his Ferrari are both fine after a fender-bender in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles Police Officer Gregory Baek says the 17-year-old singer was involved in “a very minor collision” Tuesday afternoon in LA’s Studio City.

The officer said no one was injured or cited and no police report was taken. There was no visible damage to Bieber’s car or the Honda Civic involved in the crash.

Bieber recently appeared at MTV’s Video Music Awards, where he won best male video for his song “U Smile.”

With at least nine river locations hitting or surpassing record flood levels in northern New Jersey, Governor Chris Christie said he was seeking expedited disaster assistance from the federal government.

“Hurricane Irene was a catastrophe of enormous severity and magnitude,” he said in a statement. “Torrential rains have caused significant flooding in areas across the state, impacting residences, major and local roads, and necessitating highway closures and a suspension of rail services.”

Authorities said rivers including the Passaic, Ramapo and Pompton were overflowing from heavy rains and storm surges left behind by Hurricane Irene, which hit the state on Sunday.

Wallington, in Bergen County, ordered a mandatory evacuation of about 1,000 families who live closest to the raging Passaic River, which was expected to crest at about 10 p.m. on Tuesday.

“Many people were caught off guard,” said James Furtak, acting emergency management coordinator of the borough of 11,000 residents. “Their basements were flooded up to the ceiling and the first floor.”

People were climbing out windows to get out of their flooded homes, he said.

The Passaic crested in Fairfield, New Jersey, overnight at 24.12 feet, breaking the record set in 1903 of 23.2 feet, Fairfield Deputy Police Chief Anthony Manna said.

Fairfield is surrounded on three sides by the curving river, and National Guard troops were using boats to rescue flood-stranded residents, he said.

INLAND FLOODING

In Paterson, where the Passaic slices through the city with dramatic waterfalls, hundreds of residents were taken to a shelter as torrential waters threatened to destroy homes, authorities said.

Peter Hennen was helping his son, a Paterson homeowner, rig up pumps to remove water from his house.

“I’m from this area,” he said, “and this is the worst that I’ve seen here, the farthest up this water has come.

“Everybody thought the shore was going to be devastated, but people here forgot about the media telling them that the storm’s 500 miles wide so the rest of Jersey got hit.”

The Passaic was some 13 feet higher than flood stage, Paterson Police Sergeant Alex Popov said.

In Pompton Lakes, the force of floods from the Pequannock and Ramapo rivers pushed buildings off their foundations, and two dozen homes in the flooded area have been condemned, said Vito Gadaleta, administrator for the borough of 12,000 residents.

He said the Ramapo was receding, but the Pequannock was still causing problems, with some neighborhoods under several feet of water and inaccessible, although conditions were improving.

In Wayne, where major roads were blocked due to flooding, Mike Holland paddled a canoe from his home on Trovela Drive, where cars were almost completely underwater.

“This is the worst one,” he said, having survived several floods in the neighborhood.

Marguerite Ball, another Wayne resident, described the flooding as heartbreaking for the working class area that tends to flood from the Passaic and the nearby Pequannock.

“People just get cleaned out, cleaned up, rebuild and it happens again and again,” she said.

To the west, state Route 29, a scenic road that runs along the banks of the Delaware River to tourist towns such as Lambertville and Frenchtown, was closed because of a washout near Washington Crossing Road in Hopewell Township, state Department of Transportation spokesman Tim Greeley said.

The highway typically carries 11,000 cars a day, and workers hope to have it reopened for the Labor Day weekend.

The New Jersey Office of Emergency Management said the state had registered seven deaths related to Irene.

State utility Jersey Central Power & Light said more than 240,000 customers were without power, and PSE&G said 67,000 of New Jersey customers still had no power on Tuesday afternoon.

Visitors roared into the Sleeping Bear dunes after they were named the most beautiful spot in America and they flipped for the Caseville cheeseburger festival. And while tourists still kept a careful eye on their budgets, they were ready for some fun despite the down economy.

In Metro Detroit, hotel occupancy was the highest in the last four years, and the July rate was the best since the dot.com boom of 2000. Meanwhile, lakeside resort areas in the rest of state are reporting gains from the award-winning Pure Michigan ad campaign, which is drawing more out-of-state visitors.

“It’s been an amazing summer,” said Mary McGuire Slevin, executive director of the Mackinac Island Tourism Bureau. “The hotels did well this year compared with the last couple of years. Some are reporting occupancy is up 18 percent to 28 percent, which is huge. They barely had a night open for a while.”

