Is Your Town Threatened by Floods or Fires? Consider a ‘Managed Retreat.’
After suffering back-to-back floods in 1993, the town of Valmeyer, Ill., did something unusual. Instead of risking yet another disaster, it used funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the state of Illinois to move the entire town a few miles away to higher ground.
As the climate continues to change, more and more communities will contemplate taking actions like Valmeyer’s. Rather than merely build levees or weatherize homes, communities will purposefully move away from places threatened by floods, droughts, fires or high temperatures.
This strategy is known as managed retreat. It is often considered an extreme option to be pursued only when no other alternatives remain. People don’t want to move from their homes, especially when environmental conditions, even if worsening, have not yet made life unlivable.
But managed retreat should be considered more often and in more innovative forms. Most adaptations to climate change involve both upsides and downsides: A home on stilts may reduce flood risks but restrict access for a person with limited mobility; air conditioning may keep some people cool but lead to untenable energy bills for others. While conversations about managed retreat tend to focus on its downsides, it can offer significant benefits if it’s done intelligently and with the necessary resources, as we argue in a recent article in the journal Science.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/16/opin ... 778d3e6de3
NATURAL DISASTERS
Smoke from a fire in Washington State wafted over the Snake River into Idaho earlier this month.Credit...
The Great Outdoors Is Giving Way to the Great Indoors
MISSOULA, Mont. — “I wouldn’t go out without an N95 mask,” an oncology nurse told me the other day. She wasn’t referring to Covid-19 protections. Cases here remain quite low. I’m vaccinated. Besides, I wasn’t planning to be indoors. It was for the smoke.
The nurse was responding to a question I posed on Twitter last week as the air quality in my town degraded before my eyes, from “moderate” to “unhealthy for sensitive groups” to plain “unhealthy.” I had planned to enjoy a midmorning trail run through the valley, usually one of the perks of summer in Montana. But when I opened the door, it smelled like a campfire.
The hills just across the valley were faint through the gauzy haze. After 18 months of worrying about masking and health risks from being indoors, I now wondered the reverse. Was it safe to exercise outside?
I went for my run, but I paid for it. I didn’t breathe the air, I chewed it. For the next day, I had a smoke hangover, marked by a dull headache, light wheeze, and a strange, bone-deep fatigue. But you don’t have to exercise to feel smoke malaise. My partner and I wake up cranky each morning and we seem to argue more lately over silly things. My neighbors have reported red, itchy eyes, greasy hair, and gnawing sinus pain just walking outside. As Covid’s Delta variant sweeps the country, Westerners have a new game to play: Smoke or Covid?
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/25/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Lovely Weather Defined California. What Happens When It’s Gone?
PALO ALTO, Calif. — Hollywood should have been in New Jersey. It was, after all, in that unglitzy state that Thomas Edison invented the Kinetograph and Kinetoscope, his cost-effective motion-picture camera and its companion viewer. And it was there that moviemaking took off; until the 1910s, many of the biggest hits of the day — “Jack and the Beanstalk,” for instance, or “The Great Train Robbery” — were produced in New Jersey and New York, many by Edison’s own company.
Yet by the end of that decade, the budding film industry had packed up and moved to California. Why? Scholars cite several reasons, but most accounts include an obvious one. The earliest movie cameras required lots of light, so films were often shot outdoors or on open-air sets. Unlike the gloomy Northeast, Southern California offered filmmakers year-round sun and a diversity of striking landscapes on which to dream up celluloid worlds — oceans, deserts and mountains within easy reach, glory wherever you looked.
In other words, Hollywood is in Hollywood rather than in West Orange, N.J., for many of the same reasons that California’s Central Valley produces about a quarter of the nation’s food, and why the Beach Boys wished for all of America to be like “Californi-a.” It’s why John Muir, looking from the summit of the Pacheco Pass, described a landscape that appeared “wholly composed” of light, “the most beautiful I have ever beheld.”
And it is the same reason that a lot of Californians first came here, and the reason so many of us, despite everything, still can’t help but stay: sunshine and natural splendor. We are hooked not just on California’s weather, pleasantly temperate and accommodating to seemingly any pursuit, but also the way life here feels defined just as much by what’s outdoors as what’s in.
A state that lives by nature, though, risks dying by it, too. In the last few years, as California battled heat waves and drought and fire, intensifying as the planet warms, I have found myself wondering about my home state’s future and, in a deeper sense, its purpose.
Is California still California when our weather becomes an adversary rather than an ally? What is California for when summertime, the season in which the Golden State once found its fullest luster, turns from heaven into hell?
Because that’s how I’ve come to think of late summer and fall here nowadays. Seven of the 10 largest wildfires in California history have occurred in the last three years. This fire season has already put an entry in the books. The Dixie Fire, which has been raging for nearly a month near Lassen National Forest, is already the second largest fire in the state’s history; it has consumed nearly half a million acres and destroyed hundreds of structures, and it’s only 25 percent contained.
Smoke from the Dixie Fire and other blazes this summer has blown more than a thousand miles away, choking the air in Denver and Salt Lake City. In the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live, the air has so far remained short of noxious, but nobody I know is expecting it to remain that way. As they did last year, face masks will soon likely serve a dual purpose for Californians — wear one indoors to evade the virus, and wear one outdoors to filter out smoke and raining ash.
I don’t mean to claim special hardship for my state; the weather is turning vengeful across the planet, not just in California. It is true, too, that wondrous as it often is here, California has never been exempt from bad weather and natural disasters. In an essay about the dry and dangerous Santa Ana winds that periodically blow through Southern California, Joan Didion described its climate as characterized by “infrequent but violent extremes.” Weather in Los Angeles, she wrote, “is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse.”
That strikes me as correct. Growing up in Orange County, I often saw headlines about drought and mudslides, fires here and there, El Niño, the Santa Anas. It was a place where the earth could never quite be trusted — you were to never forget that at any moment the ground beneath your feet could erupt in violent tremor, and everything around you might be destroyed in an instant.
What’s different about nature in California now is not the kind of disasters we face, but rather the regularity. The violent extremes are no longer infrequent — they are commonplace, expected. The weather of catastrophe and apocalypse is not freak; it is just the weather.
People who study California sometimes talk about the “weather tax.” Life in this state can be frustrating — it’s expensive, it’s clogged with traffic, taxes are high, inequality levels are among the worst in the nation. But maybe that’s just the price you’ve got to pay for amazing weather.
In 2015, pollsters at the University of Southern California and The Los Angeles Times asked people whether they’re likely to remain in California, and if so, why. Although respondents cited a litany of problems, more than 70 percent said they’d rather live here than anywhere else. The top reason, by far, was the weather. Life here may be tough, but people seemed willing to endure a lot to live in a place where it was so nice outside.
But the importance we place on pleasant weather is exactly why an altered climate could be so devastating to this state’s identity. The Mamas & the Papas sang of California as an escapist dreamland untouched by gloom. You’d be safe and warm if you were in L.A.
Not long from now, Los Angeles and elsewhere here might be more nightmare than dream — way too warm and none too safe, all the leaves burned, the sky ash gray.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/11/opin ... 778d3e6de3
PALO ALTO, Calif. — Hollywood should have been in New Jersey. It was, after all, in that unglitzy state that Thomas Edison invented the Kinetograph and Kinetoscope, his cost-effective motion-picture camera and its companion viewer. And it was there that moviemaking took off; until the 1910s, many of the biggest hits of the day — “Jack and the Beanstalk,” for instance, or “The Great Train Robbery” — were produced in New Jersey and New York, many by Edison’s own company.
Yet by the end of that decade, the budding film industry had packed up and moved to California. Why? Scholars cite several reasons, but most accounts include an obvious one. The earliest movie cameras required lots of light, so films were often shot outdoors or on open-air sets. Unlike the gloomy Northeast, Southern California offered filmmakers year-round sun and a diversity of striking landscapes on which to dream up celluloid worlds — oceans, deserts and mountains within easy reach, glory wherever you looked.
In other words, Hollywood is in Hollywood rather than in West Orange, N.J., for many of the same reasons that California’s Central Valley produces about a quarter of the nation’s food, and why the Beach Boys wished for all of America to be like “Californi-a.” It’s why John Muir, looking from the summit of the Pacheco Pass, described a landscape that appeared “wholly composed” of light, “the most beautiful I have ever beheld.”
And it is the same reason that a lot of Californians first came here, and the reason so many of us, despite everything, still can’t help but stay: sunshine and natural splendor. We are hooked not just on California’s weather, pleasantly temperate and accommodating to seemingly any pursuit, but also the way life here feels defined just as much by what’s outdoors as what’s in.
A state that lives by nature, though, risks dying by it, too. In the last few years, as California battled heat waves and drought and fire, intensifying as the planet warms, I have found myself wondering about my home state’s future and, in a deeper sense, its purpose.
Is California still California when our weather becomes an adversary rather than an ally? What is California for when summertime, the season in which the Golden State once found its fullest luster, turns from heaven into hell?
