Second Session of the Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction
2 June 2009- More than 1,500 delegates, from 150 Governments and over 120 regional and national organisations will gather in Geneva from 16-19 June 2009 for the Second Session of the Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction (GP09).
The Global Platform is the main bi-annual forum on disaster risk reduction bringing together a wide cross-section of the worldwide disaster risk reduction community worldwide, including heads of state, senior ministers, UN agencies, NGOs, scientific and technical experts, and others. Under the slogan ‘invest today for a safer tomorrow’, the event will focus on the linkages between climate change adaptation, poverty and disaster risk reduction.
The full program of the conference will be distributed in the next briefing on Friday 5 June together with another media advisory which will provide full details on the event.
The main highlights include:
 Opening Ceremony presided by John Holmes, United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, and Convener of the Global Platform and Keynote Speakers,
 Five High Level Panels exploring relevant thematic issues: Investment, Climate Change Adaptation, Community Resilience, Safer Hospitals and Schools, Building Back Better;
 Five Roundtables – Early Warning, NGOs, Local Authorities, Education, Ecosystems
 Five Special Events – including the public launch of the Red Cross Red Crescent World Disasters Report, a BBC World Debate featuring some hard hitting dialogue between disaster risk reduction specialists in front of a TV audience and a Film Debate highlighting climate change adaptation films
 Some 40 side events organised by ISDR partners
 A market-place featuring more than 30 booths/exhibits from ISDR partners
 Chair’s Summary session followed by the Closing Ceremony
“Public awareness of disaster risk reduction issues and initiatives is intensifying and more questions are being asked of governments,” says Margareta Wahlström, the UN’s Assistant Secretary-General
for Disaster Risk Reduction. “The Global Platform will be a pivotal conference, not only in setting the disaster risk reduction agenda for the coming two years and beyond, but also in the run up to sealing a deal on climate change adaptation in Copenhagen this December.”
Launch Venue and Date
The Second Session of the Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction will take place at CICG, International Centre of Geneva, rue de Varembe 17, 1202 Geneva from 16 to 19 June 2009 Media are welcome to the Launch Ceremony on 16 June and are invited to attend all the events
during the Global Platform
NATURAL DISASTERS
400,000 evacuated after earthquake hits China
M ore than 400,000 people were being evacuated Friday after an earthquake hit southwestern China, killing one person, injuring hundreds and flattening more than 18,000 homes, officials said.
A government relief official in Yao'an county, a mountainous area of remote Yunnan province, told AFP one person had died and 328 had been injured.
The U. S. Geological Survey (USGS) said the 5.7-magnitude quake struck at 7:19 p. m. Thursday at a shallow depth of 10 kilometres in Yunnan province.
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M ore than 400,000 people were being evacuated Friday after an earthquake hit southwestern China, killing one person, injuring hundreds and flattening more than 18,000 homes, officials said.
A government relief official in Yao'an county, a mountainous area of remote Yunnan province, told AFP one person had died and 328 had been injured.
The U. S. Geological Survey (USGS) said the 5.7-magnitude quake struck at 7:19 p. m. Thursday at a shallow depth of 10 kilometres in Yunnan province.
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; Typhoon shuts down Manila; Two missing as fierce storm slams Philippines
Agence France-presseJuly 18, 2009
A Manila resident stands at the door to her house partially submerged by floodwaters from typhoon Molave Friday.
Photograph by: Erik De Castro, Reuters, Agence France-presse
Two people were missing and more than 4,000 others displaced as typhoon Molave caused widespread flooding that effectively shut down the Philippine capital Friday, rescuers and officials said.
The eye of Molave hit the sparsely populated Batan island group near Taiwan on Friday night as weather services upgraded it from a tropical storm into a typhoon packing maximum sustained winds of 95 kilometres an hour.
Despite the centre of the disturbance being hundreds of kilometres away, President Gloria Arroyo declared a government holiday in the capital Manila and a large chunk of the main island of Luzon as roads flooded.
However, she said on government television that "those in emergency, medical and security services" should stay put at work.
The civil defence office in Manila said two people are missing and more than 4,000 people displaced amid widespread flooding in and around the metropolis of 12 million people.
A nine-year-old boy fell into a flooded storm drain in San Mateo town east of Manila while a young man tumbled into a creek near Imus town, south of the capital and was swept away, it said in a report.
Schools, offices and the country's stock exchange also shut as the Marikina river burst its banks, threatening the capital's eastern districts, while some domestic airlines suspended flights.
Weather services said the northern Philippines could expect up to 200 millimetres of rain within a 24-hour period, leading to potential flash floods and landslides.
The Philippine Stock Exchange said it suspended operations midmorning "due to lack of clearing facilities" as the central bank had curtailed its activities because of the weather.
Manila residents were seen wading knee-deep in dirty brown water.
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Agence France-presseJuly 18, 2009
A Manila resident stands at the door to her house partially submerged by floodwaters from typhoon Molave Friday.
Photograph by: Erik De Castro, Reuters, Agence France-presse
Two people were missing and more than 4,000 others displaced as typhoon Molave caused widespread flooding that effectively shut down the Philippine capital Friday, rescuers and officials said.
The eye of Molave hit the sparsely populated Batan island group near Taiwan on Friday night as weather services upgraded it from a tropical storm into a typhoon packing maximum sustained winds of 95 kilometres an hour.
Despite the centre of the disturbance being hundreds of kilometres away, President Gloria Arroyo declared a government holiday in the capital Manila and a large chunk of the main island of Luzon as roads flooded.
However, she said on government television that "those in emergency, medical and security services" should stay put at work.
The civil defence office in Manila said two people are missing and more than 4,000 people displaced amid widespread flooding in and around the metropolis of 12 million people.
A nine-year-old boy fell into a flooded storm drain in San Mateo town east of Manila while a young man tumbled into a creek near Imus town, south of the capital and was swept away, it said in a report.
Schools, offices and the country's stock exchange also shut as the Marikina river burst its banks, threatening the capital's eastern districts, while some domestic airlines suspended flights.
Weather services said the northern Philippines could expect up to 200 millimetres of rain within a 24-hour period, leading to potential flash floods and landslides.
The Philippine Stock Exchange said it suspended operations midmorning "due to lack of clearing facilities" as the central bank had curtailed its activities because of the weather.
Manila residents were seen wading knee-deep in dirty brown water.
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August 11, 2009
Death Toll Rises as Typhoons Soak Asia
By MICHAEL WINES
BEIJING — Deaths and damage from two Pacific typhoons rose on Monday, with nine reported dead in Japan and a rural village in south-central Taiwan buried in a mudslide. The number of dead there was not known. Thirty-seven people had already been reported dead in the Philippines, Taiwan, and China.
Initial reports from the Taiwanese village, Hsiao-lin, were sketchy. A spokesman for the National Fire Administration, Liang Yu-chu, said that 45 people had been pulled alive from the mudslide, but that no dead had been found.
Other unverified reports from local residents, quoted by news services, suggested that as many as 600 people were missing. Hundreds of people are scattered in houses outside the more concentrated boundaries of the village, and the scope of the landslide was not known.
“The whole village was buried in the landslide, so it’s hard to be certain,” Mr. Liang said. “They’re still searching.”
The storm, Morakot, unleashed record rains that dropped up to 83 inches in some parts of Taiwan between Friday and Sunday, causing what officials say is the worst flooding in half a century. The number of known dead in Taiwan was 15, with 32 severely injured. Those figures did not include potential landslide victims.
Morakot, which means emerald in Thai, struck the Philippines last week, killing 21 people, including a French tourist and two Belgian tourists, according to officials there. Seven others were reported missing.
Three people also were killed on mainland China, where Morakot struck Sunday.
In Japan on Monday, at least nine people were killed, and nine others were missing after another typhoon, Etau, slammed the western part of the country, bringing heavy rain that led to floods and landslides, The A.P. reported. On Sunday evening, an earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 6.9 rattled Tokyo and eastern Japan, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency.
Taiwan’s central government had warned earlier of landslide dangers after Morakot battered the island, dumping its record rains across the south. Helicopters took rescuers into the landslide site, in Kaohsiung County, and officials said accurate information on the situation was likely to emerge before daylight on Tuesday. Rescue efforts were complicated by continuing rain.
The Reuters news service quoted an army general involved in the rescue effort, Richard Hu, as saying that “no small number of single-story homes have been covered” by the mudslide.
More than 170,000 people remained without power on Monday, the government said.
In China, one of the reported dead was a 4-year-old child in Wenzhou, a city of nearly 1.4 million people in Zhejiang Province, where officials said the storm had leveled nearly 1,500 homes. The child was among five people buried when the winds collapsed five adjacent houses.
The weakened storm was still churning over Wenzhou on Monday morning. Skies there had cleared, but heavy rain was predicted later. “I’m living in the center of town, which is not so bad,” one woman, Yang Weiwei, said from Wenzhou in a telephone interview. “However, some parts of the city are in a mess.”
On Sunday, the authorities said the storm had whipped up waves as high as 26 feet in the East China Sea and in the strait between mainland China and Taiwan.
Typhoon Morakot, the eighth of the season, hit the Chinese mainland at 4:20 p.m. on Sunday at Xiapu County, in northern Fujian Province. China’s state-controlled Xinhua news service said more than 490,000 people had been moved to safety in Fujian, and 48,000 boats summoned back to harbor.
In Zhejiang Province, between Fujian and Shanghai, 505,000 others were evacuated and 35,000 boats called in.
Both provinces are manufacturing centers with large port cities. Shanghai, just north of the typhoon’s landfall, was spared the worst winds but canceled airline flights and lowered river reservoirs to prepare for flooding. Trees were uprooted and some snapped apart in Fujian Province, Xinhua reported, and farmers struggled with nets to recapture fish flushed out of fish farms.
Xinhua said relief teams were distributing food and water to rural villagers who had been stranded by high waters. By Sunday night, meteorologists reported that the typhoon had degraded close to tropical storm status, with 74-mile-an-hour winds.
The government reported that more than 83,000 Philippines residents were affected by floodwaters and landslides, and 22,000 had been evacuated.
Jonathan Ansfield contributed reporting, and Zhang Jin contributed research.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/11/world ... nted=print
Death Toll Rises as Typhoons Soak Asia
By MICHAEL WINES
BEIJING — Deaths and damage from two Pacific typhoons rose on Monday, with nine reported dead in Japan and a rural village in south-central Taiwan buried in a mudslide. The number of dead there was not known. Thirty-seven people had already been reported dead in the Philippines, Taiwan, and China.
Initial reports from the Taiwanese village, Hsiao-lin, were sketchy. A spokesman for the National Fire Administration, Liang Yu-chu, said that 45 people had been pulled alive from the mudslide, but that no dead had been found.
Other unverified reports from local residents, quoted by news services, suggested that as many as 600 people were missing. Hundreds of people are scattered in houses outside the more concentrated boundaries of the village, and the scope of the landslide was not known.
“The whole village was buried in the landslide, so it’s hard to be certain,” Mr. Liang said. “They’re still searching.”
The storm, Morakot, unleashed record rains that dropped up to 83 inches in some parts of Taiwan between Friday and Sunday, causing what officials say is the worst flooding in half a century. The number of known dead in Taiwan was 15, with 32 severely injured. Those figures did not include potential landslide victims.
Morakot, which means emerald in Thai, struck the Philippines last week, killing 21 people, including a French tourist and two Belgian tourists, according to officials there. Seven others were reported missing.
Three people also were killed on mainland China, where Morakot struck Sunday.
In Japan on Monday, at least nine people were killed, and nine others were missing after another typhoon, Etau, slammed the western part of the country, bringing heavy rain that led to floods and landslides, The A.P. reported. On Sunday evening, an earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 6.9 rattled Tokyo and eastern Japan, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency.
Taiwan’s central government had warned earlier of landslide dangers after Morakot battered the island, dumping its record rains across the south. Helicopters took rescuers into the landslide site, in Kaohsiung County, and officials said accurate information on the situation was likely to emerge before daylight on Tuesday. Rescue efforts were complicated by continuing rain.
The Reuters news service quoted an army general involved in the rescue effort, Richard Hu, as saying that “no small number of single-story homes have been covered” by the mudslide.
More than 170,000 people remained without power on Monday, the government said.
In China, one of the reported dead was a 4-year-old child in Wenzhou, a city of nearly 1.4 million people in Zhejiang Province, where officials said the storm had leveled nearly 1,500 homes. The child was among five people buried when the winds collapsed five adjacent houses.
The weakened storm was still churning over Wenzhou on Monday morning. Skies there had cleared, but heavy rain was predicted later. “I’m living in the center of town, which is not so bad,” one woman, Yang Weiwei, said from Wenzhou in a telephone interview. “However, some parts of the city are in a mess.”
On Sunday, the authorities said the storm had whipped up waves as high as 26 feet in the East China Sea and in the strait between mainland China and Taiwan.
Typhoon Morakot, the eighth of the season, hit the Chinese mainland at 4:20 p.m. on Sunday at Xiapu County, in northern Fujian Province. China’s state-controlled Xinhua news service said more than 490,000 people had been moved to safety in Fujian, and 48,000 boats summoned back to harbor.
In Zhejiang Province, between Fujian and Shanghai, 505,000 others were evacuated and 35,000 boats called in.
Both provinces are manufacturing centers with large port cities. Shanghai, just north of the typhoon’s landfall, was spared the worst winds but canceled airline flights and lowered river reservoirs to prepare for flooding. Trees were uprooted and some snapped apart in Fujian Province, Xinhua reported, and farmers struggled with nets to recapture fish flushed out of fish farms.
Xinhua said relief teams were distributing food and water to rural villagers who had been stranded by high waters. By Sunday night, meteorologists reported that the typhoon had degraded close to tropical storm status, with 74-mile-an-hour winds.
The government reported that more than 83,000 Philippines residents were affected by floodwaters and landslides, and 22,000 had been evacuated.
Jonathan Ansfield contributed reporting, and Zhang Jin contributed research.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/11/world ... nted=print
Thousands of Indonesians left homeless by quake
Death toll mounts as damage assessed
By Pipit Prahoro And Heru Asprihanto, ReutersSeptember 3, 2009
Rescuers check the collapsed boarding school in Tasikmalay, West Java, for trapped victims following Wednesday's 7.0 magnitude earthquake in Indonesia. The quake struck less than 200 kilometres south of Jakarta.
Rescuers check the collapsed boarding school in Tasikmalay, West Java, for trapped victims following Wednesday's 7.0 magnitude earthquake in Indonesia. The quake struck less than 200 kilometres south of Jakarta.
Photograph by: Gede Bagja, AFP-Getty Images, Reuters
T he death toll from a powerful earthquake in Indonesia, which killed at least 42 people and forced thousands to flee buildings, is likely to rise, government agencies said early today.
The 7.0 magnitude quake shook buildings in the capital Jakarta on Wednesday afternoon and flattened homes in villages closer to the epicentre, in West Java.
Reuters reporters at the scene today saw many damaged houses, as well as makeshift tents and shelters on the streets and in fields.
"They have taken refuge not only because their houses were ruined, but also because they fear there will be aftershocks," said local official Obar Sobarna. There were about 5,000 people taking refuge in the area, he added.
At least 42 people were killed and more than 300 people injured, the government said. Officials said about 1,300 houses were damaged, although local media put the number at 3,500.
Another 42 people were missing, presumed dead, after the quake triggered a landslide in the district of Cianjur, about 100 kilometres south of Jakarta, said Priyadi Kardono, spokesman for the National Disaster Mitigation Agency.
Kardono told Reuters the death toll could be much higher as scores of houses and offices had collapsed or suffered severe damage.
Some areas near the epicentre could not be contacted, and communications were slow to recover.
"Communications with the coastal areas were completely cut, so we don't know the conditions there," Kardono said.
"No reports have come from those areas, although we assume those were the most affected ones. It's possible the death toll could grow higher."
The Health Ministry said it was sending medical teams to the affected areas in West Java. State news agency Antara reported that villagers were clearing rubble from collapsed buildings to try to find survivors and bodies.
Indonesia's 17,000 islands are scattered along a belt of volcanic and seismic activity known as the Pacific "ring of fire," one of the most quake-prone places on Earth.
More than 170,000 Indonesians were killed or listed missing after a 9.15 magnitude earthquake off Indonesia's Aceh province on Sumatra triggered a tsunami in December 2004. A total of 230,000 people died in affected Indian Ocean countries.
Indonesia's main power, oil and gas, steel, and mining companies with operations in West and Central Java island closest to the quake's epicentre said they had not been affected and suffered no damage.
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Death toll mounts as damage assessed
By Pipit Prahoro And Heru Asprihanto, ReutersSeptember 3, 2009
Rescuers check the collapsed boarding school in Tasikmalay, West Java, for trapped victims following Wednesday's 7.0 magnitude earthquake in Indonesia. The quake struck less than 200 kilometres south of Jakarta.
Rescuers check the collapsed boarding school in Tasikmalay, West Java, for trapped victims following Wednesday's 7.0 magnitude earthquake in Indonesia. The quake struck less than 200 kilometres south of Jakarta.
Photograph by: Gede Bagja, AFP-Getty Images, Reuters
T he death toll from a powerful earthquake in Indonesia, which killed at least 42 people and forced thousands to flee buildings, is likely to rise, government agencies said early today.
The 7.0 magnitude quake shook buildings in the capital Jakarta on Wednesday afternoon and flattened homes in villages closer to the epicentre, in West Java.
Reuters reporters at the scene today saw many damaged houses, as well as makeshift tents and shelters on the streets and in fields.
"They have taken refuge not only because their houses were ruined, but also because they fear there will be aftershocks," said local official Obar Sobarna. There were about 5,000 people taking refuge in the area, he added.
At least 42 people were killed and more than 300 people injured, the government said. Officials said about 1,300 houses were damaged, although local media put the number at 3,500.
Another 42 people were missing, presumed dead, after the quake triggered a landslide in the district of Cianjur, about 100 kilometres south of Jakarta, said Priyadi Kardono, spokesman for the National Disaster Mitigation Agency.
Kardono told Reuters the death toll could be much higher as scores of houses and offices had collapsed or suffered severe damage.
Some areas near the epicentre could not be contacted, and communications were slow to recover.
"Communications with the coastal areas were completely cut, so we don't know the conditions there," Kardono said.
"No reports have come from those areas, although we assume those were the most affected ones. It's possible the death toll could grow higher."
The Health Ministry said it was sending medical teams to the affected areas in West Java. State news agency Antara reported that villagers were clearing rubble from collapsed buildings to try to find survivors and bodies.
Indonesia's 17,000 islands are scattered along a belt of volcanic and seismic activity known as the Pacific "ring of fire," one of the most quake-prone places on Earth.
More than 170,000 Indonesians were killed or listed missing after a 9.15 magnitude earthquake off Indonesia's Aceh province on Sumatra triggered a tsunami in December 2004. A total of 230,000 people died in affected Indian Ocean countries.
Indonesia's main power, oil and gas, steel, and mining companies with operations in West and Central Java island closest to the quake's epicentre said they had not been affected and suffered no damage.
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Record rains overwhelm Istanbul, 31 dead
By Murad Sezer And Ayla Jean Yackley,
ReutersSeptember 10, 2009
An aerial view shows flood-damaged vehicles on Wednesday in Istanbul. At least 31 people were killed as heavy overnight rains flooded parts of Turkey's biggest city, stranding motorists and flooding roads.
Photograph by: AFP-Getty Images, Reuters
F lash floods killed 31 people in northwest Turkey, sweeping through the city of Istanbul, swamping houses, turning highways into fast-flowing rivers and drowning seven women in a minibus that was taking them to work.
Twenty-six died in Istanbul, Turkey's largest city with 14 million inhabitants, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said late on Wednesday, after two days of the heaviest rain in 80 years produced sudden flood waters which engulfed low-lying areas.
Another five died in Saray, west of Istanbul, reportedly all from the same family. Nine more were missing, Erdogan said.
In Istanbul rescue workers, some on boats, put out planks and ladders to help drivers, stranded in fast-flowing waters, reach the safety of bridges and high land. Military helicopters also assisted bringing stranded people to safety.
The worst flooding occurred in areas in the west of the city, on the European side, where drainage is often poor.
The waters began to recede late on Wednesday revealing wrecked buildings and debris scattered across the streets, as distressed residents and workers started the cleanup.
Interior Minister Besir Atalay said the death toll could rise as waters continued to recede.
Witnesses said waves of muddy waters pulling cars, trees and debris crashed into homes and buildings early on Wednesday as people were getting up to break their fasting during the holy month of Ramadan.
"We heard a crashing sound and then saw the waters coming down carrying cars and debris," said Nuri Bitken, a 42-year-old night guard at a truck garage.
"We tried to wake up those who were still asleep in the trucks but some didn't make it. The dead had to be retrieved by boats," Bitken told Reuters.