The same held for the MGM Grand Detroit hotel and casino, where a winning season for the Tigers and several big-name concerts drew guests.

“It’s much better than last year,” said Lisa Williams, director of sales at MGM Grand. “It’s increasing steadily.”

Those increases came despite some iffy weather and higher gas prices, but aren’t likely to get much of a boost this weekend.

According to AAA of Michigan, about 1 percent fewer Michiganians will travel 50 miles or more for the holiday weekend, though that’s still a total of 1.2million travelers. Fears that high gas prices — which hit a record statewide average of $4.26 in May — would dampen vacations faded as gas prices dropped a bit during the summer, down to a state average of $3.76 Tuesday. That’s still about $1 more per gallon more than last year.

“We have the sense that people traveled more this year than last year, but that with the economy they were careful with their money,” said AAA Michigan spokeswoman Nancy Cain.

A search for bargain vacations may be behind the increase in out-of-state visitors spurred by the Pure Michigan ad campaign, lauded by everyone in the travel industry.

“Last year was the first that we saw more spending by out-of-state vacation travelers than by Michigan residents,” said George Zimmermann, vice president of Travel Michigan at the Michigan Economic Development Corp.

Zimmerman said that while he won’t have final tourism numbers for three to six months, hotel data shows Michigan’s statewide occupancy rate in July was up 8.2 percent from last year, to 51.4percent. That’s below the national average of 60.7 percent, but growing at nearly twice the rate.

“Since the beginning of 2010, we were further behind to start with but we’ve been growing faster than the national average for the last year and a half,” Zimmerman said.

The growth was even faster at Sleeping Bear dunes after the TV news show “Good Morning America” named the dunes the most beautiful place in America two weeks ago, noted Dusty Shultz, superintendent of the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. The park’s website jumped from 10,000 visits a day to nearly 60,000.

“The first week after the announcement, our visitors’ center was up about 500 additional people on Saturday and nearly 1,000 on Sunday,” Shultz said.

The park gets 1.2 million visitors a year and was already up 2 percent in July and should be up a few thousand more when the August attendance is finalized, she added.

The attention also is bringing more visitors into nearby Traverse City, already a popular tourist destination, reported Brad Van Dommelen, president of the Traverse City Convention and Visitors Bureau.

“Last summer was a record for us. So when we went into this year, we were concerned whether we could match it,” Van Dommelen said. “We saw a real uptick in activity once mention was made on “Good Morning America.” It’s rare for people to come to the dunes without coming to Traverse City.”

Traverse City also is seeing more out-of-state visitors, he added. “They’re not just from bordering states, but more people from states like Texas and the Carolinas and all down the East Coast.”

He credits the city’s out-of-state marketing efforts, as well as adding a Pure Michigan campaign dedicated to the city, a tactic Mackinac Island also used. “Our future growth here needs to come from new markets outside the state,” Van Dommelen said.

The only future Denise Thal wants to see is one without construction on the Southfield Freeway.

Thal, chief financial officer and vice president of operations at The Henry Ford and Greenfield Village, feared road construction and the gloomy spring weather would hurt attendance at the Dearborn museum complex. Instead, the village, museum and Ford Rouge Plant tours are all ahead of last year, she reported. Only attendance at the IMAX movie theater is down because of a lack of big films.

“To be honest, it could have been a lot worse,” Thal said. “But any day during the summer you can go to the parking lot and see licenses from all over the country.”

Museum renovations prompted a special offer that might reduce income even though attendance is up, Thal noted. And one of The Henry Ford’s biggest events of the summer — putting the original Emancipation Proclamation on display for 36 hours — was free, as part of recognizing the 150th anniversary of the Civil War.

“We had more than 20,000 people here for that,” Thal said. “It counts as visitor traffic but it doesn’t do anything directly for revenue.”

Attendance also was booming at the tip of the state’s thumb two weeks ago at the 13th Cheeseburger in Caseville festival, which ran Aug. 12-21.

“That town is just swamped with people and so is the region,” said Sue Bila, executive director of the Michigan Festivals & Events Association. She heard reports that 50,000 people attended and hotels were filled for 25-30 miles outside of town.

“It’s a Jimmy Buffett theme and the town is all decked out,” Bila said. “You’d think you were in the Florida Keys.”

The state’s many other festivals and celebrations also had a good summer, she said, after some events were canceled a few years ago during the onset of the recession. Since then, local governments, chambers of commerce, downtown development associations, sponsors and other boosters have come together to support and bring back events, she said. More festivals also lure families looking for fun with added free events.