Because that’s how I’ve come to think of late summer and fall here nowadays. Seven of the 10 largest wildfires in California history have occurred in the last three years. This fire season has already put an entry in the books. The Dixie Fire, which has been raging for nearly a month near Lassen National Forest, is already the second largest fire in the state’s history; it has consumed nearly half a million acres and destroyed hundreds of structures, and it’s only 25 percent contained.
Smoke from the Dixie Fire and other blazes this summer has blown more than a thousand miles away, choking the air in Denver and Salt Lake City. In the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live, the air has so far remained short of noxious, but nobody I know is expecting it to remain that way. As they did last year, face masks will soon likely serve a dual purpose for Californians — wear one indoors to evade the virus, and wear one outdoors to filter out smoke and raining ash.
I don’t mean to claim special hardship for my state; the weather is turning vengeful across the planet, not just in California. It is true, too, that wondrous as it often is here, California has never been exempt from bad weather and natural disasters. In an essay about the dry and dangerous Santa Ana winds that periodically blow through Southern California, Joan Didion described its climate as characterized by “infrequent but violent extremes.” Weather in Los Angeles, she wrote, “is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse.”
That strikes me as correct. Growing up in Orange County, I often saw headlines about drought and mudslides, fires here and there, El Niño, the Santa Anas. It was a place where the earth could never quite be trusted — you were to never forget that at any moment the ground beneath your feet could erupt in violent tremor, and everything around you might be destroyed in an instant.
What’s different about nature in California now is not the kind of disasters we face, but rather the regularity. The violent extremes are no longer infrequent — they are commonplace, expected. The weather of catastrophe and apocalypse is not freak; it is just the weather.
People who study California sometimes talk about the “weather tax.” Life in this state can be frustrating — it’s expensive, it’s clogged with traffic, taxes are high, inequality levels are among the worst in the nation. But maybe that’s just the price you’ve got to pay for amazing weather.
In 2015, pollsters at the University of Southern California and The Los Angeles Times asked people whether they’re likely to remain in California, and if so, why. Although respondents cited a litany of problems, more than 70 percent said they’d rather live here than anywhere else. The top reason, by far, was the weather. Life here may be tough, but people seemed willing to endure a lot to live in a place where it was so nice outside.
But the importance we place on pleasant weather is exactly why an altered climate could be so devastating to this state’s identity. The Mamas & the Papas sang of California as an escapist dreamland untouched by gloom. You’d be safe and warm if you were in L.A.
Not long from now, Los Angeles and elsewhere here might be more nightmare than dream — way too warm and none too safe, all the leaves burned, the sky ash gray.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/11/opin ... 778d3e6de3
A giant space rock demolished an ancient Middle Eastern city and everyone in it – possibly inspiring the Biblical story of Sodom
Christopher R. Moore, Archaeologist and Special Projects Director at the Savannah River Archaeological Research Program and South Carolina Institute for Archaeology and Anthropology, University of South Carolina
Mon, September 20, 2021, 5:48 AM
As the inhabitants of an ancient Middle Eastern city now called Tall el-Hammam went about their daily business one day about 3,600 years ago, they had no idea an unseen icy space rock was speeding toward them at about 38,000 mph (61,000 kph).
Flashing through the atmosphere, the rock exploded in a massive fireball about 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) above the ground. The blast was around 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. The shocked city dwellers who stared at it were blinded instantly. Air temperatures rapidly rose above 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit (2,000 degrees Celsius). Clothing and wood immediately burst into flames. Swords, spears, mudbricks and pottery began to melt. Almost immediately, the entire city was on fire.
Some seconds later, a massive shockwave smashed into the city. Moving at about 740 mph (1,200 kph), it was more powerful than the worst tornado ever recorded. The deadly winds ripped through the city, demolishing every building. They sheared off the top 40 feet (12 m) of the 4-story palace and blew the jumbled debris into the next valley. None of the 8,000 people or any animals within the city survived – their bodies were torn apart and their bones blasted into small fragments.
About a minute later, 14 miles (22 km) to the west of Tall el-Hammam, winds from the blast hit the biblical city of Jericho. Jericho’s walls came tumbling down and the city burned to the ground.
It all sounds like the climax of an edge-of-your-seat Hollywood disaster movie. How do we know that all of this actually happened near the Dead Sea in Jordan millennia ago?
Getting answers required nearly 15 years of painstaking excavations by hundreds of people. It also involved detailed analyses of excavated material by more than two dozen scientists in 10 states in the U.S., as well as Canada and the Czech Republic. When our group finally published the evidence recently in the journal Scientific Reports, the 21 co-authors included archaeologists, geologists, geochemists, geomorphologists, mineralogists, paleobotanists, sedimentologists, cosmic-impact experts and medical doctors.
Firestorm throughout the city
Years ago, when archaeologists looked out over excavations of the ruined city, they could see a dark, roughly 5-foot-thick (1.5 m) jumbled layer of charcoal, ash, melted mudbricks and melted pottery. It was obvious that an intense firestorm had destroyed this city long ago. This dark band came to be called the destruction layer.
No one was exactly sure what had happened, but that layer wasn’t caused by a volcano, earthquake or warfare. None of them are capable of melting metal, mudbricks and pottery.
To figure out what could, our group used the Online Impact Calculator to model scenarios that fit the evidence. Built by impact experts, this calculator allows researchers to estimate the many details of a cosmic impact event, based on known impact events and nuclear detonations.
It appears that the culprit at Tall el-Hammam was a small asteroid similar to the one that knocked down 80 million trees in Tunguska, Russia in 1908. It would have been a much smaller version of the giant miles-wide rock that pushed the dinosaurs into extinction 65 million ago.
We had a likely culprit. Now we needed proof of what happened that day at Tall el-Hammam.
Finding ‘diamonds’ in the dirt
Our research revealed a remarkably broad array of evidence.
At the site, there are finely fractured sand grains called shocked quartz that only form at 725,000 pounds per square inch of pressure (5 gigapascals) – imagine six 68-ton Abrams military tanks stacked on your thumb.
The destruction layer also contains tiny diamonoids that, as the name indicates, are as hard as diamonds. Each one is smaller than a flu virus. It appears that wood and plants in the area were instantly turned into this diamond-like material by the fireball’s high pressures and temperatures.
Experiments with laboratory furnaces showed that the bubbled pottery and mudbricks at Tall el-Hammam liquefied at temperatures above 2,700 F (1,500 C). That’s hot enough to melt an automobile within minutes.
The destruction layer also contains tiny balls of melted material smaller than airborne dust particles. Called spherules, they are made of vaporized iron and sand that melted at about 2,900 F (1,590 C).
In addition, the surfaces of the pottery and meltglass are speckled with tiny melted metallic grains, including iridium with a melting point of 4,435 F (2,466 C), platinum that melts at 3,215 F (1,768 C) and zirconium silicate at 2,800 F (1,540 C).
Together, all this evidence shows that temperatures in the city rose higher than those of volcanoes, warfare and normal city fires. The only natural process left is a cosmic impact.
The same evidence is found at known impact sites, such as Tunguska and the Chicxulub crater, created by the asteroid that triggered the dinosaur extinction.
One remaining puzzle is why the city and over 100 other area settlements were abandoned for several centuries after this devastation. It may be that high levels of salt deposited during the impact event made it impossible to grow crops. We’re not certain yet, but we think the explosion may have vaporized or splashed toxic levels of Dead Sea salt water across the valley. Without crops, no one could live in the valley for up to 600 years, until the minimal rainfall in this desert-like climate washed the salt out of the fields.
Was there a surviving eyewitness to the blast?
It’s possible that an oral description of the city’s destruction may have been handed down for generations until it was recorded as the story of Biblical Sodom. The Bible describes the devastation of an urban center near the Dead Sea – stones and fire fell from the sky, more than one city was destroyed, thick smoke rose from the fires and city inhabitants were killed.
Could this be an ancient eyewitness account? If so, the destruction of Tall el-Hammam may be the second-oldest destruction of a human settlement by a cosmic impact event, after the village of Abu Hureyra in Syria about 12,800 years ago. Importantly, it may the first written record of such a catastrophic event.
The scary thing is, it almost certainly won’t be the last time a human city meets this fate.
Tunguska-sized airbursts, such as the one that occurred at Tall el-Hammam, can devastate entire cities and regions, and they pose a severe modern-day hazard. As of September 2021, there are more than 26,000 known near-Earth asteroids and a hundred short-period near-Earth comets. One will inevitably crash into the Earth. Millions more remain undetected, and some may be headed toward the Earth now.
Unless orbiting or ground-based telescopes detect these rogue objects, the world may have no warning, just like the people of Tall el-Hammam.
This article was co-authored by research collaborators archaeologist Phil Silvia, geophysicist Allen West, geologist Ted Bunch and space physicist Malcolm LeCompte.
This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Christopher R. Moore, University of South Carolina.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/gi ... 34793.html
Christopher R. Moore, Archaeologist and Special Projects Director at the Savannah River Archaeological Research Program and South Carolina Institute for Archaeology and Anthropology, University of South Carolina
Mon, September 20, 2021, 5:48 AM
As the inhabitants of an ancient Middle Eastern city now called Tall el-Hammam went about their daily business one day about 3,600 years ago, they had no idea an unseen icy space rock was speeding toward them at about 38,000 mph (61,000 kph).