CNN Turk television showed scenes of white blankets covering the bodies of people found in the western Halkali neighbourhood near Ataturk International airport. Airport officials said there was no disruption to flights.
"My friend got stuck in the truck after the water rose all at once. The vehicle stopped working after filling with water. We rescued him with a winch," Kamil Coskun told Reuters TV in Ikitelli district.
Istanbul's ancient district of Sultanahmet, with its famous mosques, the palaces of the waterfront and Beyoglu's area of narrow streets were largely unaffected.
In the Ikitelli commercial district, residents scrambled for office equipment amid debris. In other parts of the city, people waded chest-high through swamped highways.
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By Murad Sezer And Ayla Jean Yackley,
ReutersSeptember 10, 2009
An aerial view shows flood-damaged vehicles on Wednesday in Istanbul. At least 31 people were killed as heavy overnight rains flooded parts of Turkey's biggest city, stranding motorists and flooding roads.
Photograph by: AFP-Getty Images, Reuters
F lash floods killed 31 people in northwest Turkey, sweeping through the city of Istanbul, swamping houses, turning highways into fast-flowing rivers and drowning seven women in a minibus that was taking them to work.
Twenty-six died in Istanbul, Turkey's largest city with 14 million inhabitants, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said late on Wednesday, after two days of the heaviest rain in 80 years produced sudden flood waters which engulfed low-lying areas.
Another five died in Saray, west of Istanbul, reportedly all from the same family. Nine more were missing, Erdogan said.
In Istanbul rescue workers, some on boats, put out planks and ladders to help drivers, stranded in fast-flowing waters, reach the safety of bridges and high land. Military helicopters also assisted bringing stranded people to safety.
The worst flooding occurred in areas in the west of the city, on the European side, where drainage is often poor.
The waters began to recede late on Wednesday revealing wrecked buildings and debris scattered across the streets, as distressed residents and workers started the cleanup.
Interior Minister Besir Atalay said the death toll could rise as waters continued to recede.
Witnesses said waves of muddy waters pulling cars, trees and debris crashed into homes and buildings early on Wednesday as people were getting up to break their fasting during the holy month of Ramadan.
"We heard a crashing sound and then saw the waters coming down carrying cars and debris," said Nuri Bitken, a 42-year-old night guard at a truck garage.
"We tried to wake up those who were still asleep in the trucks but some didn't make it. The dead had to be retrieved by boats," Bitken told Reuters.
CNN Turk television showed scenes of white blankets covering the bodies of people found in the western Halkali neighbourhood near Ataturk International airport. Airport officials said there was no disruption to flights.
"My friend got stuck in the truck after the water rose all at once. The vehicle stopped working after filling with water. We rescued him with a winch," Kamil Coskun told Reuters TV in Ikitelli district.
Istanbul's ancient district of Sultanahmet, with its famous mosques, the palaces of the waterfront and Beyoglu's area of narrow streets were largely unaffected.
In the Ikitelli commercial district, residents scrambled for office equipment amid debris. In other parts of the city, people waded chest-high through swamped highways.
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Scores killed as storm floods Philippines
Agence France-Presse
September 27, 2009
A Filipino girl is carried to safety through flood water brought by tropical storm Ketsana in Quezon City, near Manila, on Saturday.
Photograph by: Jay Directo, AFP; Getty Images, Agence France-Presse
At least 50 people were reported dead as tropical storm Ketsana lashed the Philippines, bringing massive flooding, television and radio reports said early today.
At least 40 were killed in Rizalprovince, eastofManila, as entire towns were inundated, Rizal Gov. Casimiro Ynares was quoted as saying by GMA television.
Radio stations had earlier reported 10 dead in Manila and its surrounding areas. This included a father and child killed by a collapsing wall weakened by the flood as well as others swept away by rising water.
Ynares said there were many more missing in flooded towns. The government declared Manila and 25 other provinces to be in a "state of calamity," Defence Secretary Gilberto Teodoro said, as heavy rains brought by the storm caused the worst flooding in the capital in 20 years.
Amid a rash of cellphone calls for help by people stranded on the roofs of their houses, President Gloria Arroyo appealed to the public to stay calm and follow the instructions of local officials.
Over 1,800 people were forced to flee their homes and take refuge in evacuation centres due to rising water, the civil defence office said.
Flooding was reported in many districts with water in some areas reaching as high as the rooftops of one-storey buildings, it added.
Power was cut in many areas of Manila, partly due to flooding, but also as a protective measure to prevent fallen lines electrocuting people trying to escape the waters.
In a radio broadcast, the defence secretary advised that "if you are on the roof, don't try to leave. Just remain there on the roof and we will do everything to rescue you." He remarked that even he had to swim through chest-deep water to reach his office.
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*****
Manila submerged in sea of muddy water
Flood leaves 86 dead, 330,000 homeless
Agence France-PresseSeptember 28, 2009
an aerial picture shows residents caught in heavy flooding brought by tropical storm Ketsana in Marikina city, east of the Philippine capital Manila on Sunday. The storm dumped the heaviest rainfall on Manila in more than four decades, officials said.
Photograph by: Noel Celis, AFP-Getty Images, Agence France-Presse
Seen from a military helicopter flying above the sprawling city, Manila was covered by a sea of brown on Sunday, with islands of desperate people clinging to corrugated rooftops.
One man, wearing only shorts and sandals, held up a piece of paper appealing for help with the words "food" and "water" scrawled on it.
Elsewhere, residents who could not wait to be rescued waded through the water, carrying their children and anything else they could manage on their shoulders or heads.
Two men converted a car roof top into a makeshift raft, and hauled themselves by rope across what was once a road but now a river. Elsewhere, dog and chicken carcasses floated in the water as rescuers in rubber boats struggled to navigate around mountains of debris.
The devastation extended across vast areas of Manila after the heaviest rain in more than 40 years sent torrents of water up to six metres high streaming across the city on Saturday. The storm, which destroyed both shanty towns and upmarket suburbs, left at least 86 people dead and displaced more than 330,000, according to the government.
Banking executive Rachelle Solis was still in shock on Sunday after she and her two children, aged six and eight, were almost swept away.
Solis, 35, had taken the children to a daycare centre near the family home in a riverside northern Manila suburb. In
a matter of minutes the water rose by about a metre and she decided to fetch her children.
Once there, Solis was forced to take her children across the torrent of water to reach higher ground. Their only way across was via a rope someone had set up above the waters across the road. "We had no choice but to brave the flood. We couldn't wait for rescuers," Solis told AFP.
"We thought we were going to die. My children kept crying. The current was so strong and we were nearly swept away... there was debris smashing into our bodies. I kept thinking this couldn't happen to me, not in Manila."
Meanwhile, rescuers pushed on with efforts to reach those who remained stranded.
President Gloria Arroyo had ordered all rescue work to be completed by nightfall on Sunday, but as daylight faded many areas of the city remained under water and countless people were left to fend for themselves.
"Rescuers are not reaching the people inside the deeper areas," said Michael Ignas, 37, a tricycle driver in eastern Manila's Pasig city which was particularly hard hit.
Ignas said he had survived the flooding by seeking refuge on the second floor of a building. As he spoke, the water remained neck-deep in nearby areas.
For Red Cross volunteer Dave Barnuevo, the rescue work was proving almost impossibly difficult. "I've never seen flooding this devastating in Manila," Barnuevo told AFP, as he led a small team of rescuers scouring Provident, a sprawling riverside community in Marikina city, east of Manila.
"The water is taking a long time to go down. The water is muddy and thick, and we have had to push our rubber boats in neck-deep waters in some areas."
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Agence France-Presse
September 27, 2009
A Filipino girl is carried to safety through flood water brought by tropical storm Ketsana in Quezon City, near Manila, on Saturday.
Photograph by: Jay Directo, AFP; Getty Images, Agence France-Presse
At least 50 people were reported dead as tropical storm Ketsana lashed the Philippines, bringing massive flooding, television and radio reports said early today.
At least 40 were killed in Rizalprovince, eastofManila, as entire towns were inundated, Rizal Gov. Casimiro Ynares was quoted as saying by GMA television.
Radio stations had earlier reported 10 dead in Manila and its surrounding areas. This included a father and child killed by a collapsing wall weakened by the flood as well as others swept away by rising water.
Ynares said there were many more missing in flooded towns. The government declared Manila and 25 other provinces to be in a "state of calamity," Defence Secretary Gilberto Teodoro said, as heavy rains brought by the storm caused the worst flooding in the capital in 20 years.
Amid a rash of cellphone calls for help by people stranded on the roofs of their houses, President Gloria Arroyo appealed to the public to stay calm and follow the instructions of local officials.
Over 1,800 people were forced to flee their homes and take refuge in evacuation centres due to rising water, the civil defence office said.
Flooding was reported in many districts with water in some areas reaching as high as the rooftops of one-storey buildings, it added.
Power was cut in many areas of Manila, partly due to flooding, but also as a protective measure to prevent fallen lines electrocuting people trying to escape the waters.
In a radio broadcast, the defence secretary advised that "if you are on the roof, don't try to leave. Just remain there on the roof and we will do everything to rescue you." He remarked that even he had to swim through chest-deep water to reach his office.
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*****
Manila submerged in sea of muddy water
Flood leaves 86 dead, 330,000 homeless
Agence France-PresseSeptember 28, 2009
an aerial picture shows residents caught in heavy flooding brought by tropical storm Ketsana in Marikina city, east of the Philippine capital Manila on Sunday. The storm dumped the heaviest rainfall on Manila in more than four decades, officials said.
Photograph by: Noel Celis, AFP-Getty Images, Agence France-Presse
Seen from a military helicopter flying above the sprawling city, Manila was covered by a sea of brown on Sunday, with islands of desperate people clinging to corrugated rooftops.
One man, wearing only shorts and sandals, held up a piece of paper appealing for help with the words "food" and "water" scrawled on it.
Elsewhere, residents who could not wait to be rescued waded through the water, carrying their children and anything else they could manage on their shoulders or heads.
Two men converted a car roof top into a makeshift raft, and hauled themselves by rope across what was once a road but now a river. Elsewhere, dog and chicken carcasses floated in the water as rescuers in rubber boats struggled to navigate around mountains of debris.
The devastation extended across vast areas of Manila after the heaviest rain in more than 40 years sent torrents of water up to six metres high streaming across the city on Saturday. The storm, which destroyed both shanty towns and upmarket suburbs, left at least 86 people dead and displaced more than 330,000, according to the government.
Banking executive Rachelle Solis was still in shock on Sunday after she and her two children, aged six and eight, were almost swept away.
Solis, 35, had taken the children to a daycare centre near the family home in a riverside northern Manila suburb. In
a matter of minutes the water rose by about a metre and she decided to fetch her children.
Once there, Solis was forced to take her children across the torrent of water to reach higher ground. Their only way across was via a rope someone had set up above the waters across the road. "We had no choice but to brave the flood. We couldn't wait for rescuers," Solis told AFP.
"We thought we were going to die. My children kept crying. The current was so strong and we were nearly swept away... there was debris smashing into our bodies. I kept thinking this couldn't happen to me, not in Manila."
Meanwhile, rescuers pushed on with efforts to reach those who remained stranded.
President Gloria Arroyo had ordered all rescue work to be completed by nightfall on Sunday, but as daylight faded many areas of the city remained under water and countless people were left to fend for themselves.
"Rescuers are not reaching the people inside the deeper areas," said Michael Ignas, 37, a tricycle driver in eastern Manila's Pasig city which was particularly hard hit.
Ignas said he had survived the flooding by seeking refuge on the second floor of a building. As he spoke, the water remained neck-deep in nearby areas.
For Red Cross volunteer Dave Barnuevo, the rescue work was proving almost impossibly difficult. "I've never seen flooding this devastating in Manila," Barnuevo told AFP, as he led a small team of rescuers scouring Provident, a sprawling riverside community in Marikina city, east of Manila.
"The water is taking a long time to go down. The water is muddy and thick, and we have had to push our rubber boats in neck-deep waters in some areas."
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Killer tsunami strikes South Pacific islands
Calgary HeraldSeptember 30, 2009
A view of the Sinalei resort, south of Apia, capital of Western Samoa, after it was struck by a tsunami.
Photograph by: Reuters, Calgary Herald
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A tsunami smashed into the Pacific island nations of American and Western Samoa on Tuesday, killing possibly more than 100 people, flattening villages and injuring hundreds.
A Pacific-wide tsunami warning was issued after a huge 8.0-magnitude undersea quake off American Samoa, with reports of a small tsunami reaching New Zealand. A tsunami advisory was also issued for Japan's east coast and the U. S. West Coast early today.
The tsunami caused waves of 1.5 metres above sea level off American Samoa, said the Pacific Western Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii. There were unconfirmed reports of waves taller than four metres.
---
For breaking news on the tsunami, see calgaryherald.comShortly after local radio tsunami warnings were issued in American and Western Samoa, waves started crashing into the capital of American Samoa, Pago Pago, and villages and resorts on the southern coasts of the tiny island nations, witnesses said.
"It's believed as of now, there could be a number close to 100 deaths," said Ausegalia Mulipola, assistant chief executive of Western Samoa's disaster management office.
"They are still continuing the searches for any missing bodies in the area," Mulipola told Reuters, adding the southern side of the country's main island Upolu was the worst hit.
"There have been reports of villages where most of the houses have been run over by the sea," he said.
"Some areas have been flattened and the tsunami had brought a lot of sand onshore, so there have been reports the sand has covered some of the bodies. So we need specialized machines to search for bodies that are buried under the sand."
In American Samoa, a U. S. territory, the death toll was officially 14, but could rise, said officials.
A series of five waves hit Pago Pago, swamping the harbourside business centre and temporarily closing the airport.
Yachtsman Wayne Hodgins, who was in Pago Pago harbour, said he had heard of people being swept away.
"There was a couple and a young boy, they were clinging to the light standard. The water came and went very, very quickly, but it was absolutely ferocious," Hodgins told American media.
American Samoa tourism chief David Vaeafe said water levels rose about three minutes after the tsunami warning, with small villages around the capital devastated.
"Access to Pago Pago has been closed. Water had come up to the first floor. The radio station was evacuated, a lot of damage, structural damage to the steel and brick structure," Vaeafe told Australia's Sky Television from Pago Pago.
There were reports of looting in Pago Pago as people flocked into supermarkets to stockpile supplies. Fishing boats not thrown onto reefs by the tsunamis moved out to open sea for safety.
Hundreds of people, including tourists, fled coastal homes and resorts to higher ground in both nations.
The Indian Ocean tsunami on Dec. 26, 2004, killed about 230,000 people across 11 countries.
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Calgary HeraldSeptember 30, 2009
A view of the Sinalei resort, south of Apia, capital of Western Samoa, after it was struck by a tsunami.
Photograph by: Reuters, Calgary Herald
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A tsunami smashed into the Pacific island nations of American and Western Samoa on Tuesday, killing possibly more than 100 people, flattening villages and injuring hundreds.
A Pacific-wide tsunami warning was issued after a huge 8.0-magnitude undersea quake off American Samoa, with reports of a small tsunami reaching New Zealand. A tsunami advisory was also issued for Japan's east coast and the U. S. West Coast early today.
The tsunami caused waves of 1.5 metres above sea level off American Samoa, said the Pacific Western Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii. There were unconfirmed reports of waves taller than four metres.
---
For breaking news on the tsunami, see calgaryherald.comShortly after local radio tsunami warnings were issued in American and Western Samoa, waves started crashing into the capital of American Samoa, Pago Pago, and villages and resorts on the southern coasts of the tiny island nations, witnesses said.
"It's believed as of now, there could be a number close to 100 deaths," said Ausegalia Mulipola, assistant chief executive of Western Samoa's disaster management office.
"They are still continuing the searches for any missing bodies in the area," Mulipola told Reuters, adding the southern side of the country's main island Upolu was the worst hit.
"There have been reports of villages where most of the houses have been run over by the sea," he said.
"Some areas have been flattened and the tsunami had brought a lot of sand onshore, so there have been reports the sand has covered some of the bodies. So we need specialized machines to search for bodies that are buried under the sand."
In American Samoa, a U. S. territory, the death toll was officially 14, but could rise, said officials.
A series of five waves hit Pago Pago, swamping the harbourside business centre and temporarily closing the airport.
Yachtsman Wayne Hodgins, who was in Pago Pago harbour, said he had heard of people being swept away.
"There was a couple and a young boy, they were clinging to the light standard. The water came and went very, very quickly, but it was absolutely ferocious," Hodgins told American media.
American Samoa tourism chief David Vaeafe said water levels rose about three minutes after the tsunami warning, with small villages around the capital devastated.
"Access to Pago Pago has been closed. Water had come up to the first floor. The radio station was evacuated, a lot of damage, structural damage to the steel and brick structure," Vaeafe told Australia's Sky Television from Pago Pago.
There were reports of looting in Pago Pago as people flocked into supermarkets to stockpile supplies. Fishing boats not thrown onto reefs by the tsunamis moved out to open sea for safety.
Hundreds of people, including tourists, fled coastal homes and resorts to higher ground in both nations.
The Indian Ocean tsunami on Dec. 26, 2004, killed about 230,000 people across 11 countries.
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Rescuers race against time after killer quake
Search for survivors as thousands feared dead in Indonesia
By John Nedy, ReutersOctober 1, 2009
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People stand near a collapsed shopping mall after a major earthquake hit Padang, on Indonesia's Sumatra island, on Wednesday.
Photograph by: Muhammad Fitrah, Singgalang Newspaper, Reuters, Reuters
Thousands may have died in an earthquake that struck the city of Padang on Indonesia's Sumatra island, a minister said early today, with officials saying many victims remained buried under toppled buildings.
The 7.6-magnitude quake hit Padang on Wednesday afternoon, knocking over hundreds of buildings, but with communications patchy it was hard to determine the extent of the destruction and loss of life.
Heavy rain was also hampering rescue efforts and officials said power had been severed in the city.
Television footage showed people being pulled from the rubble.
A second magnitude 6.8 quake hit another part of Sumatra this morning, causing fresh panic, according to TV reports.
The second quake's epicentre-- inland and further to the southeast --was 154 kilometres northwest of Bengkulu, the U. S. Geological Survey said.
The area could not immediately be contacted.
Health Minister Siti Fadillah Supari told reporters at an airport in Jakarta -- before leaving for the stricken area--that the number of victims "could be more (than hundreds or thousands). I think it's more than thousands, if we look at how widespread the damage is . . . but we don't really know yet."
The death toll exceeded 450 this morning in the city of 900,000.
About 500 houses had collapsed, officials in the area said.
"The number of people who died in West Sumatra is 464 and they are from six districts," the government official in charge of handling death toll data, Tugyo Bisri, told Agence France-Presse.
Australian businesswoman Jane Liddon told Australian radio from Padang said the city centre was devastated.
"The big buildings are down. The concrete buildings are all down, the hospitals, the main markets, down and burned. A lot of people died in there. A lot of places are burning.
"Most of the damage is in the town centre in the big buildings. The little houses, there are a few damaged, but nothing dramatic."
TV footage showed piles of debris, collapsed houses and multi-storey buildings, with scores of crushed cars, after the earthquake, which caused widespread panic.
The main hospital had collapsed, roads were cut off by landslides and Metro Television said the roof of Padang airport had caved in.
The disaster is the latest in a spate of natural and man-made calamities to hit Indonesia, a sprawling archipelago of 226 million people.
Welfare Minister Aburizal Bakrie said on Wednesday damage could be similar to that caused by a 2006 quake in the central Java city of Yogyakarta that killed 5,000 people and damaged 150,000 homes.
The quake was felt around the region.
Highrise buildings rattled in Singapore, 440 kilometres to the northeast. Office buildings also shook in Malaysia's capital, Kuala Lumpur.
Padang, capital of Indonesia's West Sumatra province, sits on one of the world's most active fault lines along the "Ring of Fire" where the Indo-Australia plate grinds against the Eurasia plate to create regular tremors and sometimes quakes.
A 9.15 magnitude quake, its epicentre 600 km northwest of Padang, caused the 2004 tsunami that killed 230,000 people around in Indonesia and other countries across the Indian Ocean.
*****
Indonesian disaster leaves whole villages buried
Thousands still trapped in quake zone
Agence France-Presse
October 4, 2009 8:12 AM
Whole villages in Indonesia's quake zone were found obliterated by landslides Saturday, as rescuers searched desperately for up to 4,000 people believed to be still trapped in rubble.
The full extent of the damage from Wednesday's 7.6-magnitude earthquake emerged as attention turned to the hundreds of villages in the hills outside Padang, a devastated city of one million at the centre of rescue efforts.
AFP journalists travelling from the coastal city on Sumatra island to the surrounding mountains encountered dozens of crumbled houses on the steep roads, and then four villages buried entirely by landslides.
Search and rescue officers from the local government said that up to 400 people could have perished in the four hillside villages alone, including a wedding party of 30.
