EL CERRITO, Calif. -- Underneath the fourth fairway at the lovely Mira Vista Golf and Country Club in El Cerrito may lie the secret of one of America's next great disasters: The Hayward fault, one of the most dangerous earthquake risks in the world.

"It's beauty and the beast," David Schwartz, a geologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, said. "We could be overdue for a big one."

For earthquake experts like Schwartz, the Hayward fault running along the east side of San Francisco Bay under the cities of Oakland and Berkeley is far more perilous than the more famous San Andreas fault a few miles to the west.

Scientists have estimated that the San Francisco area has a 67 percent chance of a major earthquake by 2020. And it is on the Hayward fault, they believe, that the stress between the North American tectonic plate and the Pacific plate is most likely to snap.

The area's last major earthquake, the Loma Prieta quake in 1989, which measured 7.1 on the Richter scale, saw elevated freeways pancake, houses tilt and part of a major bridge collapse. And Loma Prieta, which caused almost $6 billion in damage and killed 63 people, was centered on a stretch of the San Andreas fault 72 miles (115 kilometers) south of San Francisco--its destructive effects softened by the distance the shocks had to travel.

By contrast, the Hayward fault on San Francisco's doorstep has been dormant for too long, they say. "We really have been very lucky to live in a century where we've had unusually low earthquake activity in the Bay area. But we believe we are now coming out of the stress shadow of the 1906 earthquake," he said, adding that pressure clearly was building across the state's network of fault lines. "The weak links in the chain are beginning to fail."

A Colorado State University hurricane forecast team led by William Gray says 1999 will be another big hurricane year. They predict the June 1-Nov. 30, 1999 hurricane season will have 14 named storms, nine hurricanes and four intense hurricanes formed in the Atlantic Basin, comparable to the massively destructive 1998 season.

Just when you thought the worst of the weather was over, scientists have some bad news: Even though the 1997-98 El Niņo is finished, hurricanes, floods, ice storms and other extreme events are likely to continue. Cynthia Rosenzweig of NASA, speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said: "We are seeing an increase in extremes. There's no sign that it's going to end." Extreme weather during the past El Niņo has cost the world $89 billion and claimed 32,000 lives, according to a report from the Harvard Medical School presented at this meeting.

Almost 9,000 people were killed worldwide in earthquakes during 1998, triple the number that died the year before and a twentyfold increase from 1996, the U.S. government said. Despite the rise in deaths, the number of people killed by earthquakes last year was still under the long-term average of about 10,000 annually.

The agency's analysis showed that 8,928 people died from earthquakes around the globe in 1998, compared to 2,907 the previous year and just 419 people in 1996. Most of last year's deaths, 6,323 fatalities, occurred in two earthquakes that hit the border of Afghanistan and Tajikistan in central Asia.

The U.S. Geological Survey detects between 18,000 and 20,000 earthquakes annually, equal to about 50 a day.

A 7.0 strong earthquake has shaken Kazakhstan. Its epicentre was 210 kilometres from the city of Almaty in a sparsely populated area in the Tian Shan mountains near the border between Kyrgyzstan and China. There are no reports so far of any casualties or damage.

A new avalanche struck an Austrian ski resort Wednesday close to the village of Galtuer where at least 16 people died Tuesday, Reuters reported. The confirmed death toll across the continent from this month's freak snowfalls has risen to at least 49.

The latest avalanche was said to be about 218 yards wide and as much as 33 feet high. The death toll from the 16-foot wall of snow that smashed through Galtuer roughly 24 hours earlier rose to 16, including three children, with 26 people still missing. Some 20,000 people have been trapped in resorts across western Austria for up to a week by the worst snow in 40 years.

In Switzerland too, helicopters were racing to fly out thousands of stranded people including around 40,000 trapped in the eastern ski resorts of Davos and Klosters. The Swiss death toll from recent avalanches climbed to 10 as three more bodies were recovered.

In France, police said one of two hikers missing for four days in the Pyrenees had died in hospital a few hours after he and his partner were rescued.

In Germany, about 100 people were evacuated from a Bavarian ski resort after two avalanches came down.

Snow and floods submerged roads and railways in Romania, where over 50,000 acres of farmland near the Hungarian border were under water and 600 houses were damaged.