Flashing through the atmosphere, the rock exploded in a massive fireball about 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) above the ground. The blast was around 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. The shocked city dwellers who stared at it were blinded instantly. Air temperatures rapidly rose above 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit (2,000 degrees Celsius). Clothing and wood immediately burst into flames. Swords, spears, mudbricks and pottery began to melt. Almost immediately, the entire city was on fire.
Some seconds later, a massive shockwave smashed into the city. Moving at about 740 mph (1,200 kph), it was more powerful than the worst tornado ever recorded. The deadly winds ripped through the city, demolishing every building. They sheared off the top 40 feet (12 m) of the 4-story palace and blew the jumbled debris into the next valley. None of the 8,000 people or any animals within the city survived – their bodies were torn apart and their bones blasted into small fragments.
About a minute later, 14 miles (22 km) to the west of Tall el-Hammam, winds from the blast hit the biblical city of Jericho. Jericho’s walls came tumbling down and the city burned to the ground.
It all sounds like the climax of an edge-of-your-seat Hollywood disaster movie. How do we know that all of this actually happened near the Dead Sea in Jordan millennia ago?
Getting answers required nearly 15 years of painstaking excavations by hundreds of people. It also involved detailed analyses of excavated material by more than two dozen scientists in 10 states in the U.S., as well as Canada and the Czech Republic. When our group finally published the evidence recently in the journal Scientific Reports, the 21 co-authors included archaeologists, geologists, geochemists, geomorphologists, mineralogists, paleobotanists, sedimentologists, cosmic-impact experts and medical doctors.
Firestorm throughout the city
Years ago, when archaeologists looked out over excavations of the ruined city, they could see a dark, roughly 5-foot-thick (1.5 m) jumbled layer of charcoal, ash, melted mudbricks and melted pottery. It was obvious that an intense firestorm had destroyed this city long ago. This dark band came to be called the destruction layer.
No one was exactly sure what had happened, but that layer wasn’t caused by a volcano, earthquake or warfare. None of them are capable of melting metal, mudbricks and pottery.
To figure out what could, our group used the Online Impact Calculator to model scenarios that fit the evidence. Built by impact experts, this calculator allows researchers to estimate the many details of a cosmic impact event, based on known impact events and nuclear detonations.
It appears that the culprit at Tall el-Hammam was a small asteroid similar to the one that knocked down 80 million trees in Tunguska, Russia in 1908. It would have been a much smaller version of the giant miles-wide rock that pushed the dinosaurs into extinction 65 million ago.
We had a likely culprit. Now we needed proof of what happened that day at Tall el-Hammam.
Finding ‘diamonds’ in the dirt
Our research revealed a remarkably broad array of evidence.
At the site, there are finely fractured sand grains called shocked quartz that only form at 725,000 pounds per square inch of pressure (5 gigapascals) – imagine six 68-ton Abrams military tanks stacked on your thumb.
The destruction layer also contains tiny diamonoids that, as the name indicates, are as hard as diamonds. Each one is smaller than a flu virus. It appears that wood and plants in the area were instantly turned into this diamond-like material by the fireball’s high pressures and temperatures.
Experiments with laboratory furnaces showed that the bubbled pottery and mudbricks at Tall el-Hammam liquefied at temperatures above 2,700 F (1,500 C). That’s hot enough to melt an automobile within minutes.
The destruction layer also contains tiny balls of melted material smaller than airborne dust particles. Called spherules, they are made of vaporized iron and sand that melted at about 2,900 F (1,590 C).
In addition, the surfaces of the pottery and meltglass are speckled with tiny melted metallic grains, including iridium with a melting point of 4,435 F (2,466 C), platinum that melts at 3,215 F (1,768 C) and zirconium silicate at 2,800 F (1,540 C).
Together, all this evidence shows that temperatures in the city rose higher than those of volcanoes, warfare and normal city fires. The only natural process left is a cosmic impact.
The same evidence is found at known impact sites, such as Tunguska and the Chicxulub crater, created by the asteroid that triggered the dinosaur extinction.
One remaining puzzle is why the city and over 100 other area settlements were abandoned for several centuries after this devastation. It may be that high levels of salt deposited during the impact event made it impossible to grow crops. We’re not certain yet, but we think the explosion may have vaporized or splashed toxic levels of Dead Sea salt water across the valley. Without crops, no one could live in the valley for up to 600 years, until the minimal rainfall in this desert-like climate washed the salt out of the fields.
Was there a surviving eyewitness to the blast?
It’s possible that an oral description of the city’s destruction may have been handed down for generations until it was recorded as the story of Biblical Sodom. The Bible describes the devastation of an urban center near the Dead Sea – stones and fire fell from the sky, more than one city was destroyed, thick smoke rose from the fires and city inhabitants were killed.
Could this be an ancient eyewitness account? If so, the destruction of Tall el-Hammam may be the second-oldest destruction of a human settlement by a cosmic impact event, after the village of Abu Hureyra in Syria about 12,800 years ago. Importantly, it may the first written record of such a catastrophic event.
The scary thing is, it almost certainly won’t be the last time a human city meets this fate.
Tunguska-sized airbursts, such as the one that occurred at Tall el-Hammam, can devastate entire cities and regions, and they pose a severe modern-day hazard. As of September 2021, there are more than 26,000 known near-Earth asteroids and a hundred short-period near-Earth comets. One will inevitably crash into the Earth. Millions more remain undetected, and some may be headed toward the Earth now.
Unless orbiting or ground-based telescopes detect these rogue objects, the world may have no warning, just like the people of Tall el-Hammam.
This article was co-authored by research collaborators archaeologist Phil Silvia, geophysicist Allen West, geologist Ted Bunch and space physicist Malcolm LeCompte.
This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit news site dedicated to sharing ideas from academic experts. It was written by: Christopher R. Moore, University of South Carolina.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/gi ... 34793.html
They Said the Tornado Would Hit at 9:30. It Hit at 9:30.
Scientists have reached success rates of nearly 100 percent in predicting when and where violent tornadoes will strike. That hasn’t stopped people from being killed in the ferocious winds.
Morgan Jackson, a cashier at Casey’s General Store, a gas station in Mayfield, Ky., checked the weather all day Friday as her phone bleeped with loud alerts, friends and family called to compare notes and customers chatted incessantly about the tornadoes that were likely to head their way.
“We all knew the storm was going to hit,” she said. “There’s no way a single person here didn’t know the storm was coming.”
For residents of Mayfield subjected to the flurry of alerts and text messages, the urgent pleadings of television meteorologists and the barrage of warnings on social media, one thing has been clear: This was not a tornado that came without warning.
Ms. Jackson said she was surprised by how accurately forecasters had pegged the timing of the tornado, one of several that swept through Kentucky that night. “They said it would hit at 9:30 and it hit at 9:30,” she said.
Weather prediction technology has become so precise in recent years that tornadoes are almost always foreseen, a vast, if somewhat unheralded, improvement in forecasting.
In the late 1980s, before the use of Doppler radar and other technologies, meteorologists were able to issue warnings for 46 of 88 violent tornadoes in the United States, or just more than half, federal data shows. In recent years, powerful tornadoes have been preceded by warnings 97 percent of the time.
Yet despite the advances in forecasting, tornadoes that strike continue to have deadly consequences — whether because of poor decisions, weak construction or just bad luck. The storms that hit on Friday and Saturday left at least 88 people dead in five states.
“People got the warning but we are still left with the question of why people died,” said Stephen M. Strader, a professor at Villanova University who studies disasters. “Something else failed them.”
Unlike hurricanes, tornado warnings come with a much shorter lead time: around 15 to 18 minutes on average. Friday’s tornadoes had better-than-usual warning times, in some cases three times as long.
But when tornadoes strike at night, as they did last week, residents are more likely to miss the warnings. Tornadoes at night are 2.5 times as likely to result in fatalities, research shows.
The tornado that ravaged western Kentucky was a monster, an EF-3 storm with winds of 136 to 165 miles per hour. With a footprint of up to three-quarters of a mile wide, it shredded warehouses and houses along a path of more than 220 miles.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/14/us/t ... 778d3e6de3
Scientists have reached success rates of nearly 100 percent in predicting when and where violent tornadoes will strike. That hasn’t stopped people from being killed in the ferocious winds.
Morgan Jackson, a cashier at Casey’s General Store, a gas station in Mayfield, Ky., checked the weather all day Friday as her phone bleeped with loud alerts, friends and family called to compare notes and customers chatted incessantly about the tornadoes that were likely to head their way.
“We all knew the storm was going to hit,” she said. “There’s no way a single person here didn’t know the storm was coming.”
For residents of Mayfield subjected to the flurry of alerts and text messages, the urgent pleadings of television meteorologists and the barrage of warnings on social media, one thing has been clear: This was not a tornado that came without warning.
Ms. Jackson said she was surprised by how accurately forecasters had pegged the timing of the tornado, one of several that swept through Kentucky that night. “They said it would hit at 9:30 and it hit at 9:30,” she said.
Weather prediction technology has become so precise in recent years that tornadoes are almost always foreseen, a vast, if somewhat unheralded, improvement in forecasting.