"The difficulty in this rescue operation is that the houses are buried under the soil as much as four metres deep," the officer named Topan told AFP. "So far we have been using our hands to dig."
One body was seen lying in a stream nearby, but he said he expected many more would be found. The 100-strong rescue team was unable to bring in heavy machinery because of the broken, narrow roads.
Another official said about 600 people were missing in landslides north of Padang. "We've only found three dead," said local health ministry crisis centre chief Jasmarizal.
Bob McKerrow, head of the Indonesia delegation of the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Society, said aerial photos showed the huge extent of the damage in the mountainous outlying regions.
He said hundreds of villages were in the disaster zone, and that the few he had visited had all reported deaths and serious injuries.
"Typically in every village, there's an old woman with a broken back, with a gash on her arm and she's not moving. That's why we're sending in helicopters with medical teams," he said.
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Search for survivors as thousands feared dead in Indonesia
By John Nedy, ReutersOctober 1, 2009
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People stand near a collapsed shopping mall after a major earthquake hit Padang, on Indonesia's Sumatra island, on Wednesday.
Photograph by: Muhammad Fitrah, Singgalang Newspaper, Reuters, Reuters
Thousands may have died in an earthquake that struck the city of Padang on Indonesia's Sumatra island, a minister said early today, with officials saying many victims remained buried under toppled buildings.
The 7.6-magnitude quake hit Padang on Wednesday afternoon, knocking over hundreds of buildings, but with communications patchy it was hard to determine the extent of the destruction and loss of life.
Heavy rain was also hampering rescue efforts and officials said power had been severed in the city.
Television footage showed people being pulled from the rubble.
A second magnitude 6.8 quake hit another part of Sumatra this morning, causing fresh panic, according to TV reports.
The second quake's epicentre-- inland and further to the southeast --was 154 kilometres northwest of Bengkulu, the U. S. Geological Survey said.
The area could not immediately be contacted.
Health Minister Siti Fadillah Supari told reporters at an airport in Jakarta -- before leaving for the stricken area--that the number of victims "could be more (than hundreds or thousands). I think it's more than thousands, if we look at how widespread the damage is . . . but we don't really know yet."
The death toll exceeded 450 this morning in the city of 900,000.
About 500 houses had collapsed, officials in the area said.
"The number of people who died in West Sumatra is 464 and they are from six districts," the government official in charge of handling death toll data, Tugyo Bisri, told Agence France-Presse.
Australian businesswoman Jane Liddon told Australian radio from Padang said the city centre was devastated.
"The big buildings are down. The concrete buildings are all down, the hospitals, the main markets, down and burned. A lot of people died in there. A lot of places are burning.
"Most of the damage is in the town centre in the big buildings. The little houses, there are a few damaged, but nothing dramatic."
TV footage showed piles of debris, collapsed houses and multi-storey buildings, with scores of crushed cars, after the earthquake, which caused widespread panic.
The main hospital had collapsed, roads were cut off by landslides and Metro Television said the roof of Padang airport had caved in.
The disaster is the latest in a spate of natural and man-made calamities to hit Indonesia, a sprawling archipelago of 226 million people.
Welfare Minister Aburizal Bakrie said on Wednesday damage could be similar to that caused by a 2006 quake in the central Java city of Yogyakarta that killed 5,000 people and damaged 150,000 homes.
The quake was felt around the region.
Highrise buildings rattled in Singapore, 440 kilometres to the northeast. Office buildings also shook in Malaysia's capital, Kuala Lumpur.
Padang, capital of Indonesia's West Sumatra province, sits on one of the world's most active fault lines along the "Ring of Fire" where the Indo-Australia plate grinds against the Eurasia plate to create regular tremors and sometimes quakes.
A 9.15 magnitude quake, its epicentre 600 km northwest of Padang, caused the 2004 tsunami that killed 230,000 people around in Indonesia and other countries across the Indian Ocean.
*****
Indonesian disaster leaves whole villages buried
Thousands still trapped in quake zone
Agence France-Presse
October 4, 2009 8:12 AM
Whole villages in Indonesia's quake zone were found obliterated by landslides Saturday, as rescuers searched desperately for up to 4,000 people believed to be still trapped in rubble.
The full extent of the damage from Wednesday's 7.6-magnitude earthquake emerged as attention turned to the hundreds of villages in the hills outside Padang, a devastated city of one million at the centre of rescue efforts.
AFP journalists travelling from the coastal city on Sumatra island to the surrounding mountains encountered dozens of crumbled houses on the steep roads, and then four villages buried entirely by landslides.
Search and rescue officers from the local government said that up to 400 people could have perished in the four hillside villages alone, including a wedding party of 30.
"The difficulty in this rescue operation is that the houses are buried under the soil as much as four metres deep," the officer named Topan told AFP. "So far we have been using our hands to dig."
One body was seen lying in a stream nearby, but he said he expected many more would be found. The 100-strong rescue team was unable to bring in heavy machinery because of the broken, narrow roads.
Another official said about 600 people were missing in landslides north of Padang. "We've only found three dead," said local health ministry crisis centre chief Jasmarizal.
Bob McKerrow, head of the Indonesia delegation of the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Society, said aerial photos showed the huge extent of the damage in the mountainous outlying regions.
He said hundreds of villages were in the disaster zone, and that the few he had visited had all reported deaths and serious injuries.
"Typically in every village, there's an old woman with a broken back, with a gash on her arm and she's not moving. That's why we're sending in helicopters with medical teams," he said.
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India floods leave millions homeless
Worst floods in decades kill 250 people
ReutersOctober 6, 2009
Floodwaters triggered by torrential rains have swamped millions of hectares of cropland in southern India.
Photograph by: Reuters, Reuters
About 2.5 million people crammed into temporary relief shelters after floods triggered by torrential rains tore down their homes in southern India over the last week and killed some 250 people, officials said on Monday.
Most of the deaths were reported from Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh state where rivers topped or breached their embankments. Some deaths occurred in the western Maharashtra state.
The flooding, described by officials as worst in many decades in south India, swamped millions of hectares of cropland, including sugarcane plantations, prompting worries of a fall in sugar output in Karnataka, the country's third-biggest producer.
Officials and relief agencies said more than five million people had been affected by the flooding and were now sheltered in over 1,200 temporary camps. They included about 2.5 million people from Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh who lost their homes.
"These are the worst floods in 100 years," said Dharmana Prasada Rao, Andhra Pradesh's minister for revenue and relief.
Sonia Gandhi, the head of India's ruling Congress party, and federal Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram inspected the devastation.
Relief officials used helicopters and boats to drop off rations and plastic sheets to hundreds of marooned villagers in the two states.
While rains had subsided in Karnataka, overflowing rivers and dams in Andhra Pradesh threatened to inundate Vijayawada, a city about a million people and an important trading centre.
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Worst floods in decades kill 250 people
ReutersOctober 6, 2009
Floodwaters triggered by torrential rains have swamped millions of hectares of cropland in southern India.
Photograph by: Reuters, Reuters
About 2.5 million people crammed into temporary relief shelters after floods triggered by torrential rains tore down their homes in southern India over the last week and killed some 250 people, officials said on Monday.
Most of the deaths were reported from Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh state where rivers topped or breached their embankments. Some deaths occurred in the western Maharashtra state.
The flooding, described by officials as worst in many decades in south India, swamped millions of hectares of cropland, including sugarcane plantations, prompting worries of a fall in sugar output in Karnataka, the country's third-biggest producer.
Officials and relief agencies said more than five million people had been affected by the flooding and were now sheltered in over 1,200 temporary camps. They included about 2.5 million people from Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh who lost their homes.
"These are the worst floods in 100 years," said Dharmana Prasada Rao, Andhra Pradesh's minister for revenue and relief.
Sonia Gandhi, the head of India's ruling Congress party, and federal Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram inspected the devastation.
Relief officials used helicopters and boats to drop off rations and plastic sheets to hundreds of marooned villagers in the two states.
While rains had subsided in Karnataka, overflowing rivers and dams in Andhra Pradesh threatened to inundate Vijayawada, a city about a million people and an important trading centre.
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Deadly typhoon batters Japan
Agence France-Presse
October 8, 2009
A powerful typhoon slammed into Japan's main island early today, killing at least three people as violent winds damaged homes, uprooted trees and prompted fears of landslides.
Typhoon Melor, packing gusts of up to 198 kilometres an hour, was cutting a path across densely populated central Japan--the first tropical storm to make landfall since 2007, the weather agency said.
It brought heavy rain and strong winds that ripped roofs off houses, damaged walls and toppled trees, blocking roads and railways in central Japan.
The typhoon weakened slightly as it churned across the main island of Honshu, but "is still very dangerous," said Takeo Tanaka, a weather forecaster from the Meteorological Agency.
"Winds are violent and rain is torrential. You should also be on guard against mudslides," he said.
The agency warned that extensive areas in Japan, including Tokyo and the western industrial hub of Osaka, were at high risk of landslides as the typhoon moved along the archipelago.
Television footage showed trucks blown over and cars abandoned in the middle of flooded roads.
At least 22 people were injured by strong wind or heavy rain across the nation and thousands of people were moved to shelters, public broadcaster NHK reported.
Airlines cancelled some 330 flights, mostly on domestic routes, while railway services--including bullet trains --were temporarily suspended.
Japan has built extensive defences against floods and landslides, including storm surge barriers in coastal areas.
But typhoons can still be deadly.
Western Japan was battered in October 2004 by typhoon Tokage, which killed 95 people.
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Agence France-Presse
October 8, 2009
A powerful typhoon slammed into Japan's main island early today, killing at least three people as violent winds damaged homes, uprooted trees and prompted fears of landslides.
Typhoon Melor, packing gusts of up to 198 kilometres an hour, was cutting a path across densely populated central Japan--the first tropical storm to make landfall since 2007, the weather agency said.
It brought heavy rain and strong winds that ripped roofs off houses, damaged walls and toppled trees, blocking roads and railways in central Japan.
The typhoon weakened slightly as it churned across the main island of Honshu, but "is still very dangerous," said Takeo Tanaka, a weather forecaster from the Meteorological Agency.
"Winds are violent and rain is torrential. You should also be on guard against mudslides," he said.
The agency warned that extensive areas in Japan, including Tokyo and the western industrial hub of Osaka, were at high risk of landslides as the typhoon moved along the archipelago.
Television footage showed trucks blown over and cars abandoned in the middle of flooded roads.
At least 22 people were injured by strong wind or heavy rain across the nation and thousands of people were moved to shelters, public broadcaster NHK reported.
Airlines cancelled some 330 flights, mostly on domestic routes, while railway services--including bullet trains --were temporarily suspended.
Japan has built extensive defences against floods and landslides, including storm surge barriers in coastal areas.
But typhoons can still be deadly.
Western Japan was battered in October 2004 by typhoon Tokage, which killed 95 people.
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Philippine landslides kill more than 120
Reuters
October 10, 2009
A week of relentless rains in the Philippines have put dozens of towns under water, with more than 120 people drowned.
Photograph by: Erik De Castro, Reuters, Reuters
Rescue workers dug out more than 120 bodies from under tonnes of mud and debris in northern Philippines on Friday as dozens of landslides buried villages after a week of relentless rains, officials said.
Scores of towns and villages in the lowlands were flooded as overflowing dams opened their sluice gates to release water. At least 122 were killed by landslides and 13 others have previously been killed by the rains, which started one week ago.
"As of this moment, we have already retrieved 122 bodies," Olive Luces, regional disaster head for the mountain regions, told television. Most of the deaths were in the vegetable-growing Benguet province, and in neighbouring Mountain Province.
"We really have no idea how many people were buried when the landslides happened because it was almost midnight and everybody was asleep," said Loreto Espineli, police chief of Benguet. "Our recovery efforts are slowed down by mud, heavy rains and lack of power."
The rains were brought by Typhoon Parma, which first hit the Philippines last Saturday and has since hovered around the northern part of the main island of Luzon, although it has weakened into a tropical depression.
Besides setting off landslides in the mountains, the rain has swollen rivers and reservoirs, forcing dams to release water and flooding areas downstream. Television images showed towns and farmland in the plains transformed into vast lakes, dotted with trees and buildings.
About 60 to 80 per cent of the coastal province of Pangasinan has been flooded and 30,000 people evacuated, said Lt.-Col. Ernesto Torres at the NDCC.
"Many of the roads are impassable, under six to eight feet of water and hundreds are marooned on the roofs of their towns," said Butch Velasco, a disaster official in Pangasinan. "The water level has reached the second storey of their homes."
Thousands spent the night on rooftops or scrambling to higher ground. Provincial Governor Amado Espino told local radio rain and strong currents were hampering rescue efforts.
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Reuters
October 10, 2009
A week of relentless rains in the Philippines have put dozens of towns under water, with more than 120 people drowned.
Photograph by: Erik De Castro, Reuters, Reuters
Rescue workers dug out more than 120 bodies from under tonnes of mud and debris in northern Philippines on Friday as dozens of landslides buried villages after a week of relentless rains, officials said.
Scores of towns and villages in the lowlands were flooded as overflowing dams opened their sluice gates to release water. At least 122 were killed by landslides and 13 others have previously been killed by the rains, which started one week ago.
"As of this moment, we have already retrieved 122 bodies," Olive Luces, regional disaster head for the mountain regions, told television. Most of the deaths were in the vegetable-growing Benguet province, and in neighbouring Mountain Province.
"We really have no idea how many people were buried when the landslides happened because it was almost midnight and everybody was asleep," said Loreto Espineli, police chief of Benguet. "Our recovery efforts are slowed down by mud, heavy rains and lack of power."
The rains were brought by Typhoon Parma, which first hit the Philippines last Saturday and has since hovered around the northern part of the main island of Luzon, although it has weakened into a tropical depression.
Besides setting off landslides in the mountains, the rain has swollen rivers and reservoirs, forcing dams to release water and flooding areas downstream. Television images showed towns and farmland in the plains transformed into vast lakes, dotted with trees and buildings.
About 60 to 80 per cent of the coastal province of Pangasinan has been flooded and 30,000 people evacuated, said Lt.-Col. Ernesto Torres at the NDCC.
"Many of the roads are impassable, under six to eight feet of water and hundreds are marooned on the roofs of their towns," said Butch Velasco, a disaster official in Pangasinan. "The water level has reached the second storey of their homes."
Thousands spent the night on rooftops or scrambling to higher ground. Provincial Governor Amado Espino told local radio rain and strong currents were hampering rescue efforts.
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Typhoon hammers storm-weary Philippines
Mirinae leaves 11 people dead, worsens flooding
Agence France-PresseNovember 1, 2009
A man and his children wade through a flooded street triggered by typhoon Mirinae in Santa Cruz town.
Photograph by: Ted Aljibe, AFP-Getty Images,
Agence France-Presse
Typhoon Mirinae smashed through the Philippines overnight, killing 11 people and worsening floods in areas that were struggling to recover from recent deadly storms, officials said Saturday.
The typhoon, packing winds of up to 185 km/h, was the third major storm to hit the Philippines' main island of Luzon in just five weeks, with the previous two claiming more than 1,100 lives.
In Manila, areas that have been flooded since tropical storm Ketsana struck in late September were hit with more heavy rain, while residents in other districts were forced onto their roofs to escape rising waters.
"We need help because the waters have risen. We need rubber boats and choppers," Ariel Magcales, the mayor of Santa Cruz town on Manila's outskirts, said in a radio interview.
"Some people are on the roofs of their houses."
Military and police rescue boats worked to save people who were trapped by a flash flood, officials said.
One man was found dead and his one-year-old baby was missing after they were washed away while trying to cross an overflowing creek in a rural area on the outskirts of Manila, the military said. Three people were reported dead and five others were missing in Laguna province just south of Manila, the local disaster monitoring office said. Seven people died in the Bicol region, south of Manila, mostly from flash floods, local disaster monitoring officials said.
Another man was missing from a Manila slum district after his hut was washed away, while two others were missing in Batangas province south of Manila after their car fell into a river when a bridge collapsed, said civil defence spokesman Ernesto Torres.
Tropical storm Ketsana, which struck on Sept. 26, caused massive flooding in Manila.
Even before Mirinae hit, outlying districts that are home to more than a million people were expected to remain flooded into the new year, raising concern among health experts of an outbreak of deadly disease.
Navy and coast guard boats had been sent to Santa Cruz to rescue people, according to Torres, who said Defence Secretary Gilberto Teodoro was heading to the area to check on the extent of flooding and damage.
"The waters were really high. It was like a flash flood. It was waist deep in our area, but in other areas it went as high as the rooftops," said traffic director Marlon Albay.
The highway to the town was covered by knee-high waters, preventing smaller vehicles from reaching it and prompting the military to send huge trucks to help residents, according to an AFP photographer. Hundreds of residents in these areas were seen wading through the dirty waters.
Other towns in Laguna reported flooding, along with areas in the Bicol region further to the south, Torres said. However, more than 115,000 people had been evacuated from vulnerable regions before the typhoon hit, which likely prevented more deaths, Torres said.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
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Mirinae leaves 11 people dead, worsens flooding
Agence France-PresseNovember 1, 2009
A man and his children wade through a flooded street triggered by typhoon Mirinae in Santa Cruz town.
Photograph by: Ted Aljibe, AFP-Getty Images,
Agence France-Presse
Typhoon Mirinae smashed through the Philippines overnight, killing 11 people and worsening floods in areas that were struggling to recover from recent deadly storms, officials said Saturday.
The typhoon, packing winds of up to 185 km/h, was the third major storm to hit the Philippines' main island of Luzon in just five weeks, with the previous two claiming more than 1,100 lives.
In Manila, areas that have been flooded since tropical storm Ketsana struck in late September were hit with more heavy rain, while residents in other districts were forced onto their roofs to escape rising waters.
"We need help because the waters have risen. We need rubber boats and choppers," Ariel Magcales, the mayor of Santa Cruz town on Manila's outskirts, said in a radio interview.
"Some people are on the roofs of their houses."
Military and police rescue boats worked to save people who were trapped by a flash flood, officials said.
One man was found dead and his one-year-old baby was missing after they were washed away while trying to cross an overflowing creek in a rural area on the outskirts of Manila, the military said. Three people were reported dead and five others were missing in Laguna province just south of Manila, the local disaster monitoring office said. Seven people died in the Bicol region, south of Manila, mostly from flash floods, local disaster monitoring officials said.
Another man was missing from a Manila slum district after his hut was washed away, while two others were missing in Batangas province south of Manila after their car fell into a river when a bridge collapsed, said civil defence spokesman Ernesto Torres.
Tropical storm Ketsana, which struck on Sept. 26, caused massive flooding in Manila.
Even before Mirinae hit, outlying districts that are home to more than a million people were expected to remain flooded into the new year, raising concern among health experts of an outbreak of deadly disease.
Navy and coast guard boats had been sent to Santa Cruz to rescue people, according to Torres, who said Defence Secretary Gilberto Teodoro was heading to the area to check on the extent of flooding and damage.
"The waters were really high. It was like a flash flood. It was waist deep in our area, but in other areas it went as high as the rooftops," said traffic director Marlon Albay.
The highway to the town was covered by knee-high waters, preventing smaller vehicles from reaching it and prompting the military to send huge trucks to help residents, according to an AFP photographer. Hundreds of residents in these areas were seen wading through the dirty waters.
Other towns in Laguna reported flooding, along with areas in the Bicol region further to the south, Torres said. However, more than 115,000 people had been evacuated from vulnerable regions before the typhoon hit, which likely prevented more deaths, Torres said.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 5&sponsor=
Landslide disaster at Attabad - Hunza
By Noor Muhammad ⋅ January 7, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment
Filed Under attabad, Gilgit - Baltistan, Hunza, hunza landslide, landslide
The worst happened on January 4 when the already cracked mountain located above a beautiful, tiny, hamlet called Attabad slid off and buried most of the village, along with the people who had chosen to live in it, its cattle, houses, fields and orchards. The land mass that slid off has completely blocked the Hunza River gorge. More than two kilometers of the gorge through which the river once flowed is now filled with sand and rocks over, turning the river into an expanding lake, posing great risk to the low-lying villages of Gojal Valley.
More than two and a half kilometers of the Karakuram Highway has been completely destroyed, disconnecting Gojal Valley from the rest of Hunza. This blockade has severe implications for life in Gojal valley, as the supply of food, medicines and other essentials is not likely to take place till complete opening of the road. The government will have to seriously work on air – supply of such essentials of life.
Attabad village had been declared high risk zone by the government and people had been asked to relocate to safer places. Many people had relocated to safer places but others did not, and so the tragic loss of life.
The government is partly responsible for the loss of human lives because while it warned the people to move to safer places, it did not plan an alternative living space for the one hundred and six families that lived in Attabad. Those who moved out of the village were forced to stay with their relatives in nearby towns. The government’s plan to build a tent village to relocate the people failed because Tapeline villages are highly unfeasible for places where the temperature drops down to negative 18 degrees on the Celsius scale.