“I think it’s people wanting to celebrate,” Bila said. “They want to have good times and they’re finding them at the festivals. The music is big, parades are big, and so are microbrews and the new wine festivals.”

But just because summer’s over doesn’t mean the fun — or the funds — will end. As soon as Labor Day tourists are back home, the state’s hotels, tourist towns and resorts will start readying for the fall color season.

“We’re coming to the best season — the color,” said Jessica Lukomski, general manager of the Traverse Bayshore Resort in Traverse City. “My all-time favorite is fall.”

Wildfires fueled by extremely dry conditions and strong winds destroyed dozens of homes in Oklahoma City and North Texas on Tuesday and forced hundreds of residents to evacuate.

Officials did not yet know what started the blazes, but a summer heat wave and drought in Oklahoma and Texas have left the ground parched and vegetation dry.

“We’re in severe drought conditions, so just the tiniest little spark can start a wildfire,” Texas Forest Service spokeswoman April Saginor said.

In Oklahoma City, bursts of flame rose amid thick black smoke as oil-packed cedar trees ignited, giving gawkers a stunning view even from blocks away. Utility poles lit up like matchsticks, and power was out to more than 7,000 homes and businesses.

The fire destroyed 10 to 12 homes and consumed 1,500 acres in a sparsely populated and heavily wooded section of the city, fire department spokesman Mark Woodard said. Several hundred homes were evacuated, according to Red Cross spokesman Rust Surette.

Meanwhile, a fast-moving wildfire in North Texas destroyed at least 20 homes and prompted authorities to evacuate at least 125 other homes in a lakeside community, state Forest Service officials said.

Agency spokesman John Nichols said the fire, which started earlier in the day, had spread to about 7,500 acres in Palo Pinto County by Tuesday night. It comes just four months after massive blazes in roughly the same area scorched hundreds of thousands of acres and destroyed 160 homes.

Part of a state highway was shut down in the area because of tall flames and huge plumes of smoke, officials said.

Temperatures in the area got up to 106 degrees on Tuesday afternoon with winds gusting up to 28 mph, said National Weather Service meteorologist Jason Dunn. He said by nightfall, gusts were at about 20 mph and the temperature was around 99.

The Oklahoma City fire was largely under control by Tuesday night, but a flare-up at the head of the blaze was in a wooded area that firefighters were having trouble reaching, Woodard said.

“Luckily the sun is going down and everything will calm down,” Emergency Medical Services Authority spokeswoman Lara O’Leary said Tuesday evening. “It’s been a long day.”

O’Leary said four people, including two firefighters, were treated for minor injuries. Three were transported to hospitals where all were in good condition, she said. No major injuries were reported in Texas.

Air tankers and helicopters were brought in to help fight the blazes.

The fire in Oklahoma City’s rural northeast corner paralleled Interstate 35, with smoke rolling northward as strong winds stoked the fire. From time to time flames could be seen amid the roiling black cloud. The blaze moved about four miles from where it started about 1 p.m., Bryant said.

“This is a heavily wooded area,” Bryant said. “There are cedar trees out here. Cedar trees burn very hot. They’re very heavily laden with oil. A lot of times when the cedar trees do go up, they burn very hot.”

A separate grass fire was reported near Bethel Acres, just east of the Oklahoma City area, said Jennifer Dawson at the Pottawatomie County Emergency Management Agency.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has ordered people back to the beach now thatHurricane Irene has blown through the state, although his own environmental agency is still testing waters for sewage, bacteria and debris churned up by the storm.

Arlington National Cemetery may soon have an accurate record of all the people buried there. The project involves the creation of a digital database that now is substantially complete, according to officials with the Graveside Accountability Task Force.

“They had chunks of databases along the way,” said U.S. Army Lt. Col. Jamie Wilmeth, who is helping lead the analysis and cross-checking of records that started in the 1800s with handwritten entries in hardbound volumes.

He told CNN, “Now it’s gonna be a common database, and it’s going to be accurate.”

Arlington was tarnished last year by the finding of more than 200 graves that had been misidentified or mislabeled, and by the discovery of dozens of discarded headstones apparently being used to shore up a small stream in a remote corner of the cemetery.

A previous superintendent, John C. Metzler Jr., was punished for poor management after the discovery of numerous instances of bodies being buried in the wrong place and incorrect headstones on graves.

Congress ordered a task force to fully document who’s where.

Using a combination of high technology and old-fashioned research, the team is commissioned to compile a verified electronic database with no discrepancies among the records. Their work should be ready for an initial review by the end of September.