In the late 1980s, before the use of Doppler radar and other technologies, meteorologists were able to issue warnings for 46 of 88 violent tornadoes in the United States, or just more than half, federal data shows. In recent years, powerful tornadoes have been preceded by warnings 97 percent of the time.
Yet despite the advances in forecasting, tornadoes that strike continue to have deadly consequences — whether because of poor decisions, weak construction or just bad luck. The storms that hit on Friday and Saturday left at least 88 people dead in five states.
“People got the warning but we are still left with the question of why people died,” said Stephen M. Strader, a professor at Villanova University who studies disasters. “Something else failed them.”
Unlike hurricanes, tornado warnings come with a much shorter lead time: around 15 to 18 minutes on average. Friday’s tornadoes had better-than-usual warning times, in some cases three times as long.
But when tornadoes strike at night, as they did last week, residents are more likely to miss the warnings. Tornadoes at night are 2.5 times as likely to result in fatalities, research shows.
The tornado that ravaged western Kentucky was a monster, an EF-3 storm with winds of 136 to 165 miles per hour. With a footprint of up to three-quarters of a mile wide, it shredded warehouses and houses along a path of more than 220 miles.
More...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/14/us/t ... 778d3e6de3
At least 22 dead as heavy snow traps vehicles in Pakistan resort
Thousands affected at popular destination of Murree with eight of those killed from same family
At least 22 people have died after heavy snow trapped them in their vehicles as tens of thousands of visitors thronged Pakistan’s hill town of Murree, officials have said.
Atiq Ahmed, an Islamabad police officer, said eight of the 22 fatalities were from the family of fellow Islamabad police officer Naveed Iqbal, who also died. All 16 died of hypothermia, officials said.
Rescue services physician Abdur Rehman said that after evacuating all of the stranded tourists from their cars, the death toll stood at 22, including 10 men, 10 children and two women.
The interior minister, sheikh Rashid Ahmed, said thousands of vehicles had been pulled from the snow but more than a thousand were still stuck in the area on Saturday.
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Murree, 28 miles (45.5km) north of the capital of Islamabad, is a popular winter resort that attracts well over a million tourists annually.
Streets leading into the city are often blocked by snow in winter.
Ahmed said more than 4ft (1.2 metres) of snow fell in the area overnight and all incoming traffic was blocked on Saturday.
The minister said paramilitary troops and a special military mountain unit had been called in to help.
“Until then no vehicle or even people on foot are allowed to enter Murree except for the emergency and rescue vehicles and those bringing food for the stuck people,” he said.
Umar Maqbool, a local administrator, said the heavy snowfall hampered rescue efforts during the night and heavy equipment brought in to clear the snow got stuck initially.
Officials gave no further details about those who had died in their stuck vehicles but said they were working on both recovery and rescue operations.
Food and blankets were distributed to the stuck tourists.
Video shared on social media showed cars packed bumper-to-bumper, with 3ft high (1 metre) piles of snow on their roofs.
“The heavy snowfall caused a traffic jam and the closure of roads,” Babar Khan, a tourist who was stranded for hours, told AFP by phone.
“Roads were also closed due to falling trees in many places.”
The website of Pakistan’s National Weather Forecasting Centre said heavy snowfall was expected in the area until Sunday afternoon. While Fawad Chaudhry, the Information minister, said “decades” of weather records had been broken in the last 48 hours.
The Punjab province chief minister’s office said the surroundings had been declared a “disaster area” and urged people to stay away.
Imran Khan, Pakistan’s prime minister, said he was shocked and upset at the tragedy.
“Unprecedented snowfall & rush of ppl proceeding without checking weather conditions caught district admin unprepared,” he tweeted.
“Have ordered inquiry & putting in place strong regulation to ensure prevention of such tragedies.”
Most streets leading to the area’s resorts were largely cleared of snow later on Saturday but some work was still being done, Maqbool said. Military troops and machines were working to clear all the streets and the military established relief camps at army run schools that provided shelter and food.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/ ... ort-murree
******
Cold kills 16 stuck in cars in heavy snow at Pakistan resort
Deceased include eight members of the same family after their vehicles were submerged in snow, officials say.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/1/8 ... tan-resort
Thousands affected at popular destination of Murree with eight of those killed from same family
At least 22 people have died after heavy snow trapped them in their vehicles as tens of thousands of visitors thronged Pakistan’s hill town of Murree, officials have said.
Atiq Ahmed, an Islamabad police officer, said eight of the 22 fatalities were from the family of fellow Islamabad police officer Naveed Iqbal, who also died. All 16 died of hypothermia, officials said.
Rescue services physician Abdur Rehman said that after evacuating all of the stranded tourists from their cars, the death toll stood at 22, including 10 men, 10 children and two women.
The interior minister, sheikh Rashid Ahmed, said thousands of vehicles had been pulled from the snow but more than a thousand were still stuck in the area on Saturday.
Advertisement
Murree, 28 miles (45.5km) north of the capital of Islamabad, is a popular winter resort that attracts well over a million tourists annually.
Streets leading into the city are often blocked by snow in winter.
Ahmed said more than 4ft (1.2 metres) of snow fell in the area overnight and all incoming traffic was blocked on Saturday.
The minister said paramilitary troops and a special military mountain unit had been called in to help.
“Until then no vehicle or even people on foot are allowed to enter Murree except for the emergency and rescue vehicles and those bringing food for the stuck people,” he said.
Umar Maqbool, a local administrator, said the heavy snowfall hampered rescue efforts during the night and heavy equipment brought in to clear the snow got stuck initially.
Officials gave no further details about those who had died in their stuck vehicles but said they were working on both recovery and rescue operations.
Food and blankets were distributed to the stuck tourists.
Video shared on social media showed cars packed bumper-to-bumper, with 3ft high (1 metre) piles of snow on their roofs.
“The heavy snowfall caused a traffic jam and the closure of roads,” Babar Khan, a tourist who was stranded for hours, told AFP by phone.
“Roads were also closed due to falling trees in many places.”
The website of Pakistan’s National Weather Forecasting Centre said heavy snowfall was expected in the area until Sunday afternoon. While Fawad Chaudhry, the Information minister, said “decades” of weather records had been broken in the last 48 hours.
The Punjab province chief minister’s office said the surroundings had been declared a “disaster area” and urged people to stay away.
Imran Khan, Pakistan’s prime minister, said he was shocked and upset at the tragedy.
“Unprecedented snowfall & rush of ppl proceeding without checking weather conditions caught district admin unprepared,” he tweeted.
“Have ordered inquiry & putting in place strong regulation to ensure prevention of such tragedies.”
Most streets leading to the area’s resorts were largely cleared of snow later on Saturday but some work was still being done, Maqbool said. Military troops and machines were working to clear all the streets and the military established relief camps at army run schools that provided shelter and food.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/ ... ort-murree
******
Cold kills 16 stuck in cars in heavy snow at Pakistan resort
Deceased include eight members of the same family after their vehicles were submerged in snow, officials say.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/1/8 ... tan-resort
Turkmenistan's president orders closure of the 'Gateway to Hell'
Verity Bowman
Sat, January 8, 2022, 11:21 AM
"The Gateway to Hell," a huge burning gas crater in the heart of Turkmenistan's Karakum desert - AFP
Turkmenistan's strongman president has ordered the 'Gateway to Hell' to be closed as he demanded a giant desert crater that has been on fire for decades be extinguished.
President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov appeared on state television Saturday telling officials to put out the flames at the Darvaza natural gas crater in the middle of the vast Karakum desert to save valuable natural resources.
Details of its origins are sketchy, but according to local Turkmen geologists, the crater was created in 1971 during a Soviet drilling accident that hit a gas cavern, causing the drilling rig to fall in and the earth to collapse underneath it.
To prevent the dangerous fumes from spreading, the Soviets decided to burn off the gas by setting it on fire.
The pit, which is located about 260 kilometres (160 miles) north of the capital, Ashgabat, has been ablaze ever since and previous attempts to put it out have been unsuccessful.
The crater is 70 metres (229 feet) wide and 20 metres (65 feet) deep, and has become a popular site for the small number of tourists who come to the ex-Soviet country.
The fire's status was given a boost when state TV showed President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov speeding around it in an off-road truck in 2019.
But Mr Berdymukhamedov on Saturday said that the man-made crater "negatively affects both the environment and the health of the people living nearby".
"We are losing valuable natural resources for which we could get significant profits and use them for improving the well-being of our people," he said in televised remarks.
Mr Berdymukhamedov instructed officials to "find a solution to extinguish the fire".
The president of authoritarian Turkmenistan gave orders to extinguish a flaming natural gas crater.
In November 2013 Canadian explorer George Kourounis launched an expedition to its fury depths - the first ever person to do so - after a year of planning.
“The place has always fascinated me. The story behind how it came into existence has been sort of shrouded in mystery, and there's no other place like it on Earth,” he told National Geographic. “There's a lot that we can learn about this place.”
“When you first set eyes on the crater, it's like something out of a science fiction film,” he said. "When you go out over, looking straight down, it's literally like another planet, almost."