Those who criticize the people for not leaving the village, despite of the eminent threat, ignore the fact that moving out of a settled place, abandoning the organic links with the soil, is not an ordinary phenomenon. Subsistence level farming supports life in most of the villages of Hunza valley and if the fields and orchards are left unattended, the resultis great economic loss. What the government and other related agencies did not do was to provide an alternative system of economic opportunities, along with alternative, dignified, living space. It is unfortunate, scaling at the level of criminal negligence that the state relied only on giving warnings, instead of taking concrete steps to relocate and rehabilitate.
Thirteen dead bodies recovered from the debris of Attabad were laid to rest in Aliabad, Hunza, the other day, in presence of thousands of mourners. This could have been averted. The children, women and men killed in the tragedy, and those still missing, could have been saved, had the state shown more interest than it did. But the governments of Pakistan, which rule this region, have better things to do, like milking its poor citizens through taxes, so that millions of dollars are generated for the world tours of its president, prime minister, ministers, their relatives and the higher ups of civil and military establishment.
The entire process of rehabilitation and relocation would have taken lesser amount than the amount spent by the state on broadcasting and printing congratulatory or mourning messages, through state funds, to glorify this or that individual. But then, states have their own priorities!
The role of government after the disaster struck is even more pathetic. State machinery came to “rescue” the buried people on third day of the disaster. They should, better, have called it a dead body search mission. What is left to be rescued? The best thing the choppers could do was to transport the commuters who were stranded on both sides of the road blockade to their destinations.
Choppers, throwing dust in the air, don’t give comfort and relief. They reinforce the feelings of loss, of an opportunity bygone due to negligence. If the state could use so much of its resources after the tragedy, why not did it work seriously to rehabilitate residents of the village, while there was still time?
It is pertinent to note that the issue of cracks appearing in the mountain above Attabad, due to seismic activity, had been surveyed, researched, documented and reported two and a half years ago.
However, the state’s work has not ended, in any way. Announcing a few hundred thousand rupees as “compensation” for life of the dead and missing is not going to solve the issues. Far from it.
The state would, in the long run, have to generate resources to develop and execute a complete rehabilitation plan for the twelve hundred registered, alive, affectees of the Attabad village disaster. Moreover, the loss of property needs to be compensated to enable the survivors to start living again!
Immediately, however, the state needs to find a permanent solution to the threat produced by the conversion of Hunza River into a huge lake. Gojal is a valley under the siege of nature, having being closed at one end by a devastating landslide and on the other side, Khunjrav, by seasonal snowfall. Prolonging the siege would mean multiplying suffering of the valley’s twenty two thousand residents. It would not be far from reality to demand that Gojal valley be declared a calamity hit area and governed accordingly.
Towards the end, let me wholeheartedly appreciate the residents of Hunza valley, organized as they always are, for springing into action on the first day and working selflessly on the disaster site, since then. They have rescued many people, shifted the injured to hospitals, secured valuables buried under the debris and are untiringly working along with the NDMA personnel and other volunteers. The neighboring communities have also played inspiring role in the aftermath of the tragedy by contributing their energies and resources to provide relief to the survivors and victims.
The role of FOCUS Humanitarian Assistance, an affiliated institution of AKDN, is also highly appreciable because it trained, organized and equipped groups of local people to work in the times of disaster, enabling them to work on their own in a more organized manner. This is despite of the fact that the onus of governance and community empowerment primarily rests with the state and not the non – governmental organizations.
The writer is chief blogger of Pamir Times (www.pamirtimes.net)
http://pakistandesk.com/?p=3631
By Noor Muhammad ⋅ January 7, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment
Filed Under attabad, Gilgit - Baltistan, Hunza, hunza landslide, landslide
The worst happened on January 4 when the already cracked mountain located above a beautiful, tiny, hamlet called Attabad slid off and buried most of the village, along with the people who had chosen to live in it, its cattle, houses, fields and orchards. The land mass that slid off has completely blocked the Hunza River gorge. More than two kilometers of the gorge through which the river once flowed is now filled with sand and rocks over, turning the river into an expanding lake, posing great risk to the low-lying villages of Gojal Valley.
More than two and a half kilometers of the Karakuram Highway has been completely destroyed, disconnecting Gojal Valley from the rest of Hunza. This blockade has severe implications for life in Gojal valley, as the supply of food, medicines and other essentials is not likely to take place till complete opening of the road. The government will have to seriously work on air – supply of such essentials of life.
Attabad village had been declared high risk zone by the government and people had been asked to relocate to safer places. Many people had relocated to safer places but others did not, and so the tragic loss of life.
The government is partly responsible for the loss of human lives because while it warned the people to move to safer places, it did not plan an alternative living space for the one hundred and six families that lived in Attabad. Those who moved out of the village were forced to stay with their relatives in nearby towns. The government’s plan to build a tent village to relocate the people failed because Tapeline villages are highly unfeasible for places where the temperature drops down to negative 18 degrees on the Celsius scale.
Those who criticize the people for not leaving the village, despite of the eminent threat, ignore the fact that moving out of a settled place, abandoning the organic links with the soil, is not an ordinary phenomenon. Subsistence level farming supports life in most of the villages of Hunza valley and if the fields and orchards are left unattended, the resultis great economic loss. What the government and other related agencies did not do was to provide an alternative system of economic opportunities, along with alternative, dignified, living space. It is unfortunate, scaling at the level of criminal negligence that the state relied only on giving warnings, instead of taking concrete steps to relocate and rehabilitate.
Thirteen dead bodies recovered from the debris of Attabad were laid to rest in Aliabad, Hunza, the other day, in presence of thousands of mourners. This could have been averted. The children, women and men killed in the tragedy, and those still missing, could have been saved, had the state shown more interest than it did. But the governments of Pakistan, which rule this region, have better things to do, like milking its poor citizens through taxes, so that millions of dollars are generated for the world tours of its president, prime minister, ministers, their relatives and the higher ups of civil and military establishment.
The entire process of rehabilitation and relocation would have taken lesser amount than the amount spent by the state on broadcasting and printing congratulatory or mourning messages, through state funds, to glorify this or that individual. But then, states have their own priorities!
The role of government after the disaster struck is even more pathetic. State machinery came to “rescue” the buried people on third day of the disaster. They should, better, have called it a dead body search mission. What is left to be rescued? The best thing the choppers could do was to transport the commuters who were stranded on both sides of the road blockade to their destinations.
Choppers, throwing dust in the air, don’t give comfort and relief. They reinforce the feelings of loss, of an opportunity bygone due to negligence. If the state could use so much of its resources after the tragedy, why not did it work seriously to rehabilitate residents of the village, while there was still time?
It is pertinent to note that the issue of cracks appearing in the mountain above Attabad, due to seismic activity, had been surveyed, researched, documented and reported two and a half years ago.
However, the state’s work has not ended, in any way. Announcing a few hundred thousand rupees as “compensation” for life of the dead and missing is not going to solve the issues. Far from it.
The state would, in the long run, have to generate resources to develop and execute a complete rehabilitation plan for the twelve hundred registered, alive, affectees of the Attabad village disaster. Moreover, the loss of property needs to be compensated to enable the survivors to start living again!
Immediately, however, the state needs to find a permanent solution to the threat produced by the conversion of Hunza River into a huge lake. Gojal is a valley under the siege of nature, having being closed at one end by a devastating landslide and on the other side, Khunjrav, by seasonal snowfall. Prolonging the siege would mean multiplying suffering of the valley’s twenty two thousand residents. It would not be far from reality to demand that Gojal valley be declared a calamity hit area and governed accordingly.
Towards the end, let me wholeheartedly appreciate the residents of Hunza valley, organized as they always are, for springing into action on the first day and working selflessly on the disaster site, since then. They have rescued many people, shifted the injured to hospitals, secured valuables buried under the debris and are untiringly working along with the NDMA personnel and other volunteers. The neighboring communities have also played inspiring role in the aftermath of the tragedy by contributing their energies and resources to provide relief to the survivors and victims.
The role of FOCUS Humanitarian Assistance, an affiliated institution of AKDN, is also highly appreciable because it trained, organized and equipped groups of local people to work in the times of disaster, enabling them to work on their own in a more organized manner. This is despite of the fact that the onus of governance and community empowerment primarily rests with the state and not the non – governmental organizations.
The writer is chief blogger of Pamir Times (www.pamirtimes.net)
http://pakistandesk.com/?p=3631
There is a related video linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/14/world ... ?th&emc=th
January 14, 2010
Haiti Lies in Ruins; Grim Search for Untold Dead
By SIMON ROMERO
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Survivors strained desperately on Wednesday against the chunks of concrete that buried this city along with thousands of its residents, rich and poor, from shantytowns to the presidential palace, in the devastating earthquake that struck late Tuesday afternoon.
Calling the death toll “unimaginable” as he surveyed the wreckage, Haiti’s president, René Préval, said he had no idea where he would sleep. Schools, hospitals and a prison collapsed. Sixteen United Nations peacekeepers were killed and at least 140 United Nations workers were missing, including the chief of its mission, Hédi Annabi. The city’s archbishop, Msgr. Joseph Serge Miot, was feared dead.
And the poor who define this nation squatted in the streets, some hurt and bloody, many more without food and water, close to piles of covered corpses and rubble. Limbs protruded from disintegrated concrete, muffled cries emanated from deep inside the wrecks of buildings — many of them poorly constructed in the first place — as Haiti struggled to grasp the unknown toll from its worst earthquake in more than 200 years.
In the midst of the chaos, no one was able to offer an estimate of the number of people who had been killed or injured, though there was widespread concern that there were likely to be thousands of casualties.
“Please save my baby!” Jeudy Francia, a woman in her 20s, shrieked outside the St.-Esprit Hospital in the city. Her child, a girl about 4 years old, writhed in pain in the hospital’s chaotic courtyard, near where a handful of corpses lay under white blankets. “There is no one, nothing, no medicines, no explanations for why my daughter is going to die.”
Governments and aid agencies from Beijing to Grand Rapids began marshaling supplies and staffs to send here, though the obstacles proved frustrating just one day after the powerful 7.0-magnitude earthquake hit. Power and phone service were out. Flights were severely limited at Port-au-Prince’s main airport, telecommunications were barely functioning, operations at the port were shut down and most of the medical facilities had been severely damaged, if not leveled.
A Red Cross field team of officials from several nations had to spend Wednesday night in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic to gather its staff before taking the six-hour drive in the morning across the border to the earthquake zone.
“We were on the plane here with a couple of different agencies, and they all are having similar challenges of access,” Colin Chaperon, a field director for the American Red Cross, said in a telephone interview. “There is a wealth of resources out there, and everybody has the good will to go in and support the Haitian Red Cross.”
The quake struck just before 5 p.m. on Tuesday about 10 miles southwest of Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, ravaging the infrastructure of Haiti’s fragile government and destroying some of its most important cultural symbols.
“Parliament has collapsed,” Mr. Préval told The Miami Herald. “The tax office has collapsed. Schools have collapsed. Hospitals have collapsed. There are a lot of schools that have a lot of dead people in them.”
He added: “All of the hospitals are packed with people. It is a catastrophe.”
President Obama promised that Haiti would have the “unwavering support” of the United States.
Mr. Obama said that United States aid agencies were moving swiftly to get help to Haiti and that search-and-rescue teams were en route. He described the reports of destruction as “truly heart-wrenching,” made more cruel given Haiti’s long-troubled circumstances. Mr. Obama did not make a specific aid pledge, and administration officials said they were still trying to figure out what the nation needed. But he urged Americans to go to the White House’s Web site, www.whitehouse.gov, to find ways to donate money.
“This is a time when we are reminded of the common humanity that we all share,” Mr. Obama said, speaking in the morning in the White House diplomatic reception room with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. at his side.
Aid agencies said they would open their storehouses of food and water in Haiti, and the World Food Program was flying in nearly 100 tons of ready-to-eat meals and high-energy biscuits from El Salvador. The United Nations said it was freeing up $10 million in emergency relief money, the European Union pledged $4.4 million and groups like Doctors Without Borders were setting up clinics in tents and open-air triage centers to treat the injured.
Supplies began filtering in from the Dominican Republic as charter flights were restarted between Santo Domingo and Port-au-Prince.
Some aid groups with offices in Port-au-Prince were also busy searching for their own dead and missing.
Sixteen members of the United Nations peacekeeping force in Haiti were killed and as many as 100 other United Nations employees were missing after the collapse of the mission’s headquarters in the Christopher Hotel in the hills above Port-au-Prince.
Forty or more other United Nations employees were missing at a sprawling compound occupied by United Nations agencies. Ten additional employees had been in a villa nearby.
It was one of the deadliest single days for United Nations employees. The head of the group’s Haitian mission, Mr. Annabi, a Tunisian, and his deputy were among the missing, said Alain Le Roy, the United Nations peacekeeping chief.
Earlier Wednesday, the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, said in radio interviews that Mr. Annabi had been killed in the collapse.
The Brazilian Army, which has one of the largest peacekeeping presences in Haiti, said 11 of its soldiers had been killed in the quake and seven had been injured; seven more were unaccounted for.
During a driving tour of the capital on Wednesday, Bernice Robertson, an analyst with the International Crisis Group, said she saw at least 30 bodies, most covered with plastic bags or sheets. She also witnessed heroic recovery efforts. “There are people digging with their hands, searching for people in the rubble,” she said in a video interview via Skype. “There was unimaginable destruction.”
Paul McPhun, operations manager for Doctors Without Borders, described scenes of chaos.
When staff members tried to travel by car, “they were mobbed by crowds of people,” Mr. McPhun said. “They just want help, and anybody with a car is better off than they are.”
Contaminated drinking water is a longstanding and severe problem in Haiti, causing high rates of illness that put many people in the hospital. Providing sanitation and clean water is one of the top priorities for aid organizations.
More than 30 significant aftershocks of a 4.5 magnitude or higher rattled Haiti through Tuesday night and into early Wednesday, according to Amy Vaughan, a geophysicist with the United States Geological Survey. “We’ve seen a lot of shaking still happening,” she said.
Bob Poff, a Salvation Army official, described in a written account posted on the Salvation Army’s Web site how he had loaded injured victims — “older, scared, bleeding and terrified” — into the back of his truck and set off in search of help. In two hours, he managed to travel less than a mile, he said.
The account described how Mr. Poff and hundreds of neighbors spent Tuesday night outside in a playground. Every tremor sent ripples of fear through the survivors, providing “another reminder that we are not yet finished with this calamity,” he wrote.
He continued, “And when it comes, all of the people cry out and the children are terrified.”
Louise Ivers, the clinical director of the aid group Partners in Health, said in an e-mail message to her colleagues: “Port-au-Prince is devastated, lot of deaths. S O S. S O S ... Temporary field hospital by us at UNDP needs supplies, pain meds, bandages. Please help us.”
Photos from Haiti on Wednesday showed a hillside scraped nearly bare of its houses, which had tumbled into the ravine below.
Simon Romero reported from Port-au-Prince and Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Reporting was contributed by Marc Lacey and Elisabeth Malkin from Mexico City, Ginger Thompson and Brian Knowlton from Washington, Neil MacFarquhar, Denise Grady and Liz Robbins from New York, and Mery Galanternick from Rio de Janeiro.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/14/world ... ?th&emc=th
January 14, 2010
Haiti Lies in Ruins; Grim Search for Untold Dead
By SIMON ROMERO
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Survivors strained desperately on Wednesday against the chunks of concrete that buried this city along with thousands of its residents, rich and poor, from shantytowns to the presidential palace, in the devastating earthquake that struck late Tuesday afternoon.
Calling the death toll “unimaginable” as he surveyed the wreckage, Haiti’s president, René Préval, said he had no idea where he would sleep. Schools, hospitals and a prison collapsed. Sixteen United Nations peacekeepers were killed and at least 140 United Nations workers were missing, including the chief of its mission, Hédi Annabi. The city’s archbishop, Msgr. Joseph Serge Miot, was feared dead.
And the poor who define this nation squatted in the streets, some hurt and bloody, many more without food and water, close to piles of covered corpses and rubble. Limbs protruded from disintegrated concrete, muffled cries emanated from deep inside the wrecks of buildings — many of them poorly constructed in the first place — as Haiti struggled to grasp the unknown toll from its worst earthquake in more than 200 years.
In the midst of the chaos, no one was able to offer an estimate of the number of people who had been killed or injured, though there was widespread concern that there were likely to be thousands of casualties.
“Please save my baby!” Jeudy Francia, a woman in her 20s, shrieked outside the St.-Esprit Hospital in the city. Her child, a girl about 4 years old, writhed in pain in the hospital’s chaotic courtyard, near where a handful of corpses lay under white blankets. “There is no one, nothing, no medicines, no explanations for why my daughter is going to die.”
Governments and aid agencies from Beijing to Grand Rapids began marshaling supplies and staffs to send here, though the obstacles proved frustrating just one day after the powerful 7.0-magnitude earthquake hit. Power and phone service were out. Flights were severely limited at Port-au-Prince’s main airport, telecommunications were barely functioning, operations at the port were shut down and most of the medical facilities had been severely damaged, if not leveled.
A Red Cross field team of officials from several nations had to spend Wednesday night in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic to gather its staff before taking the six-hour drive in the morning across the border to the earthquake zone.
“We were on the plane here with a couple of different agencies, and they all are having similar challenges of access,” Colin Chaperon, a field director for the American Red Cross, said in a telephone interview. “There is a wealth of resources out there, and everybody has the good will to go in and support the Haitian Red Cross.”
The quake struck just before 5 p.m. on Tuesday about 10 miles southwest of Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, ravaging the infrastructure of Haiti’s fragile government and destroying some of its most important cultural symbols.
“Parliament has collapsed,” Mr. Préval told The Miami Herald. “The tax office has collapsed. Schools have collapsed. Hospitals have collapsed. There are a lot of schools that have a lot of dead people in them.”
He added: “All of the hospitals are packed with people. It is a catastrophe.”
President Obama promised that Haiti would have the “unwavering support” of the United States.
Mr. Obama said that United States aid agencies were moving swiftly to get help to Haiti and that search-and-rescue teams were en route. He described the reports of destruction as “truly heart-wrenching,” made more cruel given Haiti’s long-troubled circumstances. Mr. Obama did not make a specific aid pledge, and administration officials said they were still trying to figure out what the nation needed. But he urged Americans to go to the White House’s Web site, www.whitehouse.gov, to find ways to donate money.
“This is a time when we are reminded of the common humanity that we all share,” Mr. Obama said, speaking in the morning in the White House diplomatic reception room with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. at his side.
Aid agencies said they would open their storehouses of food and water in Haiti, and the World Food Program was flying in nearly 100 tons of ready-to-eat meals and high-energy biscuits from El Salvador. The United Nations said it was freeing up $10 million in emergency relief money, the European Union pledged $4.4 million and groups like Doctors Without Borders were setting up clinics in tents and open-air triage centers to treat the injured.
Supplies began filtering in from the Dominican Republic as charter flights were restarted between Santo Domingo and Port-au-Prince.
Some aid groups with offices in Port-au-Prince were also busy searching for their own dead and missing.
Sixteen members of the United Nations peacekeeping force in Haiti were killed and as many as 100 other United Nations employees were missing after the collapse of the mission’s headquarters in the Christopher Hotel in the hills above Port-au-Prince.
Forty or more other United Nations employees were missing at a sprawling compound occupied by United Nations agencies. Ten additional employees had been in a villa nearby.
It was one of the deadliest single days for United Nations employees. The head of the group’s Haitian mission, Mr. Annabi, a Tunisian, and his deputy were among the missing, said Alain Le Roy, the United Nations peacekeeping chief.
Earlier Wednesday, the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, said in radio interviews that Mr. Annabi had been killed in the collapse.
The Brazilian Army, which has one of the largest peacekeeping presences in Haiti, said 11 of its soldiers had been killed in the quake and seven had been injured; seven more were unaccounted for.
During a driving tour of the capital on Wednesday, Bernice Robertson, an analyst with the International Crisis Group, said she saw at least 30 bodies, most covered with plastic bags or sheets. She also witnessed heroic recovery efforts. “There are people digging with their hands, searching for people in the rubble,” she said in a video interview via Skype. “There was unimaginable destruction.”
Paul McPhun, operations manager for Doctors Without Borders, described scenes of chaos.
When staff members tried to travel by car, “they were mobbed by crowds of people,” Mr. McPhun said. “They just want help, and anybody with a car is better off than they are.”
Contaminated drinking water is a longstanding and severe problem in Haiti, causing high rates of illness that put many people in the hospital. Providing sanitation and clean water is one of the top priorities for aid organizations.