During a demonstration Tuesday, U.S. Army troops armed with smartphones took photographs front and back of headstones, and recorded the precise GPS location where the images were taken. An app developed for the project then took the information and e-mailed it directly to a database.

That portion of the project is usually done at night when the lighting on the marble headstones can be controlled for the best quality photograph. Eventually the pictures will be available in a searchable database for the public.

“My team does about 1,000 pictures per night,” said, U.S. Army Spec. Matthew Caruso. “The main problem during the day is the glare from the sun, that makes it difficult to see the data on the gravestone.”

The photographs and locations are then combined with other official records that have been kept over the years, and researchers sometimes find mistakes.

“The methodology that they used was perhaps a little lacking,” Wilmeth said, with a half-dozen forms that were used as records of internment (ROI). He explained, “In one of those ROIs there’s no entry box for date of birth, but then you see some of them are handwritten in there.”

At its worst, Wilmeth agreed with a suggestion the records-keeping was sloppy. “Things were done wrong in the past, let’s call it that,” he told CNN.

With the combination of headstone photography, GPS location and the document scanning of earlier paperwork, errors are falling into three categories: critical, serious and administrative.

Critical errors that are being repaired include missing remains, unknown locations, the wrong name and the wrong record. Serious errors include typographical mistakes or erroneous dates.

Administrative errors can include discrepancies in a service record, military awards and honors, and religious affiliation.

Kenneth Melson, who has been acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives since 2009, was reassigned after admitting mistakes in the sting operation meant to try to crack down on weapons reaching violent drug gangs from U.S. gun stores.

In further fallout from the operation, the U.S. attorney for Arizona, Dennis Burke, has resigned effective immediately after acknowledging mistakes in the operation. The lead prosecutor on the case, Emory Hurley, has also been reassigned, an Obama administration official said.

Another administration official said the shake-up at ATF was a chance for a “fresh start given everything they’ve gone through lately.”

The sting operation, dubbed “Fast and Furious,” has spawned congressional and internal Justice Department probes and put the Obama administration on the defensive about whether dangerous weapons were knowingly allowed to cross the border.

Authorities had hoped they would be able to follow the guns to cartel leaders, but ATF agents did not track the weapons after they were transferred from the initial buyer to others who smuggled them across the border. Some agents have testified that they were not allowed to continue the pursuit.

Attorney General Eric Holder and Melson both issued statements but steered clear of any comments about the controversy. Holder has referred the entire matter to the department’s inspector general for an investigation.

Melson will be reassigned to the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy as an adviser on forensic science, the Justice Department said.

The U.S. attorney for Minnesota, Todd Jones, will serve as acting ATF director starting on Wednesday.

U.S. ATTORNEY ADMITS MISTAKES

Burke was interviewed by congressional investigators on August 18 and said he was unaware of the tactical details of the sting and acknowledged that he and his team made mistakes, including not adequately supervising the case.

“It should not have been done the way it was done, and I want to take responsibility for that, and I’m not falling on a sword or trying to cover for anyone else,” Burke told them, according to excerpts of his testimony released by Democrats on the House of Representatives Committee on Oversight.

Mexican authorities have complained bitterly about the flow of guns from the United States across the border, where gangs have battled with each other and with Mexican authorities, straining ties between the two countries.

Some 42,000 have died since 2006 as a result of the turf wars. The congressional investigation has turned up evidence that guns sold in the sting have been found at numerous crime scenes in the United States and Mexico.

U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry died in a December 2010 shootout on the American side of the border and two guns found there have been traced to the sting. It is not known if those guns were used to fire the fatal shots.

Some of the weapons recovered at crime scenes include powerful AK-47s and .50 caliber rifles.

Republicans in the U.S. Congress have been demanding the Obama administration explain who knew what and when about the ATF program, which was conceived of and run out of the agency’s Phoenix division.

“There are still many questions to be answered about what happened in Operation Fast and Furious and who else bears responsibility,” said Republican Representative Darrell Issa, chairman of the House Oversight Committee.

For years the ATF has been without a director confirmed by the U.S. Senate. The position has been the source of tension between advocates and opponents of gun control.

President Barack Obama has nominated Andrew Traver of the agency’s Chicago office to the job, but the gun industry has opposed him. Melson is a career federal employee.

Obama will need to nominate someone to fill the U.S. Attorney’s post. Burke previously served as chief of staff to Janet Napolitano when she was Arizona governor.

Melson was interviewed on July 4 by congressional investigators. At that time he acknowledged mistakes had been made and other law enforcement agencies had had critical information they did not share about their targets.