When Mr Kourounis reached the bottom he collected soil samples in an effort to learn whether life could survive in such hostile conditions elsewhere in the universe. He discovered that no one actually knows its definitive origins.
Mr Berdymukhamedov stunt speeding around the fire in 2019 is not unusual. He is known for his eccentric approach to leadership, having previously dabbled as a DJ, author and equestrian.
Mr Berdymukhamedov also made headlines when footage of him raising a hold bar during a cabinet meeting emerged before the country hosted the International Weightlifting Federation World Championship in 2020.
In 2018, the president officially renamed the crater the "Shining of Karakum".
Mr Berdymukhamedov has ruled since 2007, although rights groups have raised concerns over his leadership.
“Turkmenistan remains an extremely repressive country," said Human Rights Watch. "The government severely restricts all fundamental rights and freedoms, including freedoms of association, expression, and religion.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/tu ... 24253.html
Verity Bowman
Sat, January 8, 2022, 11:21 AM
"The Gateway to Hell," a huge burning gas crater in the heart of Turkmenistan's Karakum desert - AFP
Turkmenistan's strongman president has ordered the 'Gateway to Hell' to be closed as he demanded a giant desert crater that has been on fire for decades be extinguished.
President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov appeared on state television Saturday telling officials to put out the flames at the Darvaza natural gas crater in the middle of the vast Karakum desert to save valuable natural resources.
Details of its origins are sketchy, but according to local Turkmen geologists, the crater was created in 1971 during a Soviet drilling accident that hit a gas cavern, causing the drilling rig to fall in and the earth to collapse underneath it.
To prevent the dangerous fumes from spreading, the Soviets decided to burn off the gas by setting it on fire.
The pit, which is located about 260 kilometres (160 miles) north of the capital, Ashgabat, has been ablaze ever since and previous attempts to put it out have been unsuccessful.
The crater is 70 metres (229 feet) wide and 20 metres (65 feet) deep, and has become a popular site for the small number of tourists who come to the ex-Soviet country.
The fire's status was given a boost when state TV showed President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov speeding around it in an off-road truck in 2019.
But Mr Berdymukhamedov on Saturday said that the man-made crater "negatively affects both the environment and the health of the people living nearby".
"We are losing valuable natural resources for which we could get significant profits and use them for improving the well-being of our people," he said in televised remarks.
Mr Berdymukhamedov instructed officials to "find a solution to extinguish the fire".
The president of authoritarian Turkmenistan gave orders to extinguish a flaming natural gas crater.
In November 2013 Canadian explorer George Kourounis launched an expedition to its fury depths - the first ever person to do so - after a year of planning.
“The place has always fascinated me. The story behind how it came into existence has been sort of shrouded in mystery, and there's no other place like it on Earth,” he told National Geographic. “There's a lot that we can learn about this place.”
“When you first set eyes on the crater, it's like something out of a science fiction film,” he said. "When you go out over, looking straight down, it's literally like another planet, almost."
When Mr Kourounis reached the bottom he collected soil samples in an effort to learn whether life could survive in such hostile conditions elsewhere in the universe. He discovered that no one actually knows its definitive origins.
Mr Berdymukhamedov stunt speeding around the fire in 2019 is not unusual. He is known for his eccentric approach to leadership, having previously dabbled as a DJ, author and equestrian.
Mr Berdymukhamedov also made headlines when footage of him raising a hold bar during a cabinet meeting emerged before the country hosted the International Weightlifting Federation World Championship in 2020.
In 2018, the president officially renamed the crater the "Shining of Karakum".
Mr Berdymukhamedov has ruled since 2007, although rights groups have raised concerns over his leadership.
“Turkmenistan remains an extremely repressive country," said Human Rights Watch. "The government severely restricts all fundamental rights and freedoms, including freedoms of association, expression, and religion.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/tu ... 24253.html
Millions Displaced and Dozens Dead in Flooding in India and Bangladesh
Heavy rains have washed away towns, villages and infrastructure, as extreme weather events become more common in South Asia.
A road washed away by flooding on Thursday in the state of Assam, India.Credit...Biju Boro/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
NEW DELHI — Heavy pre-monsoon rains in India and Bangladesh have washed away train stations, towns and villages, leaving millions of people homeless as extreme weather events, including heat waves, intense rainfall and floods, become more common in South Asia.
More than 60 people have been killed in days of flooding, landslides and thunderstorms that have left many people without food and drinking water and have isolated them by cutting off the internet, according to officials.
The devastation in India’s northeast, one of the worst affected regions, has submerged railway tracks, bridges and roads. In the remote state of Assam, 31 of its 33 districts have been affected by floods, impacting the lives of more than 700,000 people, officials said on Saturday. At least 18 people have already died in the state because of floods and landslides, according to news reports.
At least 33 people were killed in the neighboring state of Bihar by lightning strikes and heavy rain in its 16 districts, Nitish Kumar, the chief minister, said on Friday.
Climate scientists have said that India and Bangladesh are particularly vulnerable to climate change because of their proximity to the warm tropical waters of the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal, which are increasingly experiencing heat waves. The rising sea temperatures have led to “dry conditions” in some parts of the Indian subcontinent and “a significant increase in rainfall” in other areas, according to a study published in January by the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune.
Climate Forward There’s an ongoing crisis — and tons of news. Our newsletter keeps you up to date. Get it in your inbox.
On Sunday, India’s meteorological department warned of “thunderstorms with lightning and very heavy rainfall” in many parts of the country’s remote northeast where the Brahmaputra, one of the world’s largest rivers, has inundated vast areas of agricultural land, villages and towns over the past couple of weeks.
The floodwaters of the Brahmaputra and other rivers have arrived with fury in Bangladesh, a low-lying nation of about 170 million people, where extreme rainfall and landslides washed away a sprawling Rohingya refugee camp overnight last year. In 2020, torrential rains submerged at least a quarter of the country.
Flooded houses on Saturday in Beanibazar, in the region of Sylhet, Bangladesh.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
About two million people have been affected in the Sylhet region, in the country’s east, in what officials describe as one of the worst floods in many years.
“We haven’t seen such a widespread flood in Sylhet for around two decades,” S.M. Shahidul Islam, a chief engineer of the Bangladesh Water Development Board, said on Sunday.
“Heavy rainfall and increased flow of floodwater through the Surma River is the main reason for this situation,” said Mr. Islam, explaining that dams in the area are unable to hold the floodwaters that have started pouring into cities.
At least 10 people have been killed in the region, most drowning after their boats capsized while they were trying to move to safer areas, officials said on Sunday. “We still are working to see if there are more casualties,” said Mosharraf Hossain, the top official in the Sylhet region.
Roads cut off by floods have made relief efforts challenging, officials say. But the devastation has left millions of people with nothing.
“The flood situation is terrible in our village in Zakiganj,” said Mahmudul Hasan, 29, who was taking shelter with six family members in Sylhet.
The family has not received any food or water, said Mr. Hasan. And he said he was constantly worried about his home. “Our house is made of mud,” he explained.
The government of Bangladesh has closed nearly 600 schools and colleges indefinitely to use them as shelters for those who have nowhere to go. At least 3,000 hectares of rice paddy fields have been consumed by the flooding, which is expected to affect the livelihoods of thousands of farmers, officials said.
Karan Deep Singh reported from New Delhi, and Saif Hasnat from Dhaka, Bangladesh.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/22/worl ... iversified
A road washed away by flooding on Thursday in the state of Assam, India.Credit...Biju Boro/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
NEW DELHI — Heavy pre-monsoon rains in India and Bangladesh have washed away train stations, towns and villages, leaving millions of people homeless as extreme weather events, including heat waves, intense rainfall and floods, become more common in South Asia.
More than 60 people have been killed in days of flooding, landslides and thunderstorms that have left many people without food and drinking water and have isolated them by cutting off the internet, according to officials.
The devastation in India’s northeast, one of the worst affected regions, has submerged railway tracks, bridges and roads. In the remote state of Assam, 31 of its 33 districts have been affected by floods, impacting the lives of more than 700,000 people, officials said on Saturday. At least 18 people have already died in the state because of floods and landslides, according to news reports.
At least 33 people were killed in the neighboring state of Bihar by lightning strikes and heavy rain in its 16 districts, Nitish Kumar, the chief minister, said on Friday.
Climate scientists have said that India and Bangladesh are particularly vulnerable to climate change because of their proximity to the warm tropical waters of the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal, which are increasingly experiencing heat waves. The rising sea temperatures have led to “dry conditions” in some parts of the Indian subcontinent and “a significant increase in rainfall” in other areas, according to a study published in January by the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune.
Climate Forward There’s an ongoing crisis — and tons of news. Our newsletter keeps you up to date. Get it in your inbox.
On Sunday, India’s meteorological department warned of “thunderstorms with lightning and very heavy rainfall” in many parts of the country’s remote northeast where the Brahmaputra, one of the world’s largest rivers, has inundated vast areas of agricultural land, villages and towns over the past couple of weeks.
The floodwaters of the Brahmaputra and other rivers have arrived with fury in Bangladesh, a low-lying nation of about 170 million people, where extreme rainfall and landslides washed away a sprawling Rohingya refugee camp overnight last year. In 2020, torrential rains submerged at least a quarter of the country.