More than 30 significant aftershocks of a 4.5 magnitude or higher rattled Haiti through Tuesday night and into early Wednesday, according to Amy Vaughan, a geophysicist with the United States Geological Survey. “We’ve seen a lot of shaking still happening,” she said.
Bob Poff, a Salvation Army official, described in a written account posted on the Salvation Army’s Web site how he had loaded injured victims — “older, scared, bleeding and terrified” — into the back of his truck and set off in search of help. In two hours, he managed to travel less than a mile, he said.
The account described how Mr. Poff and hundreds of neighbors spent Tuesday night outside in a playground. Every tremor sent ripples of fear through the survivors, providing “another reminder that we are not yet finished with this calamity,” he wrote.
He continued, “And when it comes, all of the people cry out and the children are terrified.”
Louise Ivers, the clinical director of the aid group Partners in Health, said in an e-mail message to her colleagues: “Port-au-Prince is devastated, lot of deaths. S O S. S O S ... Temporary field hospital by us at UNDP needs supplies, pain meds, bandages. Please help us.”
Photos from Haiti on Wednesday showed a hillside scraped nearly bare of its houses, which had tumbled into the ravine below.
Simon Romero reported from Port-au-Prince and Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Reporting was contributed by Marc Lacey and Elisabeth Malkin from Mexico City, Ginger Thompson and Brian Knowlton from Washington, Neil MacFarquhar, Denise Grady and Liz Robbins from New York, and Mery Galanternick from Rio de Janeiro.
January 15, 2010
Op-Ed Contributor
Civilization on a Fault Line
By DEBORAH BLUM
Madison, Wis.
I USED to be a science writer for a California newspaper, where I learned to think of the ground beneath my feet as something alive. It crawled and shivered, stretched and quaked. It was the thin, wrinkled skin of an A.D.D. planet, whose muscles and bones constantly twitched beneath it.
In California — as opposed to the relatively placid terrain of Wisconsin, where I now live — it’s impossible to miss that reality. The great San Andreas fault, where the Pacific and North American plates meet, slowly rumbles its way along the western edge of the state. The fault slides and catches, builds up pressure and then releases that pressure along smaller adjacent faults. Residents and scientists alike play a waiting game in California, uneasily trying to foretell when the big fault itself will go, setting off another geologic convulsion like the one that destroyed San Francisco in 1906.
At one meeting of seismologists I attended, the organizers strung a banner across the front of the conference room with a quotation attributed to the historian Will Durant: “Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.” I’ve always liked that line — its rebuttal of our natural hubris, our assumption that we inevitably lord over this small sphere in one of our galaxy’s lesser solar systems.
Durant, writing with his wife, Ariel, came back to this point again in “The Lessons of History,” drawing this time on a Biblical analogy: “To the geologic eye all the surface of the earth is a fluid form, and man moves upon it as insecurely as Peter walking on the waves to Christ.” Again, the Durants hit the right note because a crushing earthquake — like the one that devastated Haiti on Tuesday — brings with it a Biblical, a Homeric, epic sense of the world gone wrong.
Surely, you think, we should be able to rely on rock. A country like Haiti, already battered enough by circumstance, should be able to find safety in solid ground. Somehow it should be so, even though our planet proves that wrong again and again. Remember the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan Province in eastern China, which left more than 88,000 people dead or missing? The Indonesian earthquake of 2006, which killed more than 6,000 people?
Haiti is situated along a strike-slip fault between two great plates of the earth’s crust, just like the San Andreas of California. The word fault does not imply a mistake. Nor does it suggest a stationary crack in the earth’s crust. In geology, the word “fault” implies motion. Beneath the thin outer skin on which we stake our lives, our planet flexes its muscles. The hot magma that lies below, the liquid minerals and metals that swirl around the earth’s core, conspire to keep the surface moving. The crustal plates, which cover the planet’s surface like a great rocky jigsaw puzzle, push against, under and over one another. All with the slowness, and the inevitability, of geologic time.
The great continental and oceanic plates of crust are always moving, rubbing, rearranging the bedrock of our lives. The motion is too slow to catch our attention except when it becomes erratic. Strike-slip faults tend to get stuck as they slide against each other, one jagged section catching on another. They grind slowly onward though, moved relentlessly by that underground current, eventually breaking the hold, setting off the reverberations of a quake. It’s been more than 100 years since the San Andreas broke in a spectacular way, more than 200 since the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden Fault, the one adjacent to Haiti, did so. It takes time for even the earth to build up to a catastrophe.
Although we have used that time to learn the mechanics of earthquakes, we are still a long way from being able to predict them. The territory is too large, the hidden influences buried too deep. The United States Geological Survey, for instance, has long focused prediction research on an earthquake-prone section of the San Andreas, near the central California town of Parkfield. From 1857 to 1966, moderate earthquakes rattled Parkfield every 20 to 30 years. The survey forecast the next to occur before 1993. It came in 2004, a tremor registering 6.0. Geologists have been watching the fault region for 25 years now. More than 175 papers have been published on observations at Parkfield. When I read through them, they seem to all reach the same conclusion: we live on a very tricky planet, unstable, restless and, yes, still unpredictable.
But they also offer insights into the subterranean world that — we hope — will move us a little closer to predicting danger. We do know how to engineer buildings with a greater degree of earthquake safety. But that takes money, commitment and a rigorous standard of government regulation and inspection. It shouldn’t be surprising that a state like California has imposed safety measures while Haiti, long an impoverished and disorganized country, has struggled. I’m always heartened by international rescue efforts, like those in Haiti at the moment. But it would be even better if they were less necessary. Eventually, I hope, we will figure out a way to build an international coalition on building standards with some money behind it, able to invest in proactive safety measures.
After all, we’re together here, all of us clinging to the skin of this perilously active planet. At our best, we confront the risks as a global community. As Will Durant also pointed out, “Man, not the earth, makes civilization.”
Deborah Blum, a professor of science journalism at the University of Wisconsin, is the author of the forthcoming “The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/15/opini ... nted=print
******
January 15, 2010
Op-Ed Contributor
Expecting the Big One
By SIMON WINCHESTER
THOUGH it can offer scant comfort to the victims of the earthquake in Haiti, seismology is making some slight progress in its search for the holy grail of being able to predict dreadful events like that on Tuesday. New studies into ultra-slow-motion events deep underground called nonvolcanic tremors are showing vague but promising signs that the same kind of subterranean danger signals that allow us today to forecast when a volcano is about to erupt may one day offer some warning of the hitherto unpredictable nucleation — the explosive beginning — of an earthquake.
The most interesting studies are those that are proceeding, slowly and expensively, in Parkfield, Calif. (as it happens, just a little north of the road crossing where James Dean was killed in a traffic accident nearly 55 years ago). A deep hole has been drilled into the countryside there, directly into the San Andreas fault, which runs for 800 miles along the junction between the North American and Pacific tectonic plates.
The academic and government researchers who run the drilling program seek to find out what happens at the precise point of contact between two plates. It now appears highly likely that the very low impact, but still measurable, nonvolcanic tremors that the researchers have detected in boreholes deep beneath the San Andreas are in some way associated with the destructive earthquakes that occur at shallower depths above them. What the scientists would still like to determine is whether it might be possible to discern a nonvolcanic tremor’s signature in the deep crust some useful time before a major earthquake happens far above.
This is highly relevant to the disaster in Haiti because the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault, the tectonic culprit behind Tuesday’s earthquake, shares many similarities with the San Andreas: it is a strike-slip fault of about half the length (it runs from the Dominican Republic to Jamaica), it separates two plates (the North American and the Caribbean), for most of its length it is simultaneously locked solid and under severe stress, and it shears substantially every century or so. (The last time was in 1907, in Jamaica; scientists have long warned of a catastrophe — one day — involving Port-au-Prince.)
It is highly likely that the low-impact, nonvolcanic tremors measured in the San Andreas happen in the Caribbean also. If a real correlation between these tremors and earthquakes can be found, then science will turn out to be truly on to something. Such a relationship has not yet been discovered. But the tremors do seem to have some unusual bellwether characteristics: there seems to be a correlation, for instance, between their occurrence and such external phenomena as the tides and the phases of the Moon. A link to movements within the Earth’s crust is at least a further possibility — and that is something that could not have been said five years ago. Hence the faintest glimmer of hope for progress.
But then what? If the geophysicists at the University of California at Berkeley, the United States Geological Survey, the California Institute of Technology and the Scripps Research Institute are convinced of a correlation, and then one day detect with their deeply buried devices a sudden swarm of nonvolcanic tremors, would they call the mayor of San Francisco or Los Angeles and issue a warning? And would the mayors then order a mass evacuation? And if they did, what if the scientists turned out to be wrong?
These are questions well worth asking — and asking even more stridently of a place that is somewhat less sophisticated than California. If a similar swarm of data is noticed in the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault, would geologists try to warn the citizens of a city like Port-au-Prince? And even if the forecasts were right, would such a warning save lives, or would it set off panics more lethal than the earthquake itself?
The branch of seismology that deals with prediction is undoubtedly in a slightly better place than it was half a decade ago. But new questions arise with every step toward the grail, and the answers come too slowly to bring true comfort to anyone today, least of all the unfortunate people of Haiti.
Simon Winchester is the author of “A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906” and the forthcoming “Atlantic: A Biography of the Ocean.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/15/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Contributor
Civilization on a Fault Line
By DEBORAH BLUM
Madison, Wis.
I USED to be a science writer for a California newspaper, where I learned to think of the ground beneath my feet as something alive. It crawled and shivered, stretched and quaked. It was the thin, wrinkled skin of an A.D.D. planet, whose muscles and bones constantly twitched beneath it.
In California — as opposed to the relatively placid terrain of Wisconsin, where I now live — it’s impossible to miss that reality. The great San Andreas fault, where the Pacific and North American plates meet, slowly rumbles its way along the western edge of the state. The fault slides and catches, builds up pressure and then releases that pressure along smaller adjacent faults. Residents and scientists alike play a waiting game in California, uneasily trying to foretell when the big fault itself will go, setting off another geologic convulsion like the one that destroyed San Francisco in 1906.
At one meeting of seismologists I attended, the organizers strung a banner across the front of the conference room with a quotation attributed to the historian Will Durant: “Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.” I’ve always liked that line — its rebuttal of our natural hubris, our assumption that we inevitably lord over this small sphere in one of our galaxy’s lesser solar systems.
Durant, writing with his wife, Ariel, came back to this point again in “The Lessons of History,” drawing this time on a Biblical analogy: “To the geologic eye all the surface of the earth is a fluid form, and man moves upon it as insecurely as Peter walking on the waves to Christ.” Again, the Durants hit the right note because a crushing earthquake — like the one that devastated Haiti on Tuesday — brings with it a Biblical, a Homeric, epic sense of the world gone wrong.
Surely, you think, we should be able to rely on rock. A country like Haiti, already battered enough by circumstance, should be able to find safety in solid ground. Somehow it should be so, even though our planet proves that wrong again and again. Remember the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan Province in eastern China, which left more than 88,000 people dead or missing? The Indonesian earthquake of 2006, which killed more than 6,000 people?
Haiti is situated along a strike-slip fault between two great plates of the earth’s crust, just like the San Andreas of California. The word fault does not imply a mistake. Nor does it suggest a stationary crack in the earth’s crust. In geology, the word “fault” implies motion. Beneath the thin outer skin on which we stake our lives, our planet flexes its muscles. The hot magma that lies below, the liquid minerals and metals that swirl around the earth’s core, conspire to keep the surface moving. The crustal plates, which cover the planet’s surface like a great rocky jigsaw puzzle, push against, under and over one another. All with the slowness, and the inevitability, of geologic time.
The great continental and oceanic plates of crust are always moving, rubbing, rearranging the bedrock of our lives. The motion is too slow to catch our attention except when it becomes erratic. Strike-slip faults tend to get stuck as they slide against each other, one jagged section catching on another. They grind slowly onward though, moved relentlessly by that underground current, eventually breaking the hold, setting off the reverberations of a quake. It’s been more than 100 years since the San Andreas broke in a spectacular way, more than 200 since the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden Fault, the one adjacent to Haiti, did so. It takes time for even the earth to build up to a catastrophe.
Although we have used that time to learn the mechanics of earthquakes, we are still a long way from being able to predict them. The territory is too large, the hidden influences buried too deep. The United States Geological Survey, for instance, has long focused prediction research on an earthquake-prone section of the San Andreas, near the central California town of Parkfield. From 1857 to 1966, moderate earthquakes rattled Parkfield every 20 to 30 years. The survey forecast the next to occur before 1993. It came in 2004, a tremor registering 6.0. Geologists have been watching the fault region for 25 years now. More than 175 papers have been published on observations at Parkfield. When I read through them, they seem to all reach the same conclusion: we live on a very tricky planet, unstable, restless and, yes, still unpredictable.
But they also offer insights into the subterranean world that — we hope — will move us a little closer to predicting danger. We do know how to engineer buildings with a greater degree of earthquake safety. But that takes money, commitment and a rigorous standard of government regulation and inspection. It shouldn’t be surprising that a state like California has imposed safety measures while Haiti, long an impoverished and disorganized country, has struggled. I’m always heartened by international rescue efforts, like those in Haiti at the moment. But it would be even better if they were less necessary. Eventually, I hope, we will figure out a way to build an international coalition on building standards with some money behind it, able to invest in proactive safety measures.
After all, we’re together here, all of us clinging to the skin of this perilously active planet. At our best, we confront the risks as a global community. As Will Durant also pointed out, “Man, not the earth, makes civilization.”
Deborah Blum, a professor of science journalism at the University of Wisconsin, is the author of the forthcoming “The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/15/opini ... nted=print
******
January 15, 2010
Op-Ed Contributor
Expecting the Big One
By SIMON WINCHESTER
THOUGH it can offer scant comfort to the victims of the earthquake in Haiti, seismology is making some slight progress in its search for the holy grail of being able to predict dreadful events like that on Tuesday. New studies into ultra-slow-motion events deep underground called nonvolcanic tremors are showing vague but promising signs that the same kind of subterranean danger signals that allow us today to forecast when a volcano is about to erupt may one day offer some warning of the hitherto unpredictable nucleation — the explosive beginning — of an earthquake.
The most interesting studies are those that are proceeding, slowly and expensively, in Parkfield, Calif. (as it happens, just a little north of the road crossing where James Dean was killed in a traffic accident nearly 55 years ago). A deep hole has been drilled into the countryside there, directly into the San Andreas fault, which runs for 800 miles along the junction between the North American and Pacific tectonic plates.
The academic and government researchers who run the drilling program seek to find out what happens at the precise point of contact between two plates. It now appears highly likely that the very low impact, but still measurable, nonvolcanic tremors that the researchers have detected in boreholes deep beneath the San Andreas are in some way associated with the destructive earthquakes that occur at shallower depths above them. What the scientists would still like to determine is whether it might be possible to discern a nonvolcanic tremor’s signature in the deep crust some useful time before a major earthquake happens far above.
This is highly relevant to the disaster in Haiti because the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault, the tectonic culprit behind Tuesday’s earthquake, shares many similarities with the San Andreas: it is a strike-slip fault of about half the length (it runs from the Dominican Republic to Jamaica), it separates two plates (the North American and the Caribbean), for most of its length it is simultaneously locked solid and under severe stress, and it shears substantially every century or so. (The last time was in 1907, in Jamaica; scientists have long warned of a catastrophe — one day — involving Port-au-Prince.)
It is highly likely that the low-impact, nonvolcanic tremors measured in the San Andreas happen in the Caribbean also. If a real correlation between these tremors and earthquakes can be found, then science will turn out to be truly on to something. Such a relationship has not yet been discovered. But the tremors do seem to have some unusual bellwether characteristics: there seems to be a correlation, for instance, between their occurrence and such external phenomena as the tides and the phases of the Moon. A link to movements within the Earth’s crust is at least a further possibility — and that is something that could not have been said five years ago. Hence the faintest glimmer of hope for progress.
But then what? If the geophysicists at the University of California at Berkeley, the United States Geological Survey, the California Institute of Technology and the Scripps Research Institute are convinced of a correlation, and then one day detect with their deeply buried devices a sudden swarm of nonvolcanic tremors, would they call the mayor of San Francisco or Los Angeles and issue a warning? And would the mayors then order a mass evacuation? And if they did, what if the scientists turned out to be wrong?
These are questions well worth asking — and asking even more stridently of a place that is somewhat less sophisticated than California. If a similar swarm of data is noticed in the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault, would geologists try to warn the citizens of a city like Port-au-Prince? And even if the forecasts were right, would such a warning save lives, or would it set off panics more lethal than the earthquake itself?
The branch of seismology that deals with prediction is undoubtedly in a slightly better place than it was half a decade ago. But new questions arise with every step toward the grail, and the answers come too slowly to bring true comfort to anyone today, least of all the unfortunate people of Haiti.
Simon Winchester is the author of “A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906” and the forthcoming “Atlantic: A Biography of the Ocean.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/15/opini ... nted=print
January 16, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
Resolve Among the Ruins
By BOB HERBERT
In Haiti, the apocalypse wears the trappings of the norm. It’s a place where heartbreak never seems to end.
One evening many years ago, when I was on assignment in Haiti for The Daily News, a man took me to the back of a pickup truck and pointed to his two small children. It was obvious they were ill. Both were shivering, although the evening was quite warm.
The man pleaded with me to take the youngsters and smuggle them into the United States. “They will die here,” he said, whereas in America they would be safe and “grow strong.”
I tried to explain why that was impossible, that I could not take his children. The man listened politely, then quietly said thank you, and with an expression of the deepest despair climbed into the cab of his truck and drove off.
Enslavement, murderous colonial oppression, invasions by powerful foreign armies, grotesque homegrown tyrants, natural disasters — all you have to do is wait a while in Haiti for the next catastrophe to strike. On Tuesday, it was an earthquake that crushed the capital city of Port-au-Prince and much of its surroundings and raised the level of suffering and death to heights that defied comprehension.
“The world is coming to an end,” cried a woman in the midst of the carnage.
Pooja Bhatia, a journalist who lives in Haiti, told The Times, “I was here during the 2008 hurricanes that left thousands dead, and thousands and thousands homeless, and that felt like the apocalypse. But that pales in comparison to this.”
Just when you think the ultimate has happened, the absolute worst, something even more dire, comes along.
And yet. No matter how overwhelming the tragedy, how bleak the outlook, no matter what malevolent forces the fates see fit to hurl at this tiny, beleaguered, mountainous, sun-splashed portion of the planet, there is no quit in the Haitian people.
They rose up against the French and defeated the forces of Napoleon to become the only nation to grow out of a slave revolt. They rose up against the despotic Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier and sent him packing. Despite ruthless exploitation by more powerful nations, including the United States, and many long years of crippling civil strife, corruption, terror and chronic poverty, the Haitian people have endured.
They will not be defeated by this earthquake.
I spoke on Friday with Ruthzee Louijeune, who works at the Posse Foundation here in New York and had waited like so many others for word about her extended family in Haiti. Eventually, she learned that her uncle, 43-year-old Michelet Philippe, had been killed and that several relatives, including her grandparents, were living in a car in Port-au-Prince.
She wept as she talked. “We’re grateful that we have a body to bury,” she said. “So many people don’t even have that. But right now there is no transportation to take him back to the village where he is from, so they are looking for a respectable place to bury him. It’s so hard. He had a wife and three children.”
But even in her grief, Ms. Louijeune spoke forcefully about the resilience of her family and what she referred to as “her people.”
“My family always taught me to be proud of Haiti,” she said, “whatever anybody else might say about it. They taught me to read on my own and to learn the true history of the country. We’re strong, and despite the hunger, despite the poverty, despite all the problems, we’ll make it through.”
If there is any upside to such an enormous tragedy, it is to be found in the spirit of the people clawing, in some cases with their bare and bleeding hands, through concrete and filth and metal to comfort and rescue survivors and reclaim the dead. And it’s to be found in the powerfully humane way in which so many people, in Haiti and outside of the country, have responded to this shattering disaster — spontaneously, generously and in many, many cases, heroically.
There are no satisfactory explanations for why this kind of event should have occurred. But we can control the way we respond. Faulkner tells us: “I believe that man will not merely endure, he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.”
In the darkest of moments, Plutarch is also a comfort. “Good fortune,” he said, “will elevate even petty minds, and give them the appearance of a certain greatness and stateliness, as from their high place they look down upon the world; but the truly noble and resolved spirit raises itself, and becomes more conspicuous in times of disaster and ill fortune.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/16/opini ... nted=print
Op-Ed Columnist
Resolve Among the Ruins
By BOB HERBERT
In Haiti, the apocalypse wears the trappings of the norm. It’s a place where heartbreak never seems to end.
One evening many years ago, when I was on assignment in Haiti for The Daily News, a man took me to the back of a pickup truck and pointed to his two small children. It was obvious they were ill. Both were shivering, although the evening was quite warm.
The man pleaded with me to take the youngsters and smuggle them into the United States. “They will die here,” he said, whereas in America they would be safe and “grow strong.”
I tried to explain why that was impossible, that I could not take his children. The man listened politely, then quietly said thank you, and with an expression of the deepest despair climbed into the cab of his truck and drove off.
Enslavement, murderous colonial oppression, invasions by powerful foreign armies, grotesque homegrown tyrants, natural disasters — all you have to do is wait a while in Haiti for the next catastrophe to strike. On Tuesday, it was an earthquake that crushed the capital city of Port-au-Prince and much of its surroundings and raised the level of suffering and death to heights that defied comprehension.
“The world is coming to an end,” cried a woman in the midst of the carnage.
Pooja Bhatia, a journalist who lives in Haiti, told The Times, “I was here during the 2008 hurricanes that left thousands dead, and thousands and thousands homeless, and that felt like the apocalypse. But that pales in comparison to this.”
Just when you think the ultimate has happened, the absolute worst, something even more dire, comes along.
And yet. No matter how overwhelming the tragedy, how bleak the outlook, no matter what malevolent forces the fates see fit to hurl at this tiny, beleaguered, mountainous, sun-splashed portion of the planet, there is no quit in the Haitian people.
They rose up against the French and defeated the forces of Napoleon to become the only nation to grow out of a slave revolt. They rose up against the despotic Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier and sent him packing. Despite ruthless exploitation by more powerful nations, including the United States, and many long years of crippling civil strife, corruption, terror and chronic poverty, the Haitian people have endured.
They will not be defeated by this earthquake.
I spoke on Friday with Ruthzee Louijeune, who works at the Posse Foundation here in New York and had waited like so many others for word about her extended family in Haiti. Eventually, she learned that her uncle, 43-year-old Michelet Philippe, had been killed and that several relatives, including her grandparents, were living in a car in Port-au-Prince.
She wept as she talked. “We’re grateful that we have a body to bury,” she said. “So many people don’t even have that. But right now there is no transportation to take him back to the village where he is from, so they are looking for a respectable place to bury him. It’s so hard. He had a wife and three children.”
But even in her grief, Ms. Louijeune spoke forcefully about the resilience of her family and what she referred to as “her people.”
“My family always taught me to be proud of Haiti,” she said, “whatever anybody else might say about it. They taught me to read on my own and to learn the true history of the country. We’re strong, and despite the hunger, despite the poverty, despite all the problems, we’ll make it through.”
If there is any upside to such an enormous tragedy, it is to be found in the spirit of the people clawing, in some cases with their bare and bleeding hands, through concrete and filth and metal to comfort and rescue survivors and reclaim the dead. And it’s to be found in the powerfully humane way in which so many people, in Haiti and outside of the country, have responded to this shattering disaster — spontaneously, generously and in many, many cases, heroically.
There are no satisfactory explanations for why this kind of event should have occurred. But we can control the way we respond. Faulkner tells us: “I believe that man will not merely endure, he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.”
In the darkest of moments, Plutarch is also a comfort. “Good fortune,” he said, “will elevate even petty minds, and give them the appearance of a certain greatness and stateliness, as from their high place they look down upon the world; but the truly noble and resolved spirit raises itself, and becomes more conspicuous in times of disaster and ill fortune.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/16/opini ... nted=print
The rescue operation in Afghanistan
Rescuers are continuing to dig through snow in Afghanistan to reach hundreds of people trapped in their vehicles by avalanches in the Salang Pass.
Government officials say at least 165 bodies have been recovered from the mountain pass north of Kabul.
Some 2,500 people have been rescued so far, but scores more are feared buried following several days of heavy snow.
More than two dozen avalanches have hit the pass north of Kabul since Monday, blocking 2.1 miles (3.5km) of road.
'Frozen bodies'
The total number of casualties remains unclear.
Interior Ministry spokesman Zemeri Bashary told the AP news agency that rescuers had recovered 166 bodies from the road, which connects the Afghan capital with the north, over the past two days.
Acting health minister Suraya Dalil said hospitals had taken in the bodies of 165 people killed in the avalanches.
DEADLY AVALANCHES
February 19-20 2005: At least 250 people killed in avalanches after heavy snowfall in Indian-administered Kashmir
January 16 1995: At least 200 people killed in avalanches in Indian-administered Kashmir triggered by a snow storm and strong winds
September 20 2002: At least 125 people killed when the Kolka glacier collapses on the village of Nijni Karmadon in North Ossetia, Russia
March 24 1996: 56 people killed when avalanche hits main road between Tibet and Sichuan in China
February 23 1999: Avalanche hits Austrian village of Galtur, killing 31 people
Source: News agencies
Afghanistan's dangerous lifeline
In pictures: Afghan avalanches
Officials said crews were working to clear the route near the Salang Tunnel for ambulances, bulldozers and other road-clearing equipment.
Local people are helping Afghan soldiers dig through the snow to vehicles buried or stuck.
"There are many other cars swept away," Gen Mohammad Rajab, the head of the Kabul-Salang highway, told Reuters news agency.
"The death toll may rise as we dig out dozens of other frozen bodies."
Reporters said they could see a number of vehicles, including passenger buses, that had been swept deep into a gorge at the side of the road.
The area is often affected by heavy snow and has been hit by avalanches in the past, the BBC's Martin Patience says from Kabul.
On Tuesday, Afghan interior minister Mohammad Hanif Atmar fended off questions as to why the road had been open in the first place, insisting the situation had appeared manageable until snowstorms unexpectedly struck.
The road through the Salang Pass is the only major route over the Hindu Kush mountains linking southern Afghanistan to the north and Central Asia that remains open throughout the year.
Reaching 3,400m (11,000 ft) at the pass, the road is one of the highest in the world. It was finished in the 1960s with Soviet help.
Meanwhile, an Indian soldier was killed but 13 others were rescued after a second avalanche in two days in Kashmir.
The snow struck an army post on Tuesday in Indian-administered Kashmir, along the Line of Control adjoining Pakistani-administered Kashmir, officials said.
At least 17 Indian soldiers were killed on Monday when an avalanche hit a military training camp in Indian-administered Kashmir, the army said.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8506033.stm
Rescuers are continuing to dig through snow in Afghanistan to reach hundreds of people trapped in their vehicles by avalanches in the Salang Pass.
Government officials say at least 165 bodies have been recovered from the mountain pass north of Kabul.
Some 2,500 people have been rescued so far, but scores more are feared buried following several days of heavy snow.
More than two dozen avalanches have hit the pass north of Kabul since Monday, blocking 2.1 miles (3.5km) of road.
'Frozen bodies'
The total number of casualties remains unclear.
Interior Ministry spokesman Zemeri Bashary told the AP news agency that rescuers had recovered 166 bodies from the road, which connects the Afghan capital with the north, over the past two days.
Acting health minister Suraya Dalil said hospitals had taken in the bodies of 165 people killed in the avalanches.
DEADLY AVALANCHES
February 19-20 2005: At least 250 people killed in avalanches after heavy snowfall in Indian-administered Kashmir
January 16 1995: At least 200 people killed in avalanches in Indian-administered Kashmir triggered by a snow storm and strong winds
September 20 2002: At least 125 people killed when the Kolka glacier collapses on the village of Nijni Karmadon in North Ossetia, Russia
March 24 1996: 56 people killed when avalanche hits main road between Tibet and Sichuan in China
February 23 1999: Avalanche hits Austrian village of Galtur, killing 31 people
Source: News agencies
Afghanistan's dangerous lifeline
In pictures: Afghan avalanches
Officials said crews were working to clear the route near the Salang Tunnel for ambulances, bulldozers and other road-clearing equipment.
Local people are helping Afghan soldiers dig through the snow to vehicles buried or stuck.
"There are many other cars swept away," Gen Mohammad Rajab, the head of the Kabul-Salang highway, told Reuters news agency.
"The death toll may rise as we dig out dozens of other frozen bodies."
Reporters said they could see a number of vehicles, including passenger buses, that had been swept deep into a gorge at the side of the road.
The area is often affected by heavy snow and has been hit by avalanches in the past, the BBC's Martin Patience says from Kabul.
On Tuesday, Afghan interior minister Mohammad Hanif Atmar fended off questions as to why the road had been open in the first place, insisting the situation had appeared manageable until snowstorms unexpectedly struck.
The road through the Salang Pass is the only major route over the Hindu Kush mountains linking southern Afghanistan to the north and Central Asia that remains open throughout the year.
Reaching 3,400m (11,000 ft) at the pass, the road is one of the highest in the world. It was finished in the 1960s with Soviet help.
Meanwhile, an Indian soldier was killed but 13 others were rescued after a second avalanche in two days in Kashmir.
The snow struck an army post on Tuesday in Indian-administered Kashmir, along the Line of Control adjoining Pakistani-administered Kashmir, officials said.
At least 17 Indian soldiers were killed on Monday when an avalanche hit a military training camp in Indian-administered Kashmir, the army said.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8506033.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8521750.stm
Pakistan avalanche buries village and kills at least 38
At least 38 people are dead after an avalanche buried an entire village in north-west Pakistan.
The avalanche hit a remote village in Kohistan district, about 200km (124 miles) north of Islamabad.
Local government head Aminul Haq told the BBC that the eventual death toll could exceed 56, as many others are missing.
According to most recent reports from the area, 38 bodies had been dug up by the villagers before sunset, he said.
The regional police chief said roads had been blocked by landslides and several feet of snow.
"Rescue workers are facing a lot of problems," a local police official was quoted as saying by AFP news agency.
"We fear that some women and children were also trapped," Mohammad Sadiq told AFP.
Increased risk
Avalanches are common in the mountains of Pakistan.
The village of Bagaro Serai in the Kandia Valley is so remote that it took hours for news to get out, the BBC's Aleem Maqbool in Islamabad says.
Rescuers are trying to find survivors, but conditions are poor.
A helicopter that flew in from Peshawar with relief goods could not reach the area due to bad weather.
Heavy snow over the past two weeks has meant an increased risk of avalanches across northern Pakistan.
On Monday, a mass of snow killed seven people about 150km from Bagaro Serai, local police said.
Pakistan avalanche buries village and kills at least 38
At least 38 people are dead after an avalanche buried an entire village in north-west Pakistan.
The avalanche hit a remote village in Kohistan district, about 200km (124 miles) north of Islamabad.
Local government head Aminul Haq told the BBC that the eventual death toll could exceed 56, as many others are missing.
According to most recent reports from the area, 38 bodies had been dug up by the villagers before sunset, he said.
The regional police chief said roads had been blocked by landslides and several feet of snow.
"Rescue workers are facing a lot of problems," a local police official was quoted as saying by AFP news agency.
"We fear that some women and children were also trapped," Mohammad Sadiq told AFP.
Increased risk
Avalanches are common in the mountains of Pakistan.
The village of Bagaro Serai in the Kandia Valley is so remote that it took hours for news to get out, the BBC's Aleem Maqbool in Islamabad says.
Rescuers are trying to find survivors, but conditions are poor.
A helicopter that flew in from Peshawar with relief goods could not reach the area due to bad weather.
Heavy snow over the past two weeks has meant an increased risk of avalanches across northern Pakistan.
On Monday, a mass of snow killed seven people about 150km from Bagaro Serai, local police said.
February 25, 2010
Disaster Awaits Cities in Earthquake Zones
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
ISTANBUL — As he surveys the streets of this sprawling mega-city, Mustafa Erdik, the director of an earthquake engineering institute here, says he sometimes feels like a doctor scanning a crowded hospital ward.
It is not so much the city’s modern core, where two sleek Trump Towers and a huge airport terminal were built to withstand a major earthquake that is considered all but inevitable in the next few decades. Nor does Dr. Erdik agonize over Istanbul’s ancient monuments, whose yards-thick walls have largely withstood more than a dozen potent seismic blows over the past two millenniums.
His biggest worry is that tens of thousands of buildings throughout the city, erected in a haphazard, uninspected rush as the population soared past 10 million from the 1 million it was just 50 years ago, are what some seismologists call “rubble in waiting.”
“Earthquakes always find the weakest point,” said Dr. Erdik, a professor at Bogazici University here.
Istanbul is one of a host of quake-threatened cities in the developing world where populations have swelled far faster than the capacity to house them safely, setting them up for disaster of a scope that could, in some cases, surpass the devastation in Haiti from last month’s earthquake.
Roger Bilham, a seismologist at the University of Colorado who has spent decades studying major earthquakes around the world, including the recent quake in Haiti, said that the planet’s growing, urbanizing population, projected to swell by two billion more people by midcentury and to require one billion dwellings, faced “an unrecognized weapon of mass destruction: houses.”
Without vastly expanded efforts to change construction practices and educate people, from mayors to masons, on simple ways to bolster structures, he said, Haiti’s tragedy is almost certain to be surpassed sometime this century when a major quake hits Karachi, Pakistan, Katmandu, Nepal, Lima, Peru, or one of a long list of big poor cities facing inevitable major earthquakes.
In Tehran, Iran’s capital, Dr. Bilham has calculated that one million people could die in a predicted quake similar in intensity to the one in Haiti, which the Haitian government estimates killed 230,000. (Some Iranian geologists have pressed their government for decades to move the capital because of the nest of surrounding geologic faults.)
As for Istanbul, a study led by Dr. Erdik mapped out a situation in which a quake could kill 30,000 to 40,000 people and seriously injure 120,000 at the very minimum.
The city is rife with buildings with glaring flaws, like ground floors with walls or columns removed to make way for store displays, or a succession of illegal new floors added in each election period on the presumption that local officials will look the other way. On many blocks, upper floors jut precariously over the sidewalk, taking advantage of an old permitting process that governed only a building’s footprint.
More......
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/25/scien ... nted=print
Disaster Awaits Cities in Earthquake Zones
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
ISTANBUL — As he surveys the streets of this sprawling mega-city, Mustafa Erdik, the director of an earthquake engineering institute here, says he sometimes feels like a doctor scanning a crowded hospital ward.
It is not so much the city’s modern core, where two sleek Trump Towers and a huge airport terminal were built to withstand a major earthquake that is considered all but inevitable in the next few decades. Nor does Dr. Erdik agonize over Istanbul’s ancient monuments, whose yards-thick walls have largely withstood more than a dozen potent seismic blows over the past two millenniums.
His biggest worry is that tens of thousands of buildings throughout the city, erected in a haphazard, uninspected rush as the population soared past 10 million from the 1 million it was just 50 years ago, are what some seismologists call “rubble in waiting.”
“Earthquakes always find the weakest point,” said Dr. Erdik, a professor at Bogazici University here.
Istanbul is one of a host of quake-threatened cities in the developing world where populations have swelled far faster than the capacity to house them safely, setting them up for disaster of a scope that could, in some cases, surpass the devastation in Haiti from last month’s earthquake.
Roger Bilham, a seismologist at the University of Colorado who has spent decades studying major earthquakes around the world, including the recent quake in Haiti, said that the planet’s growing, urbanizing population, projected to swell by two billion more people by midcentury and to require one billion dwellings, faced “an unrecognized weapon of mass destruction: houses.”
Without vastly expanded efforts to change construction practices and educate people, from mayors to masons, on simple ways to bolster structures, he said, Haiti’s tragedy is almost certain to be surpassed sometime this century when a major quake hits Karachi, Pakistan, Katmandu, Nepal, Lima, Peru, or one of a long list of big poor cities facing inevitable major earthquakes.
In Tehran, Iran’s capital, Dr. Bilham has calculated that one million people could die in a predicted quake similar in intensity to the one in Haiti, which the Haitian government estimates killed 230,000. (Some Iranian geologists have pressed their government for decades to move the capital because of the nest of surrounding geologic faults.)
As for Istanbul, a study led by Dr. Erdik mapped out a situation in which a quake could kill 30,000 to 40,000 people and seriously injure 120,000 at the very minimum.
The city is rife with buildings with glaring flaws, like ground floors with walls or columns removed to make way for store displays, or a succession of illegal new floors added in each election period on the presumption that local officials will look the other way. On many blocks, upper floors jut precariously over the sidewalk, taking advantage of an old permitting process that governed only a building’s footprint.
More......
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/25/scien ... nted=print
There is a related video and more at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/world ... ?th&emc=th
1.5 Million Displaced After Chile Quake
By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO and LIZ ROBBINS
RIO DE JANEIRO — A strong aftershock struck Chile on Sunday, a day after a destructive 8.8-magnitude earthquake left hundreds of people dead and a long swath of the country in smoky rubble.
The death toll was expected to rise, particularly around Concepción, Chile's second-largest metropolitan area, which is roughly 70 miles from the quake's center. The aftershock was reported around 8:30 local time Sunday morning from the capital of Santiago, where it shook buildings, according to Reuters.
More than 1.5 million people have displaced by the quake, according to local news services that quoted the director of Chile's emergency management office. In Concepción, which appeared to be especially hard hit, the mayor said Sunday morning that 100 people were trapped under the rubble of a building that had collapsed, according to Reuters.
Elsewhere in Concepción, cars lay mangled and upended on streets littered with telephone wires and power cables. A new 14-story apartment building fell, while an older, biochemical lab at the University of Concepción caught fire.
In the nearby port of Talcahuano, a giant wave flooded the main square before receding and leaving behind a large fishing boat on the city streets.
“It was terrible, terrible,” said Adela Galaz, a 59-year-old cosmetologist who said glasses and paintings fell to the floor of her 22nd-floor apartment in Santiago, 200 miles from the quake’s center. “We are grateful to be alive.”
President Michelle Bachelet, speaking at a news conference on Saturday night, called the quake “one of the worst tragedies in the last 50 years” and declared a “state of catastrophe.”
While this earthquake was far stronger than the 7.0-magnitude one that ravaged Haiti six weeks ago, the damage and death toll in Chile are likely to be far less extensive, in part because of strict building codes put in place after devastating earthquakes.
The quake Saturday, tied for the fifth largest in the world since 1900, set off tsunami waves that swamped some nearby islands before moving across the Pacific. Hawaii began evacuations before dawn, but by early afternoon there — more than 15 hours after the earthquake first struck 6,500 miles away — the fears of a destructive wave had passed. Countries including Japan and the Philippines were on alert and ordered limited evacuations in anticipation of waves hitting Sunday.
Chileans were only just beginning to grapple with the devastation before them, even as more than two dozen significant aftershocks struck the country.
In Santiago, the capital, residents reported having been terrified as the city shook for about 90 seconds.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/world ... ?th&emc=th
1.5 Million Displaced After Chile Quake
By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO and LIZ ROBBINS
RIO DE JANEIRO — A strong aftershock struck Chile on Sunday, a day after a destructive 8.8-magnitude earthquake left hundreds of people dead and a long swath of the country in smoky rubble.
The death toll was expected to rise, particularly around Concepción, Chile's second-largest metropolitan area, which is roughly 70 miles from the quake's center. The aftershock was reported around 8:30 local time Sunday morning from the capital of Santiago, where it shook buildings, according to Reuters.
More than 1.5 million people have displaced by the quake, according to local news services that quoted the director of Chile's emergency management office. In Concepción, which appeared to be especially hard hit, the mayor said Sunday morning that 100 people were trapped under the rubble of a building that had collapsed, according to Reuters.
Elsewhere in Concepción, cars lay mangled and upended on streets littered with telephone wires and power cables. A new 14-story apartment building fell, while an older, biochemical lab at the University of Concepción caught fire.
In the nearby port of Talcahuano, a giant wave flooded the main square before receding and leaving behind a large fishing boat on the city streets.
“It was terrible, terrible,” said Adela Galaz, a 59-year-old cosmetologist who said glasses and paintings fell to the floor of her 22nd-floor apartment in Santiago, 200 miles from the quake’s center. “We are grateful to be alive.”
President Michelle Bachelet, speaking at a news conference on Saturday night, called the quake “one of the worst tragedies in the last 50 years” and declared a “state of catastrophe.”
While this earthquake was far stronger than the 7.0-magnitude one that ravaged Haiti six weeks ago, the damage and death toll in Chile are likely to be far less extensive, in part because of strict building codes put in place after devastating earthquakes.
The quake Saturday, tied for the fifth largest in the world since 1900, set off tsunami waves that swamped some nearby islands before moving across the Pacific. Hawaii began evacuations before dawn, but by early afternoon there — more than 15 hours after the earthquake first struck 6,500 miles away — the fears of a destructive wave had passed. Countries including Japan and the Philippines were on alert and ordered limited evacuations in anticipation of waves hitting Sunday.
Chileans were only just beginning to grapple with the devastation before them, even as more than two dozen significant aftershocks struck the country.
In Santiago, the capital, residents reported having been terrified as the city shook for about 90 seconds.
At least 113 dead in Brazil as downpours spur landslides
Herald News ServicesApril 8, 2010
Rescuers searched for flood and landslide survivors Wednesday in southeastern Brazil after the heaviest downpours in almost half a century left at least 113 people dead.