Flooded houses on Saturday in Beanibazar, in the region of Sylhet, Bangladesh.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
About two million people have been affected in the Sylhet region, in the country’s east, in what officials describe as one of the worst floods in many years.
“We haven’t seen such a widespread flood in Sylhet for around two decades,” S.M. Shahidul Islam, a chief engineer of the Bangladesh Water Development Board, said on Sunday.
“Heavy rainfall and increased flow of floodwater through the Surma River is the main reason for this situation,” said Mr. Islam, explaining that dams in the area are unable to hold the floodwaters that have started pouring into cities.
At least 10 people have been killed in the region, most drowning after their boats capsized while they were trying to move to safer areas, officials said on Sunday. “We still are working to see if there are more casualties,” said Mosharraf Hossain, the top official in the Sylhet region.
Roads cut off by floods have made relief efforts challenging, officials say. But the devastation has left millions of people with nothing.
“The flood situation is terrible in our village in Zakiganj,” said Mahmudul Hasan, 29, who was taking shelter with six family members in Sylhet.
The family has not received any food or water, said Mr. Hasan. And he said he was constantly worried about his home. “Our house is made of mud,” he explained.
The government of Bangladesh has closed nearly 600 schools and colleges indefinitely to use them as shelters for those who have nowhere to go. At least 3,000 hectares of rice paddy fields have been consumed by the flooding, which is expected to affect the livelihoods of thousands of farmers, officials said.
Karan Deep Singh reported from New Delhi, and Saif Hasnat from Dhaka, Bangladesh.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/22/worl ... iversified
Karachi submerged in floods, Pakistanis ask govt about its ‘rain emergency plan’
Pakistan PM Shehbaz Sharif said he was 'deeply saddened' by the damage caused and said that he had 'offered to extend every possible support' to the Sindh govt
Torrential rains, floods and landslides in Karachi and surrounding areas have once again raised questions over poor urban planning in Pakistan’s biggest city. Dozens were killed and hundreds of people have been left homeless in Karachi ruining Eid celebrations.
The Express Tribune reported that southern Karachi was inundated with waist-high water early Monday morning. These areas “received the most rain till now after a slow-moving thunderstorm stalled over the city during early morning hours”. Posh neighbourhoods such as DHA and Clifton, too, saw severe flooding as water entered the houses of the residents who pointed out the negligence of the Sindh authorities that led to their Eid festivities being ruined.
In Balochistan, eight dams burst, killing at least 57 people. Several roads and underpasses shut down due to the water-logging.
More...
https://theprint.in/go-to-pakistan/kara ... n/1034307/
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Monsoon rains in Pakistan kill 147 in less than a month
The death toll from rain-related incidents rises as rains trigger flash floods in some parts of the country, officials say.
A man pushes his bike as he wades through a flooded road in Karachi [Akhtar Soomro/Reuters]
The death toll from rain-related incidents over the past month has risen to 147 as monsoon rains continue to lash Pakistan, triggering flash floods in some parts of the country, officials say.
The National Disaster Management Authority said 88 women and children were among the dead. The monsoon rains also damaged homes, roads, bridges and power stations across the country, it said.
The situation was particularly dire in the major southern port city of Karachi, the country’s largest, where entire neighbourhoods remained submerged on Monday, leaving commuters stranded in places or attempting to wave through knee-deep water on foot or on bicycles.
Vehicles and people wade through a flooded road in Karachi [Fareed Khan/AP]
Some residents arranged for boats to move them to safer places.
“At the moment, the situation is like this that we need to travel by boat rather than in vehicles as the roads are flooded,” said one resident, Abdul Raheem.
Some Karachi residents said they were forced to abandon their cars on submerged roads and walk through waist-high water. Authorities summoned paramilitary troops to help with efforts to drain the waters from flooded streets and evacuate people.
More...
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/7/1 ... an-a-month
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At least 26 people killed across Sindh due to monsoon rains, says PDMA
Report says highest number of deaths occurred in Karachi; 11 injured within the same period
https://tribune.com.pk/story/2365586/se ... y-downpour
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Pakistan's financial capital Karachi flooded by monsoon rains
A flooded street during the monsoon season in Karachi, Pakistan, on July 11.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/11/world/pa ... index.html
Torrential rains, floods and landslides in Karachi and surrounding areas have once again raised questions over poor urban planning in Pakistan’s biggest city. Dozens were killed and hundreds of people have been left homeless in Karachi ruining Eid celebrations.
The Express Tribune reported that southern Karachi was inundated with waist-high water early Monday morning. These areas “received the most rain till now after a slow-moving thunderstorm stalled over the city during early morning hours”. Posh neighbourhoods such as DHA and Clifton, too, saw severe flooding as water entered the houses of the residents who pointed out the negligence of the Sindh authorities that led to their Eid festivities being ruined.
In Balochistan, eight dams burst, killing at least 57 people. Several roads and underpasses shut down due to the water-logging.
More...
https://theprint.in/go-to-pakistan/kara ... n/1034307/
********
Monsoon rains in Pakistan kill 147 in less than a month
The death toll from rain-related incidents rises as rains trigger flash floods in some parts of the country, officials say.
A man pushes his bike as he wades through a flooded road in Karachi [Akhtar Soomro/Reuters]
The death toll from rain-related incidents over the past month has risen to 147 as monsoon rains continue to lash Pakistan, triggering flash floods in some parts of the country, officials say.
The National Disaster Management Authority said 88 women and children were among the dead. The monsoon rains also damaged homes, roads, bridges and power stations across the country, it said.
The situation was particularly dire in the major southern port city of Karachi, the country’s largest, where entire neighbourhoods remained submerged on Monday, leaving commuters stranded in places or attempting to wave through knee-deep water on foot or on bicycles.
Vehicles and people wade through a flooded road in Karachi [Fareed Khan/AP]
Some residents arranged for boats to move them to safer places.
“At the moment, the situation is like this that we need to travel by boat rather than in vehicles as the roads are flooded,” said one resident, Abdul Raheem.
Some Karachi residents said they were forced to abandon their cars on submerged roads and walk through waist-high water. Authorities summoned paramilitary troops to help with efforts to drain the waters from flooded streets and evacuate people.
More...
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/7/1 ... an-a-month
*******
At least 26 people killed across Sindh due to monsoon rains, says PDMA
Report says highest number of deaths occurred in Karachi; 11 injured within the same period
https://tribune.com.pk/story/2365586/se ... y-downpour
*******
Pakistan's financial capital Karachi flooded by monsoon rains
A flooded street during the monsoon season in Karachi, Pakistan, on July 11.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/11/world/pa ... index.html
Re: NATURAL DISASTERS
Information Minister Marriyum Aurangzeb on Thursday deemed the rain-induced flooding that is ravaging the country and has caused more than 900 deaths "a national emergency".
In a statement, Aurangzeb said that a critical juncture has been reached and the time has come to demonstrate "national spirit" to deal with the extraordinary disasters in Sindh and Balochistan.
"The entire nation, especially overseas Pakistanis, should donate generously to help the flood victims as a huge amount of money will be required for the rehabilitation of the victims due to the large-scale disaster," she said.
Aurangzeb added that the federal government, along with the provinces, was making tireless efforts and all the resources were being mobilised.
The minister said that owing to heavy rains and severe flooding, there were difficulties in relief operations and that public contributions were needed to ramp up rescue efforts.
Aurangzeb said that the details and process for depositing donations in the Prime Minister Flood Relief Account 2022 had already been made public.
Meanwhile, at a press conference in Islamabad, Climate Change Minister Sherry Rehman echoed Aurangzeb's sentiments, saying: "This is a national emergency and we will have to treat it as such."
The minister said that the "entirety of Pakistan's south" was inundated and all resources would have to be gathered for this major crisis. She said the Pakistan Army and National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) were active in relief and rescue operations.
Providing some figures of the damage so far, Rehman said 20 million people were rendered homeless or without shelter.
She said that 913 deaths had already been recorded. "This is a very big figure and the time has come for the world to help us," Rehman added.
The minister said that such a devastating monsoon season was unprecedented and called it "very rare" and "unexpected".
"This is Pakistan's main crisis at this time ... a climate-induced humanitarian disaster of epic proportions. Thousands are without shelter and many without food and stranded," she said, adding that it was beyond the capability of the provinces or Islamabad to rehabilitate and manage alone and needed international help.
Rehman said the NDMA was currently working on a needs assessment survey that would be completed soon and is a requirement for international donors and aid.
One element she outlined as hindering rebuilding operations was the continuous monsoon spell that she termed a "monster monsoon". She said that no let up in the rains meant no time or space for anything other than rescue and relief operations, adding that there were reports about a similar spell arriving in September as well.
Rehman decried the lack of resources as a major problem, adding that climate resilience programmes needed millions of dollars. She pointed out that it was also important to conduct climate risk assessment since climate change was occurring so fast that extreme weather events were becoming more frequent.
The minister said the country would have to think about unusual strategies, take technical advice from the world and increasingly use scientific modelling.
"There should only be one singular focus in Pakistan right now, which is the resourcing, coordination and provision of relief to millions stranded by the monster monsoons hitting Pakistan in a cascade of catastrophic cycles," she later tweeted.
Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal presided over a meeting of his ministry which reviewed the flood situation. He directed the formation of a team of government doctors for the affected areas and ordered that a plan should be developed to speed up reconstruction activities of flood-hit areas.
According to Radio Pakistan, he also revealed that Chinese companies had donated Rs15m to the PM's relief fund and China was giving 25,000 tents to provide shelter to flood victims.
He added that the Red Cross Society of China has also offered $300,000 to the Pakistan Red Crescent Society.
International institutions announce over $500m in aid
International organisations and financial institutions announced immediate assistance of over $500m for the flood victims on the appeal of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif.
Representatives of the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, international financial institutions, development partners and donors attended the meeting. Officials from China, the United States, the European Union, United Nations agencies and the World Health Organisation also took part in the meeting.
PM Shehbaz briefed the international partners about the devastation caused by floods in the country, particularly in Sindh and Balochistan. He said the country faced an emergency situation because of the historic rains and floods and a large number of people including women and children lost their lives.
He told that houses, infrastructure, crops and orchards were destroyed, roads and bridges were washed away and land routes were cut off which made it difficult to carry out rescue and relief activities.
Shehbaz said the federal government undertook relief activities in coordination with the provinces and the federal and provincial departments were working together. However, the prime minister added that the extent of the destruction was so huge that the federal and provincial governments could not complete the rehabilitation of the flood affectees on their own.
He said the government had released Rs5 billion for relief and the family of every deceased was given financial assistance of Rs1m. Each flood victim family was immediately given Rs25,000 and Rs80bn was allocated for this purpose, he added.
PM Shehbaz urged international organisations, financial institutions and countries to cooperate with the Pakistan government on an emergency basis.
“I am personally overseeing the rescue, relief, and rehabilitation activities from day one," Shehbaz said.
“We want to reach out to every affected Pakistani and we want help from the international partners. We need essential items and medical staff to overcome the difficult situation.”
He invited international partners to visit the flood-affected areas. The government would make arrangements for the visit of the international partners, he added.
The prime minister had earlier cancelled his visit to London, where he planned to go to tend to his ailing granddaughter.
The prime minister had intended to fly to London after his two-day official visit to Qatar but decided to travel back to Islamabad to review the ongoing rescue and relief operations in flood-hit areas.
The PTI also announced that party chairman Imran Khan would visit flood-affected areas and meet with the affectees.
Sindh CM constitutes committees for relief and damage assessment
Sindh Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah presided over a rain emergency and relief meeting at the Chief Minister House. During the meeting it was decided to constitute district-level committees comprising the relevant deputy commissioner, representatives from V Corps, engineering corps, local government, Provincial Disaster Management Authority (PDMA) and local representatives, to start relief, rescue, survey and damages assessment.
“The purpose is to reach to the affected families and support them in a transparent, proper, and decent way,” CM Shah said, adding that the committees would also procure all the required materials and goods, tents, mosquito nets, food items, medicines, machinery and other items.
Punjab CM announces Rs5bn for flood affectees
Punjab Chief Minister Parvez Elahi announced the allocation of Rs5 billion to flood affectees in South Punjab. He has also established the "Chief Minister Punjab Flood Relief Fund" for their resettlement.
In a meeting with parliamentarians today, he said that the Punjab government had employed all of its machinery in helping the people in the rain-hit areas.
He added that Punjab Chief Secretary Kamran Afzal was also monitoring relief and rescue operations in the affected areas.
"The government will arrange every available resource," Elahi vowed, urging philanthropists to also come forward to help the people in need.
The chief minister said that he had ordered a survey to rectify the ensuing damage since the rehabilitation of victims was the government's top priority. He also appreciated and praised the role of the army in rescue operations.
250th Corps Commanders’ Conference
Chief of Army Staff (COAS) Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa presided over the 250th Corps Commanders’ Conference at the General Headquarters in Rawalpindi today, in which the forum was briefed in detail on the external and internal security situation, with a particular focus on the flood situation and the ongoing relief operations being undertaken by army formations.
"Participants undertook a comprehensive overview of the flood situation and ongoing relief and rescue operations by the army.
"Expressing deep sorrow over [the] loss of precious lives and extensive damage to infrastructure due to unprecedented rains/floods, [the] forum resolved to spare no efforts for mitigating the sufferings of flood affectees," reads a press release from the Inter Services Public Relations.
It added that army chief appreciated the ongoing relief efforts and directed army formations to "render all possible support" to the flood affectees.
"Every single affected individual must be reached to bring comfort in this hour of distress," the press release quoted the COAS as saying.
Four drown in KP
Four people drowned in flash floods while suspension bridges and infrastructure was destroyed in Hazara division's Lower Kohistan area.
Imran Nawaz, station house officer (SHO) for Dubair police station in Lower Kohistan, told Dawn that six people were stranded in the middle of Dubair river and subsequently, four drowned while two were rescued by locals.
He said one of the four bodies was recovered but the other three were still missing. Nawaz added that massive flooding was underway in Dubair and Ranolia rivers in which cars and houses were also swept away, besides destroying mini power stations, water mills and roads.
“There is no cellular network in the Sanagai area where the quartet drowned in the flash floods. Reports of destruction by the floods are being received from different parts of Lower Kohistan,” the SHO said.
He said roads had been blocked at several points.
Meanwhile, in Shangla, Sanaullah, a local from Damorai Faizdara, said that the bridge they had built on a self-help basis was washed away by the floods while the flow of water in the Kana river was increasing with every passing minute.
He said mini power stations were also damaged as a result of floods and had caused an electricity outage.
https://www.dawn.com/news/1706740/minis ... ue-efforts
In a statement, Aurangzeb said that a critical juncture has been reached and the time has come to demonstrate "national spirit" to deal with the extraordinary disasters in Sindh and Balochistan.
"The entire nation, especially overseas Pakistanis, should donate generously to help the flood victims as a huge amount of money will be required for the rehabilitation of the victims due to the large-scale disaster," she said.
Aurangzeb added that the federal government, along with the provinces, was making tireless efforts and all the resources were being mobilised.
The minister said that owing to heavy rains and severe flooding, there were difficulties in relief operations and that public contributions were needed to ramp up rescue efforts.
Aurangzeb said that the details and process for depositing donations in the Prime Minister Flood Relief Account 2022 had already been made public.
Meanwhile, at a press conference in Islamabad, Climate Change Minister Sherry Rehman echoed Aurangzeb's sentiments, saying: "This is a national emergency and we will have to treat it as such."
The minister said that the "entirety of Pakistan's south" was inundated and all resources would have to be gathered for this major crisis. She said the Pakistan Army and National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) were active in relief and rescue operations.
Providing some figures of the damage so far, Rehman said 20 million people were rendered homeless or without shelter.
She said that 913 deaths had already been recorded. "This is a very big figure and the time has come for the world to help us," Rehman added.
The minister said that such a devastating monsoon season was unprecedented and called it "very rare" and "unexpected".
"This is Pakistan's main crisis at this time ... a climate-induced humanitarian disaster of epic proportions. Thousands are without shelter and many without food and stranded," she said, adding that it was beyond the capability of the provinces or Islamabad to rehabilitate and manage alone and needed international help.
Rehman said the NDMA was currently working on a needs assessment survey that would be completed soon and is a requirement for international donors and aid.
One element she outlined as hindering rebuilding operations was the continuous monsoon spell that she termed a "monster monsoon". She said that no let up in the rains meant no time or space for anything other than rescue and relief operations, adding that there were reports about a similar spell arriving in September as well.
Rehman decried the lack of resources as a major problem, adding that climate resilience programmes needed millions of dollars. She pointed out that it was also important to conduct climate risk assessment since climate change was occurring so fast that extreme weather events were becoming more frequent.
The minister said the country would have to think about unusual strategies, take technical advice from the world and increasingly use scientific modelling.
"There should only be one singular focus in Pakistan right now, which is the resourcing, coordination and provision of relief to millions stranded by the monster monsoons hitting Pakistan in a cascade of catastrophic cycles," she later tweeted.
Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal presided over a meeting of his ministry which reviewed the flood situation. He directed the formation of a team of government doctors for the affected areas and ordered that a plan should be developed to speed up reconstruction activities of flood-hit areas.
According to Radio Pakistan, he also revealed that Chinese companies had donated Rs15m to the PM's relief fund and China was giving 25,000 tents to provide shelter to flood victims.
He added that the Red Cross Society of China has also offered $300,000 to the Pakistan Red Crescent Society.
International institutions announce over $500m in aid
International organisations and financial institutions announced immediate assistance of over $500m for the flood victims on the appeal of Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif.
Representatives of the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, international financial institutions, development partners and donors attended the meeting. Officials from China, the United States, the European Union, United Nations agencies and the World Health Organisation also took part in the meeting.
PM Shehbaz briefed the international partners about the devastation caused by floods in the country, particularly in Sindh and Balochistan. He said the country faced an emergency situation because of the historic rains and floods and a large number of people including women and children lost their lives.
He told that houses, infrastructure, crops and orchards were destroyed, roads and bridges were washed away and land routes were cut off which made it difficult to carry out rescue and relief activities.