The state of Rio de Janeiro was in mourning as the extent of the disaster became clear and a third day of rains compounded the misery for 5,000 municipal employees trying to clear streets turned to mud.
Rain fell intermittently on Wednesday amid sunny spells, providing hope that the worst was over. But the toll could rise further as dozens were reportedly still missing.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 9&sponsor=
Herald News ServicesApril 8, 2010
Rescuers searched for flood and landslide survivors Wednesday in southeastern Brazil after the heaviest downpours in almost half a century left at least 113 people dead.
The state of Rio de Janeiro was in mourning as the extent of the disaster became clear and a third day of rains compounded the misery for 5,000 municipal employees trying to clear streets turned to mud.
Rain fell intermittently on Wednesday amid sunny spells, providing hope that the worst was over. But the toll could rise further as dozens were reportedly still missing.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 9&sponsor=
April 11, 2010
Op-Ed Contributor
The Earth Holds Steady
By ROGER MUSSON
Edinburgh
ARE earthquakes becoming more frequent? This is a question that every seismologist is used to. I was asked it 30 years ago. Thanks to large quakes in Haiti and Chile — not to mention 7-plus magnitude quakes in Indonesia and Baja California over the past week — I’ve been asked it a lot lately. And the answer is no. You would think this would be good news, but sometimes people seem faintly disappointed when they hear it. It’s as if a dose of disaster makes life more interesting.
It’s true that more earthquakes are recorded than used to be the case, but that’s simply because there are more monitoring stations that are able to pick up minor earthquakes that once went undetected. If we compare the average global rates of large earthquakes, we find that these are stable as far back as we can trace them. On average, we record an earthquake with a magnitude over 6 every three days or so, and over 7 at least once a month.
Why then, does it sometimes seem they are more common occurrences? There are two reasons for this. First, people notice it when earthquakes happen in populated places. A big earthquake in California is news; a big earthquake in the Southern Ocean is noticed only by seismologists. So a run of earthquakes that by chance hit populated places makes it look as though the rate has increased, even if it hasn’t.
The classic case of this was in 1976. That year, there were a number of high-casualty earthquakes — including a 7.5 magnitude quake in Tangshan, China, that killed more than a quarter of a million people — prompting a lot of news media questions about the increasing frequency of earthquakes. But, in the end, 1976 turned out to have a relatively low number of quakes. It was just that an abnormal number hit populated areas.
The second reason is that in any semi-random process, you get clustering. Throw enough dice, and sometimes you’ll get several sixes in a row. People notice the clusters; they don’t notice the gaps in between. No one ever asks me during the quiet periods if earthquakes are becoming less frequent. Also, people tend to have short memories; they notice the current cluster, but don’t remember the previous one.
Basic geology explains why the number of earthquakes remains relatively constant. Quakes release a lot of energy, and that energy has to come from somewhere. Ultimately, the source of it is heat released by the steady decay of radioactive material deep inside the earth. For a real long-term increase in earthquake activity, there would have to be an increase in that energy supply, and it’s hard to see how that could happen.
One problem that we do have to face is that our exposure to earthquakes is increasing. As the world becomes more populated and cities grow ever bigger, the potential for quakes to become disasters rises. Tehran, for instance, has been destroyed by earthquakes several times, but it was still quite small at the time of its last damaging quake, in 1830. Now the city is home to millions, and when the next major quake hits, the results will be catastrophic.
Unless we devote more effort to protecting communities, the number of earthquake disasters will grow, even if the number of earthquakes stays the same.
Roger Musson is a seismologist with the British Geological Survey.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/opini ... ?th&emc=th
Op-Ed Contributor
The Earth Holds Steady
By ROGER MUSSON
Edinburgh
ARE earthquakes becoming more frequent? This is a question that every seismologist is used to. I was asked it 30 years ago. Thanks to large quakes in Haiti and Chile — not to mention 7-plus magnitude quakes in Indonesia and Baja California over the past week — I’ve been asked it a lot lately. And the answer is no. You would think this would be good news, but sometimes people seem faintly disappointed when they hear it. It’s as if a dose of disaster makes life more interesting.
It’s true that more earthquakes are recorded than used to be the case, but that’s simply because there are more monitoring stations that are able to pick up minor earthquakes that once went undetected. If we compare the average global rates of large earthquakes, we find that these are stable as far back as we can trace them. On average, we record an earthquake with a magnitude over 6 every three days or so, and over 7 at least once a month.
Why then, does it sometimes seem they are more common occurrences? There are two reasons for this. First, people notice it when earthquakes happen in populated places. A big earthquake in California is news; a big earthquake in the Southern Ocean is noticed only by seismologists. So a run of earthquakes that by chance hit populated places makes it look as though the rate has increased, even if it hasn’t.
The classic case of this was in 1976. That year, there were a number of high-casualty earthquakes — including a 7.5 magnitude quake in Tangshan, China, that killed more than a quarter of a million people — prompting a lot of news media questions about the increasing frequency of earthquakes. But, in the end, 1976 turned out to have a relatively low number of quakes. It was just that an abnormal number hit populated areas.
The second reason is that in any semi-random process, you get clustering. Throw enough dice, and sometimes you’ll get several sixes in a row. People notice the clusters; they don’t notice the gaps in between. No one ever asks me during the quiet periods if earthquakes are becoming less frequent. Also, people tend to have short memories; they notice the current cluster, but don’t remember the previous one.
Basic geology explains why the number of earthquakes remains relatively constant. Quakes release a lot of energy, and that energy has to come from somewhere. Ultimately, the source of it is heat released by the steady decay of radioactive material deep inside the earth. For a real long-term increase in earthquake activity, there would have to be an increase in that energy supply, and it’s hard to see how that could happen.
One problem that we do have to face is that our exposure to earthquakes is increasing. As the world becomes more populated and cities grow ever bigger, the potential for quakes to become disasters rises. Tehran, for instance, has been destroyed by earthquakes several times, but it was still quite small at the time of its last damaging quake, in 1830. Now the city is home to millions, and when the next major quake hits, the results will be catastrophic.
Unless we devote more effort to protecting communities, the number of earthquake disasters will grow, even if the number of earthquakes stays the same.
Roger Musson is a seismologist with the British Geological Survey.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/opini ... ?th&emc=th
April 19, 2010
Editorial
The Icelandic Plume
When severe storms blow through, meteorologists can track their path and predict with considerable confidence when the disturbance will end. Volcanoes don’t blow through. Even with all of the sophisticated monitoring technology and expertise, no one knows when the eruptions at Eyjafjallajokull — the Icelandic volcano now venting ash into the atmosphere — will subside.
That uncertainty only deepens the sense of helplessness across Europe, where much of the airspace has been closed since late last week, stranding millions of passengers across the globe. Even President Obama had to forgo his planned trip to Poland for Sunday’s funeral of President Lech Kaczynski.
Like the ash cloud, the economic costs of this eruption are immense. The airlines, which estimate that they have lost about a billion dollars worldwide, are pressing officials to allow at least some flights to resume. For all that, the physical damage is minute, especially when compared with the recent earthquakes in Haiti, Chile and China. Luckily it has taken no lives.
What Eyjafjallajokull has done above all is force upon us a visceral awareness of our interconnected world — woven together by the crisscrossing of airline routes. For all of the talk of globalization, we see what a global construct our sense of normality really is.
With luck, the volcano will simmer down soon and the ash plume will disperse. Flights will resume, business will begin to make up its losses, and weary travelers will safely find their way home. It will be a long time before we forget the threat that lies smoldering under an Icelandic glacier. Or its lesson that even in the 21st centry, our lives are still at the sufferance of nature.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/19/opini ... ?th&emc=th
Editorial
The Icelandic Plume
When severe storms blow through, meteorologists can track their path and predict with considerable confidence when the disturbance will end. Volcanoes don’t blow through. Even with all of the sophisticated monitoring technology and expertise, no one knows when the eruptions at Eyjafjallajokull — the Icelandic volcano now venting ash into the atmosphere — will subside.
That uncertainty only deepens the sense of helplessness across Europe, where much of the airspace has been closed since late last week, stranding millions of passengers across the globe. Even President Obama had to forgo his planned trip to Poland for Sunday’s funeral of President Lech Kaczynski.
Like the ash cloud, the economic costs of this eruption are immense. The airlines, which estimate that they have lost about a billion dollars worldwide, are pressing officials to allow at least some flights to resume. For all that, the physical damage is minute, especially when compared with the recent earthquakes in Haiti, Chile and China. Luckily it has taken no lives.
What Eyjafjallajokull has done above all is force upon us a visceral awareness of our interconnected world — woven together by the crisscrossing of airline routes. For all of the talk of globalization, we see what a global construct our sense of normality really is.
With luck, the volcano will simmer down soon and the ash plume will disperse. Flights will resume, business will begin to make up its losses, and weary travelers will safely find their way home. It will be a long time before we forget the threat that lies smoldering under an Icelandic glacier. Or its lesson that even in the 21st centry, our lives are still at the sufferance of nature.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/19/opini ... ?th&emc=th
There are a related video and a multimedia linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/world ... &th&emc=th
August 1, 2010
Pakistan Challenged in Flood Rescue
By ADAM B. ELLICK
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The military and other emergency workers struggled against time and nature on Sunday to reach at least 10,000 people trapped by collapsed bridges and flooded roads and threatened by rising water brought by the worst monsoon rains in Pakistan’s history.
The army announced Sunday night that it had reached up to 20,000 people, but the government’s response to the disaster — which has already claimed hundreds of lives — has been widely assailed as slow and inadequate. Criticism was further fed by a decision by President Asif Zardari, already deeply unpopular, to leave the country this week for political talks in Europe.
“We’re out of bridges, so it’s the necessity of time to reach them by air,” said Adnan Khan, an official at the Provincial Disaster Management Authority of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, who called the situation “very urgent.”
The crisis is especially catastrophic in Swat, once famed as a tourist valley, where the army defeated militants last year. Local leaders said at least 900 Swatis have died, and nearly all the bridges that the army built after last year’s war have collapsed.
Officials said at least 10,000 people were stranded in Upper Swat and Dir Ismail Khan, which were inaccessible by road because 40 bridges had fallen. Efforts were under way to erect temporary spans, but officials were skeptical that they could be built in time.
Estimates of the total death toll on Sunday ranged up to 1,100, although the national government put the figure at 730. The nation’s largest and most respected private rescue service, the Edhi Foundation, predicted the death toll would reach 3,000.
The great disparity in numbers reflects the challenge facing the government and other emergency workers struggling to reach isolated areas and to gain reliable information.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/02/world ... &th&emc=th
August 1, 2010
Pakistan Challenged in Flood Rescue
By ADAM B. ELLICK
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The military and other emergency workers struggled against time and nature on Sunday to reach at least 10,000 people trapped by collapsed bridges and flooded roads and threatened by rising water brought by the worst monsoon rains in Pakistan’s history.
The army announced Sunday night that it had reached up to 20,000 people, but the government’s response to the disaster — which has already claimed hundreds of lives — has been widely assailed as slow and inadequate. Criticism was further fed by a decision by President Asif Zardari, already deeply unpopular, to leave the country this week for political talks in Europe.
“We’re out of bridges, so it’s the necessity of time to reach them by air,” said Adnan Khan, an official at the Provincial Disaster Management Authority of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, who called the situation “very urgent.”
The crisis is especially catastrophic in Swat, once famed as a tourist valley, where the army defeated militants last year. Local leaders said at least 900 Swatis have died, and nearly all the bridges that the army built after last year’s war have collapsed.
Officials said at least 10,000 people were stranded in Upper Swat and Dir Ismail Khan, which were inaccessible by road because 40 bridges had fallen. Efforts were under way to erect temporary spans, but officials were skeptical that they could be built in time.
Estimates of the total death toll on Sunday ranged up to 1,100, although the national government put the figure at 730. The nation’s largest and most respected private rescue service, the Edhi Foundation, predicted the death toll would reach 3,000.
The great disparity in numbers reflects the challenge facing the government and other emergency workers struggling to reach isolated areas and to gain reliable information.
500,000 fleeing floods in Pakistan
By Hasan Mansoor, Agence France-Presse
August 6, 2010
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 0&sponsor=
A woman yells as her child is evacuated from the roof of a mosque in Pakistan's Punjab province on Thursday. So far, the floods have killed more than 1,600 people and officials say the toll is likely to climb.
Photograph by: Reuters, Agence France-Presse
Pakistan began evacuating half a million people from flood-risk areas in the south on Thursday as the overall number hit by the country's worst floods in living memory rose to more than four million.
The United Nations rushed a top envoy to Pakistan to mobilize international support and address the urgent plight of millions affected by torrential monsoon rains that have killed around 1,500 across the volatile country.
The disaster is now into its second week and the rains are spreading into Pakistan's most populous provinces of Punjab and Sindh, as anger mounts against the government response after villages and farmland were washed away.
In Sindh, authorities warned that major floods were expected on Saturday and Sunday in fertile agricultural areas along the Indus river.
The military said 25,000 people had been evacuated in parts of the province while the local government put the number at 150,000.
"We have a target evacuation of at least 500,000 people who live in 11 most vulnerable districts," said provincial irrigation minister Jam Saifullah Dharejo, saying many towns and villages were in danger.
Maurizio Giuliano, a spokesman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said rising water levels could pose threat to Sukkur Barrage.
Further north in Punjab, an AFP reporter saw an exodus of people streaming out of flooded villages, wading barefoot through water, cramming belongings onto donkey carts and into cars under heavy rains.
"Altogether, more than four million people are in one way or another affected," said Manuel Bessler, who heads the OCHA in Pakistan.
"What we are facing now is a major catastrophe," he said.
Officials warned that dams could burst as heavy rain lashed the Punjab town of Kot Addu, transforming the area into a giant lake.
Army helicopters flew overhead as people streamed out of flooded villages searching for safer ground.
"All these villages are dangerous now. We are evacuating the population. Important installations are in danger," said Manzoor Sarwar, police chief for Muzaffargarh district.
Survivors lashed out at authorities for failing to come to their rescue and provide better relief, piling pressure on a cash-strapped administration straining to contain Taliban violence and an economic crisis.
By Hasan Mansoor, Agence France-Presse
August 6, 2010
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 0&sponsor=
A woman yells as her child is evacuated from the roof of a mosque in Pakistan's Punjab province on Thursday. So far, the floods have killed more than 1,600 people and officials say the toll is likely to climb.
Photograph by: Reuters, Agence France-Presse
Pakistan began evacuating half a million people from flood-risk areas in the south on Thursday as the overall number hit by the country's worst floods in living memory rose to more than four million.
The United Nations rushed a top envoy to Pakistan to mobilize international support and address the urgent plight of millions affected by torrential monsoon rains that have killed around 1,500 across the volatile country.
The disaster is now into its second week and the rains are spreading into Pakistan's most populous provinces of Punjab and Sindh, as anger mounts against the government response after villages and farmland were washed away.
In Sindh, authorities warned that major floods were expected on Saturday and Sunday in fertile agricultural areas along the Indus river.
The military said 25,000 people had been evacuated in parts of the province while the local government put the number at 150,000.
"We have a target evacuation of at least 500,000 people who live in 11 most vulnerable districts," said provincial irrigation minister Jam Saifullah Dharejo, saying many towns and villages were in danger.
Maurizio Giuliano, a spokesman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said rising water levels could pose threat to Sukkur Barrage.
Further north in Punjab, an AFP reporter saw an exodus of people streaming out of flooded villages, wading barefoot through water, cramming belongings onto donkey carts and into cars under heavy rains.
"Altogether, more than four million people are in one way or another affected," said Manuel Bessler, who heads the OCHA in Pakistan.
"What we are facing now is a major catastrophe," he said.
Officials warned that dams could burst as heavy rain lashed the Punjab town of Kot Addu, transforming the area into a giant lake.
Army helicopters flew overhead as people streamed out of flooded villages searching for safer ground.
"All these villages are dangerous now. We are evacuating the population. Important installations are in danger," said Manzoor Sarwar, police chief for Muzaffargarh district.
Survivors lashed out at authorities for failing to come to their rescue and provide better relief, piling pressure on a cash-strapped administration straining to contain Taliban violence and an economic crisis.
August 15, 2010
Drowning Today, Parched Tomorrow
By STEVEN SOLOMON
Washington
HARD as it may be to believe when you see the images of the monsoon floods that are now devastating Pakistan, the country is actually on the verge of a critical shortage of fresh water. And water scarcity is not only a worry for Pakistan’s population — it is a threat to America’s national security as well.
Given the rapid melting of the Himalayan glaciers that feed the Indus River — a possible contributor to the current floods — and growing tensions with upriver archenemy India about use of the river’s tributaries, it’s unlikely that Pakistani food production will long keep pace with the growing population.
It’s no surprise, then, that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made Pakistani headlines a few weeks before the flooding by unveiling major water projects aimed at bolstering national storage capacity, irrigation, safe drinking water and faltering electrical power service under America’s new $7.5 billion assistance program. In March, the State Department announced that water scarcity had been upgraded to “a central U.S. foreign policy concern.” Pakistan is at the center of it.
This is because a widespread water shortage in Pakistan would further destabilize the fractious country, hurting its efforts to root out its resident international terrorists. The struggle for water could also become a tipping point for renewed war with India. The jihadists know how important the issue is: in April 2009, Taliban forces launched an offensive that got within 35 miles of the giant Tarbela Dam, the linchpin of Pakistan’s hydroelectric and irrigation system.
Pakistan needs to rebuild and overhaul the administration of the world’s largest contiguous irrigation network. For decades, Islamabad has spent far too little on basic maintenance, drainage and distribution canals, new water storage and hydropower plants.
To some extent, these deficiencies have been masked since the 1970s by farmers drilling hundreds of thousands of little tube wells, which now provide half of the country’s irrigation. But in many of these places the groundwater is running dry and becoming too salty for use. The result is an agricultural crisis of wasted water, inefficient production and incipient crop shortfalls.
Like Egypt on the Nile, arid Pakistan is totally reliant on the Indus and its tributaries. Yet the river’s water is already so overdrawn that it no longer reaches the sea, dribbling to a meager end near the Indian Ocean port of Karachi. Its once-fertile delta of rice paddies and fisheries has shriveled up.
Chronic water shortages in the southern province of Sindh breed suspicions that politically connected landowners in upriver Punjab are siphoning more than their allotted share. There have been repeated riots over lack of water and electricity in Karachi, and across the country people suffer from contaminated drinking water, poor sanitation and pollution.
The future looks grim. Pakistan’s population is expected to rise to 220 million over the next decade, up from around 170 million today. Yet, eventually, flows of the Indus are expected to decrease as global warming causes the Himalayan glaciers to retreat, while monsoons will get more intense. Terrifyingly, Pakistan only has the capacity to hold a 30-day reserve storage of water as a buffer against drought.
India, meanwhile, is straining the limits of the Indus Waters Treaty, a 1960 agreement on sharing the river system. To cope with its own severe electricity shortages, it is building a series of hydropower dams on Indus tributaries in Jammu and Kashmir State, where the rivers emerge from the Himalayas.
While technically permissible under the treaty provided the overall volumes flowing downstream aren’t diminished, untimely dam-filling by India during planting season could destroy Pakistan’s harvest. Pakistan, downriver and militarily weaker than India, understandably regards the dams’ cumulative one-month storage capacity as a potentially lethal new water weapon in India’s arsenal.
Now, on top of all this, come the monsoon floods, which have obliterated countless canals, diversion weirs and huge swaths of cropland. Pakistan needs help, and projects like those heralded by Secretary Clinton, while valuable, are not on the scale needed to turn things around.
The best first step is a huge one: for Washington to kick-start progress on the Diamer-Bhasha dam, an agricultural and hydroelectric project on the Indus that’s been on the drawing board for decades. The project, likely to cost more than $12 billion, has languished for want of financing. It has also has run afoul of the developed world’s knee-jerk disfavor of giant dams.
But there is simply no other project that can add so much desperately needed water storage and hydroelectricity — Pakistan is tapping just 12 percent of its hydropower potential. Giant dams, moreover, can be inspiring, iconic projects — the Hoover Dam was a statement of American fortitude at the height of the Depression. Beleaguered Pakistan could use a symbol of progress.
There are other projects, already shown to be successful, that on a larger scale could save more water than building half a dozen giant dams. Managers at one Punjabi canal branch, for example, are working with international experts to replace the traditional supply system called warabandi — in which farmers draw water on a simple rotational basis — with one that requires less overall water but delivers it on a reliable, as-needed basis.
Finally, President Obama should take a lesson from John F. Kennedy. In 1961 President Kennedy and President Ayub Khan of Pakistan established a technical collaboration between American experts and a young generation of Pakistani engineers who, together, largely ameliorated Pakistan’s seemingly intractable problem of waterlogging and soil salinization. Yes, Washington’s interest may have been more related to the cold war than to helping the Pakistani people, but we’ve again reached the point where national security and benevolence align.
The Pakistanis may never come to love us. But as the current spectacle of Islamic jihadists bringing emergency aid to flooded areas warns us, we can’t afford to ignore Pakistan’s looming freshwater crisis.
Steven Solomon is the author of “Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/opini ... &th&emc=th
Drowning Today, Parched Tomorrow
By STEVEN SOLOMON
Washington
HARD as it may be to believe when you see the images of the monsoon floods that are now devastating Pakistan, the country is actually on the verge of a critical shortage of fresh water. And water scarcity is not only a worry for Pakistan’s population — it is a threat to America’s national security as well.
Given the rapid melting of the Himalayan glaciers that feed the Indus River — a possible contributor to the current floods — and growing tensions with upriver archenemy India about use of the river’s tributaries, it’s unlikely that Pakistani food production will long keep pace with the growing population.
It’s no surprise, then, that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made Pakistani headlines a few weeks before the flooding by unveiling major water projects aimed at bolstering national storage capacity, irrigation, safe drinking water and faltering electrical power service under America’s new $7.5 billion assistance program. In March, the State Department announced that water scarcity had been upgraded to “a central U.S. foreign policy concern.” Pakistan is at the center of it.
This is because a widespread water shortage in Pakistan would further destabilize the fractious country, hurting its efforts to root out its resident international terrorists. The struggle for water could also become a tipping point for renewed war with India. The jihadists know how important the issue is: in April 2009, Taliban forces launched an offensive that got within 35 miles of the giant Tarbela Dam, the linchpin of Pakistan’s hydroelectric and irrigation system.
Pakistan needs to rebuild and overhaul the administration of the world’s largest contiguous irrigation network. For decades, Islamabad has spent far too little on basic maintenance, drainage and distribution canals, new water storage and hydropower plants.
To some extent, these deficiencies have been masked since the 1970s by farmers drilling hundreds of thousands of little tube wells, which now provide half of the country’s irrigation. But in many of these places the groundwater is running dry and becoming too salty for use. The result is an agricultural crisis of wasted water, inefficient production and incipient crop shortfalls.
Like Egypt on the Nile, arid Pakistan is totally reliant on the Indus and its tributaries. Yet the river’s water is already so overdrawn that it no longer reaches the sea, dribbling to a meager end near the Indian Ocean port of Karachi. Its once-fertile delta of rice paddies and fisheries has shriveled up.
Chronic water shortages in the southern province of Sindh breed suspicions that politically connected landowners in upriver Punjab are siphoning more than their allotted share. There have been repeated riots over lack of water and electricity in Karachi, and across the country people suffer from contaminated drinking water, poor sanitation and pollution.
The future looks grim. Pakistan’s population is expected to rise to 220 million over the next decade, up from around 170 million today. Yet, eventually, flows of the Indus are expected to decrease as global warming causes the Himalayan glaciers to retreat, while monsoons will get more intense. Terrifyingly, Pakistan only has the capacity to hold a 30-day reserve storage of water as a buffer against drought.
India, meanwhile, is straining the limits of the Indus Waters Treaty, a 1960 agreement on sharing the river system. To cope with its own severe electricity shortages, it is building a series of hydropower dams on Indus tributaries in Jammu and Kashmir State, where the rivers emerge from the Himalayas.
While technically permissible under the treaty provided the overall volumes flowing downstream aren’t diminished, untimely dam-filling by India during planting season could destroy Pakistan’s harvest. Pakistan, downriver and militarily weaker than India, understandably regards the dams’ cumulative one-month storage capacity as a potentially lethal new water weapon in India’s arsenal.
Now, on top of all this, come the monsoon floods, which have obliterated countless canals, diversion weirs and huge swaths of cropland. Pakistan needs help, and projects like those heralded by Secretary Clinton, while valuable, are not on the scale needed to turn things around.
The best first step is a huge one: for Washington to kick-start progress on the Diamer-Bhasha dam, an agricultural and hydroelectric project on the Indus that’s been on the drawing board for decades. The project, likely to cost more than $12 billion, has languished for want of financing. It has also has run afoul of the developed world’s knee-jerk disfavor of giant dams.
But there is simply no other project that can add so much desperately needed water storage and hydroelectricity — Pakistan is tapping just 12 percent of its hydropower potential. Giant dams, moreover, can be inspiring, iconic projects — the Hoover Dam was a statement of American fortitude at the height of the Depression. Beleaguered Pakistan could use a symbol of progress.
There are other projects, already shown to be successful, that on a larger scale could save more water than building half a dozen giant dams. Managers at one Punjabi canal branch, for example, are working with international experts to replace the traditional supply system called warabandi — in which farmers draw water on a simple rotational basis — with one that requires less overall water but delivers it on a reliable, as-needed basis.
Finally, President Obama should take a lesson from John F. Kennedy. In 1961 President Kennedy and President Ayub Khan of Pakistan established a technical collaboration between American experts and a young generation of Pakistani engineers who, together, largely ameliorated Pakistan’s seemingly intractable problem of waterlogging and soil salinization. Yes, Washington’s interest may have been more related to the cold war than to helping the Pakistani people, but we’ve again reached the point where national security and benevolence align.
The Pakistanis may never come to love us. But as the current spectacle of Islamic jihadists bringing emergency aid to flooded areas warns us, we can’t afford to ignore Pakistan’s looming freshwater crisis.
Steven Solomon is the author of “Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/opini ... &th&emc=th
There is a related multimedia and more linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/23/world ... pstan.html
August 22, 2010
Floods Force Thousands From Homes in Pakistan
By CARLOTTA GALL
SUKKUR, Pakistan — Floodwaters surged deeper into areas of southern Pakistan on Sunday, forcing thousands more people to abandon their homes in haste and flee to higher ground. Attention has now focused on the province of Sindh as the floods that have torn through the length of the country for three weeks finally move toward the Arabian Sea.
Water reached within half a mile of Shadad Kot, a town of 150,000 people, on Sunday afternoon, and several nearby villages were already cut off when a protective embankment began to give way, Yasin Shar, the district coordination officer of Shadad Kot, said by telephone. Most of the population had been evacuated and more were still leaving, he said. “We are trying to save the embankment and keep on repairing wherever it is damaged, but the water is flowing with a lot of pressure,” Mr. Shar said. “We hope the embankment won’t break. We are praying.”
Nearly five million people have been displaced from the worst flooding ever recorded in Pakistan. Hundreds of thousands are being housed in orderly tented camps set up in army compounds, schools and other public buildings, but thousands more are living on roadsides and canal embankments, spreading out mats under the trees or making shade over the simple rope beds they brought with them.
******
There is a related video linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/23/world ... ?th&emc=th
August 22, 2010
Severe Flooding Hits Northeast China
By DAVID BARBOZA
SHANGHAI — More than 250,000 people were evacuated in northeastern China over the weekend after torrential rains battered the area and led to severe flooding along the border with North Korea, Chinese state media reported on Monday.
The government said that four people were killed and one was missing near the port city of Dandong in the northeastern province of Liaoning after some of the worst flooding to hit the region in decades.
Emergency crews worked beginning Saturday into Sunday to move the estimated 253,500 people, the Xinhua news agency reported.
China has been suffering from severe flooding in various parts of the country for months, and is still trying to cope with massive mudslides that killed at least 1,400 people this month in Gansu Province, in the northwestern part of the country.
The heavy rains in North China over the weekend flooded the Yalu River, which separates China from North Korea, forcing the river to breach its banks, China’s state-run news media reported.
In North Korea, flooding submerged much of Sinuiju. The North Korean state-run media said Sunday that the country’s leader, Kim Jong-il, had mobilized military forces to rescue and evacuate thousands of North Koreans from floods that hit Sinuiju, the isolated country’s major trading gate on its border with China.
The North’s Korean Central News Agency said that about a foot of rain had fallen around Sinuiju from midnight until 9 a.m. Saturday. The agency reported “severe damage” and said that 5,150 people had been evacuated to higher ground. It reported no deaths.
Sinuiju forms a vital lifeline for the North’s impoverished economy. Much of the country’s land traffic with China, its main trading partner, travels trough Sinuiju.
Since the mid-1990s, North Korea’s agricultural sector has often been devastated by both floods and drought. After decades of denuding its hills for firewood, North Korea remains vulnerable to landslides and flash floods.
In the Chinese province of Liaoning, the floodwaters damaged five border cities, destroying or damaging thousands of homes and buildings and causing at least $100 million in losses, the government said.
The heavy rains began pounding Liaoning Province on Thursday and did not let up until Saturday. But, the government said Sunday, another wave of heavy rains was expected to worsen the situation.
Choe Sang-hun contributed reporting from Seoul.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/23/world ... pstan.html
August 22, 2010
Floods Force Thousands From Homes in Pakistan
By CARLOTTA GALL
SUKKUR, Pakistan — Floodwaters surged deeper into areas of southern Pakistan on Sunday, forcing thousands more people to abandon their homes in haste and flee to higher ground. Attention has now focused on the province of Sindh as the floods that have torn through the length of the country for three weeks finally move toward the Arabian Sea.
Water reached within half a mile of Shadad Kot, a town of 150,000 people, on Sunday afternoon, and several nearby villages were already cut off when a protective embankment began to give way, Yasin Shar, the district coordination officer of Shadad Kot, said by telephone. Most of the population had been evacuated and more were still leaving, he said. “We are trying to save the embankment and keep on repairing wherever it is damaged, but the water is flowing with a lot of pressure,” Mr. Shar said. “We hope the embankment won’t break. We are praying.”
Nearly five million people have been displaced from the worst flooding ever recorded in Pakistan. Hundreds of thousands are being housed in orderly tented camps set up in army compounds, schools and other public buildings, but thousands more are living on roadsides and canal embankments, spreading out mats under the trees or making shade over the simple rope beds they brought with them.
******
There is a related video linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/23/world ... ?th&emc=th
August 22, 2010
Severe Flooding Hits Northeast China
By DAVID BARBOZA
SHANGHAI — More than 250,000 people were evacuated in northeastern China over the weekend after torrential rains battered the area and led to severe flooding along the border with North Korea, Chinese state media reported on Monday.
The government said that four people were killed and one was missing near the port city of Dandong in the northeastern province of Liaoning after some of the worst flooding to hit the region in decades.
Emergency crews worked beginning Saturday into Sunday to move the estimated 253,500 people, the Xinhua news agency reported.
China has been suffering from severe flooding in various parts of the country for months, and is still trying to cope with massive mudslides that killed at least 1,400 people this month in Gansu Province, in the northwestern part of the country.
The heavy rains in North China over the weekend flooded the Yalu River, which separates China from North Korea, forcing the river to breach its banks, China’s state-run news media reported.
In North Korea, flooding submerged much of Sinuiju. The North Korean state-run media said Sunday that the country’s leader, Kim Jong-il, had mobilized military forces to rescue and evacuate thousands of North Koreans from floods that hit Sinuiju, the isolated country’s major trading gate on its border with China.
The North’s Korean Central News Agency said that about a foot of rain had fallen around Sinuiju from midnight until 9 a.m. Saturday. The agency reported “severe damage” and said that 5,150 people had been evacuated to higher ground. It reported no deaths.
Sinuiju forms a vital lifeline for the North’s impoverished economy. Much of the country’s land traffic with China, its main trading partner, travels trough Sinuiju.
Since the mid-1990s, North Korea’s agricultural sector has often been devastated by both floods and drought. After decades of denuding its hills for firewood, North Korea remains vulnerable to landslides and flash floods.
In the Chinese province of Liaoning, the floodwaters damaged five border cities, destroying or damaging thousands of homes and buildings and causing at least $100 million in losses, the government said.
The heavy rains began pounding Liaoning Province on Thursday and did not let up until Saturday. But, the government said Sunday, another wave of heavy rains was expected to worsen the situation.
Choe Sang-hun contributed reporting from Seoul.
September 7, 2010, 11:05 am
In Earthquakes, Poverty, Population and Motion Matter
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
David Alexander/NZPA, via Associated Press
Dean Marshall, left, and Shaun Stockman assessed damage to buildings they own in downtown Christchurch.There are plenty of reasons damage and deaths from the 7.1-magnitude earthquake that struck near Christchurch, New Zealand, on Saturday utterly paled compared to the absolute devastation wrought by the 7.0-magnitude quake near Port-au-Prince, Haiti. I sent a query about the different outcomes in Christchuch, Haiti (and Chile) to a half dozen engineers and geologists working on earthquake preparedness and design and you can read some of their observations below.
Here are some of the main points:
- Poverty kills.
- Not all earthquakes of the same magnitude have the same destructive force. Ground motion is a critical factor. Check the two charts below for a comparison of the motion of the earth in New Zealand and Haiti. No competition.
- Communities and countries that have frequent low-level seismic activity (New Zealand, Japan, California) tend to have better construction standards and preparation than those where quakes are devastating, but rare (Haiti, the Pacific Northwest).
Below you can compare tables showing the intensity of ground motion in communities around the epicenters in New Zealand and Haiti. Click here for descriptions of the rankings. Basically red and orange are very bad. (Santiago Pujol of Purdue University sent the charts, which are from the U.S. Geological Survey.) Also look at the populations in the two quake’s danger zones.
New Zealand:
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/ ... n&emc=tya3
In Earthquakes, Poverty, Population and Motion Matter
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
David Alexander/NZPA, via Associated Press
Dean Marshall, left, and Shaun Stockman assessed damage to buildings they own in downtown Christchurch.There are plenty of reasons damage and deaths from the 7.1-magnitude earthquake that struck near Christchurch, New Zealand, on Saturday utterly paled compared to the absolute devastation wrought by the 7.0-magnitude quake near Port-au-Prince, Haiti. I sent a query about the different outcomes in Christchuch, Haiti (and Chile) to a half dozen engineers and geologists working on earthquake preparedness and design and you can read some of their observations below.
Here are some of the main points:
- Poverty kills.
- Not all earthquakes of the same magnitude have the same destructive force. Ground motion is a critical factor. Check the two charts below for a comparison of the motion of the earth in New Zealand and Haiti. No competition.
- Communities and countries that have frequent low-level seismic activity (New Zealand, Japan, California) tend to have better construction standards and preparation than those where quakes are devastating, but rare (Haiti, the Pacific Northwest).
Below you can compare tables showing the intensity of ground motion in communities around the epicenters in New Zealand and Haiti. Click here for descriptions of the rankings. Basically red and orange are very bad. (Santiago Pujol of Purdue University sent the charts, which are from the U.S. Geological Survey.) Also look at the populations in the two quake’s danger zones.
New Zealand:
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/ ... n&emc=tya3
After the storm: A dispatch from Pakistan
This is the fourth in a series of commentaries contributed by the Pneumococcal Awareness Council of Experts (PACE). PACE is working to ensure that existing safe and effective vaccines for pneumonia—the world’s leading childhood killer—reach all of the children who need them
Heavy media coverage of the recent MDG Summit in New York has meant that many people who don’t keep close tabs on global health issues are now aware of the realities facing the world’s poorest people. The Summit highlighted the need for many things, including immediate action and a longer-term plan to ensure sustainable access to food, clean water, sanitation, medical care, immunization and housing in the developing world.
From my base in Pakistan, this sums up exactly what we need. The flooding that began in July was the single worst disaster in my country’s history. The statistics are beyond comprehension. The number of people who remain displaced from their homes is roughly equal to the population of Australia. At one point, 20 percent of the country—including more than a third of the province of Sindh—was underwater, with almost 7 million people displaced from their homes. Although this story has fallen off the front pages, the situation remains devastating, the health system in most affected areas destroyed, and for millions of men, women and children, exposed to extraordinary risks of undernutrition and disease.
As the floodwaters recede, it is evident that the disaster has affected the poorest of the poor and many communities have lost everything: their homes, crops and livestock. The communal infrastructure is also gone—including roads, hospitals and schools—and in most places, the environmental damage and soil conditions will make rebuilding livelihoods and planting crops huge challenges. Given the high probability of waterborne and airborne disease outbreaks, vaccinations against pneumonia and diarrheal disease and appropriate case management can truly save lives. Immunizations are unique in that they continue to protect people even when they are at their most vulnerable.
Although the Summit has come to an end, the issues it has brought both in terms of immediate interventions and long-term planning are of dire importance in my country. The US Fund for UNICEF referred to the aftermath of the flood as “the worst humanitarian crisis the international community has ever faced” and the Gates Foundation echoed the call that much more support is needed to help Pakistan recover. Encouragingly, The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria’s recent commitment to help rebuild Pakistan’s health system demonstrates that leading organizations are embracing smart tactics that will help my country recover.
In resource-poor settings such as these, where disasters have destroyed or crippled local medical resources, vaccinations become even more important to saving children’s lives. In the case of pneumonia, the world’s leading killer of children, the majority of deaths can be prevented through the use of safe and effective vaccines for the leading childhood killers. Children in Pakistan who have already been immunized received a lifetime of protection, while those who have not and now contract the deadly disease in the weeks and months after the flood will struggle to find timely medical treatment. Vaccination is a critical part of a broader health strategy and I hope you will do all that you can to secure the funding, technical know-how and political will to protect the lives of millions of children against disease.
I have spent my career in global health, but being in Pakistan providing support in the aftermath of the flooding has been one of the most difficult tasks I have ever undertaken. And were it not for the heroic work of Pakistan’s armed forces and many civic-society organizations, the death toll would have been even higher. Recovery will be a long road but -– with your help -– Pakistan’s people will not walk it alone.
Zulfiqar Bhutta is the Founding Chair of the Division of Women & Child Health at Aga Khan University in Pakistan and a member of the Pneumococcal Awareness Council of Experts (PACE).
http://www.one.org/blog/2010/10/07/afte ... -pakistan/
This is the fourth in a series of commentaries contributed by the Pneumococcal Awareness Council of Experts (PACE). PACE is working to ensure that existing safe and effective vaccines for pneumonia—the world’s leading childhood killer—reach all of the children who need them
Heavy media coverage of the recent MDG Summit in New York has meant that many people who don’t keep close tabs on global health issues are now aware of the realities facing the world’s poorest people. The Summit highlighted the need for many things, including immediate action and a longer-term plan to ensure sustainable access to food, clean water, sanitation, medical care, immunization and housing in the developing world.
From my base in Pakistan, this sums up exactly what we need. The flooding that began in July was the single worst disaster in my country’s history. The statistics are beyond comprehension. The number of people who remain displaced from their homes is roughly equal to the population of Australia. At one point, 20 percent of the country—including more than a third of the province of Sindh—was underwater, with almost 7 million people displaced from their homes. Although this story has fallen off the front pages, the situation remains devastating, the health system in most affected areas destroyed, and for millions of men, women and children, exposed to extraordinary risks of undernutrition and disease.
As the floodwaters recede, it is evident that the disaster has affected the poorest of the poor and many communities have lost everything: their homes, crops and livestock. The communal infrastructure is also gone—including roads, hospitals and schools—and in most places, the environmental damage and soil conditions will make rebuilding livelihoods and planting crops huge challenges. Given the high probability of waterborne and airborne disease outbreaks, vaccinations against pneumonia and diarrheal disease and appropriate case management can truly save lives. Immunizations are unique in that they continue to protect people even when they are at their most vulnerable.
Although the Summit has come to an end, the issues it has brought both in terms of immediate interventions and long-term planning are of dire importance in my country. The US Fund for UNICEF referred to the aftermath of the flood as “the worst humanitarian crisis the international community has ever faced” and the Gates Foundation echoed the call that much more support is needed to help Pakistan recover. Encouragingly, The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria’s recent commitment to help rebuild Pakistan’s health system demonstrates that leading organizations are embracing smart tactics that will help my country recover.
In resource-poor settings such as these, where disasters have destroyed or crippled local medical resources, vaccinations become even more important to saving children’s lives. In the case of pneumonia, the world’s leading killer of children, the majority of deaths can be prevented through the use of safe and effective vaccines for the leading childhood killers. Children in Pakistan who have already been immunized received a lifetime of protection, while those who have not and now contract the deadly disease in the weeks and months after the flood will struggle to find timely medical treatment. Vaccination is a critical part of a broader health strategy and I hope you will do all that you can to secure the funding, technical know-how and political will to protect the lives of millions of children against disease.
I have spent my career in global health, but being in Pakistan providing support in the aftermath of the flooding has been one of the most difficult tasks I have ever undertaken. And were it not for the heroic work of Pakistan’s armed forces and many civic-society organizations, the death toll would have been even higher. Recovery will be a long road but -– with your help -– Pakistan’s people will not walk it alone.
Zulfiqar Bhutta is the Founding Chair of the Division of Women & Child Health at Aga Khan University in Pakistan and a member of the Pneumococcal Awareness Council of Experts (PACE).
http://www.one.org/blog/2010/10/07/afte ... -pakistan/