Shehbaz said the federal government undertook relief activities in coordination with the provinces and the federal and provincial departments were working together. However, the prime minister added that the extent of the destruction was so huge that the federal and provincial governments could not complete the rehabilitation of the flood affectees on their own.
He said the government had released Rs5 billion for relief and the family of every deceased was given financial assistance of Rs1m. Each flood victim family was immediately given Rs25,000 and Rs80bn was allocated for this purpose, he added.
PM Shehbaz urged international organisations, financial institutions and countries to cooperate with the Pakistan government on an emergency basis.
“I am personally overseeing the rescue, relief, and rehabilitation activities from day one," Shehbaz said.
“We want to reach out to every affected Pakistani and we want help from the international partners. We need essential items and medical staff to overcome the difficult situation.”
He invited international partners to visit the flood-affected areas. The government would make arrangements for the visit of the international partners, he added.
The prime minister had earlier cancelled his visit to London, where he planned to go to tend to his ailing granddaughter.
The prime minister had intended to fly to London after his two-day official visit to Qatar but decided to travel back to Islamabad to review the ongoing rescue and relief operations in flood-hit areas.
The PTI also announced that party chairman Imran Khan would visit flood-affected areas and meet with the affectees.
Sindh CM constitutes committees for relief and damage assessment
Sindh Chief Minister Syed Murad Ali Shah presided over a rain emergency and relief meeting at the Chief Minister House. During the meeting it was decided to constitute district-level committees comprising the relevant deputy commissioner, representatives from V Corps, engineering corps, local government, Provincial Disaster Management Authority (PDMA) and local representatives, to start relief, rescue, survey and damages assessment.
“The purpose is to reach to the affected families and support them in a transparent, proper, and decent way,” CM Shah said, adding that the committees would also procure all the required materials and goods, tents, mosquito nets, food items, medicines, machinery and other items.
Punjab CM announces Rs5bn for flood affectees
Punjab Chief Minister Parvez Elahi announced the allocation of Rs5 billion to flood affectees in South Punjab. He has also established the "Chief Minister Punjab Flood Relief Fund" for their resettlement.
In a meeting with parliamentarians today, he said that the Punjab government had employed all of its machinery in helping the people in the rain-hit areas.
He added that Punjab Chief Secretary Kamran Afzal was also monitoring relief and rescue operations in the affected areas.
"The government will arrange every available resource," Elahi vowed, urging philanthropists to also come forward to help the people in need.
The chief minister said that he had ordered a survey to rectify the ensuing damage since the rehabilitation of victims was the government's top priority. He also appreciated and praised the role of the army in rescue operations.
250th Corps Commanders’ Conference
Chief of Army Staff (COAS) Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa presided over the 250th Corps Commanders’ Conference at the General Headquarters in Rawalpindi today, in which the forum was briefed in detail on the external and internal security situation, with a particular focus on the flood situation and the ongoing relief operations being undertaken by army formations.
"Participants undertook a comprehensive overview of the flood situation and ongoing relief and rescue operations by the army.
"Expressing deep sorrow over [the] loss of precious lives and extensive damage to infrastructure due to unprecedented rains/floods, [the] forum resolved to spare no efforts for mitigating the sufferings of flood affectees," reads a press release from the Inter Services Public Relations.
It added that army chief appreciated the ongoing relief efforts and directed army formations to "render all possible support" to the flood affectees.
"Every single affected individual must be reached to bring comfort in this hour of distress," the press release quoted the COAS as saying.
Four drown in KP
Four people drowned in flash floods while suspension bridges and infrastructure was destroyed in Hazara division's Lower Kohistan area.
Imran Nawaz, station house officer (SHO) for Dubair police station in Lower Kohistan, told Dawn that six people were stranded in the middle of Dubair river and subsequently, four drowned while two were rescued by locals.
He said one of the four bodies was recovered but the other three were still missing. Nawaz added that massive flooding was underway in Dubair and Ranolia rivers in which cars and houses were also swept away, besides destroying mini power stations, water mills and roads.
“There is no cellular network in the Sanagai area where the quartet drowned in the flash floods. Reports of destruction by the floods are being received from different parts of Lower Kohistan,” the SHO said.
He said roads had been blocked at several points.
Meanwhile, in Shangla, Sanaullah, a local from Damorai Faizdara, said that the bridge they had built on a self-help basis was washed away by the floods while the flow of water in the Kana river was increasing with every passing minute.
He said mini power stations were also damaged as a result of floods and had caused an electricity outage.
https://www.dawn.com/news/1706740/minis ... ue-efforts
Pakistan floods: Thousands told to evacuate as rivers rise
*Please Note:*
*Special Griyawazari Tasbih* will be recited
from
*Monday August, 29, 2022*
to
*Sunday September 04, 2022*
in all the jamat khanas of *Pakistan.*
Watch video at:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-62699886
Watch video:
https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/asi ... 778d3e6de3
The Prime Minister of Pakistan has said the "magnitude of the calamity" is bigger than expected, after visiting flood-hit areas.
Shehbaz Sharif was speaking from Sindh province - which has had nearly eight times its average August rainfall.
The floods have killed nearly 1,000 people across Pakistan since June, while thousands have been displaced - and millions more affected.
As the BBC drove through Sindh, there were displaced people in every village.
The full scale of the devastation in the province is yet to be fully understood - but the people described it as the worst disaster they've survived.
Floods are not uncommon in Pakistan, but people here said these rains were different - more than anything that's ever been seen. One local official called them "floods of biblical proportions".
Near the city of Larkana, thousands of mud homes have sunk under water. For miles all that's visible is treetops. Where the water level is lightly lower, thatched roofs creep out from underneath the water.
In one village, the people are desperate for food. In another, many children have developed waterborne diseases.
When a mobile truck pulled over, scores of people immediately ran towards it. Children carrying other children made their way to the long queue.
One 12-year-old girl said she and her baby sister had not eaten for a day.
"No food has come here, but my sister is sick, she has been vomiting," the girl said. "I hope they can help."
The desperation was evident in every community. People ran towards car windows to ask for help - anything.
Stranded people are evacuated on boats in Sukkur
On one of the main streets out of the city of Sukkur, hundreds of people have settled.
Many of them walked from remote villages, and were told that help is easier to get in the urban areas. But there's not much difference here.
On Friday, PM Sharif said 33 million people had been hit by the floods - about 15% of the country's population.
He said the losses caused by floods this season were comparable to those during the floods of 2010-11, said to be the worst on record. The country has appealed for more international aid.
Flood victims queue up outside a bank to receive financial assistance in southern Sindh province
In Sindh, it's not that local authorities are not trying, but they admit that they are out of their depth.
The provincial government says this is a "climate change catastrophe" and that the people of Pakistan, especially in the poorer communities, have been the worst affected.
The solutions will not be quick - acres of land are waterlogged and the water is not receding fast enough for any rebuilding to take place here.
There's not much to do for the people but to wait - wait for the rains to stop, wait for the water to go down, wait for more resources to be allocated to these kinds of communities.
In the meantime, life continues to be difficult.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-62699886
**********
*Special Griyawazari Tasbih* will be recited
from
*Monday August, 29, 2022*
to
*Sunday September 04, 2022*
in all the jamat khanas of *Pakistan.*
Watch video at:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-62699886
Watch video:
https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/asi ... 778d3e6de3
The Prime Minister of Pakistan has said the "magnitude of the calamity" is bigger than expected, after visiting flood-hit areas.
Shehbaz Sharif was speaking from Sindh province - which has had nearly eight times its average August rainfall.
The floods have killed nearly 1,000 people across Pakistan since June, while thousands have been displaced - and millions more affected.
As the BBC drove through Sindh, there were displaced people in every village.
The full scale of the devastation in the province is yet to be fully understood - but the people described it as the worst disaster they've survived.
Floods are not uncommon in Pakistan, but people here said these rains were different - more than anything that's ever been seen. One local official called them "floods of biblical proportions".
Near the city of Larkana, thousands of mud homes have sunk under water. For miles all that's visible is treetops. Where the water level is lightly lower, thatched roofs creep out from underneath the water.
In one village, the people are desperate for food. In another, many children have developed waterborne diseases.
When a mobile truck pulled over, scores of people immediately ran towards it. Children carrying other children made their way to the long queue.
One 12-year-old girl said she and her baby sister had not eaten for a day.
"No food has come here, but my sister is sick, she has been vomiting," the girl said. "I hope they can help."
The desperation was evident in every community. People ran towards car windows to ask for help - anything.
Stranded people are evacuated on boats in Sukkur
On one of the main streets out of the city of Sukkur, hundreds of people have settled.
Many of them walked from remote villages, and were told that help is easier to get in the urban areas. But there's not much difference here.
On Friday, PM Sharif said 33 million people had been hit by the floods - about 15% of the country's population.
He said the losses caused by floods this season were comparable to those during the floods of 2010-11, said to be the worst on record. The country has appealed for more international aid.
Flood victims queue up outside a bank to receive financial assistance in southern Sindh province
In Sindh, it's not that local authorities are not trying, but they admit that they are out of their depth.
The provincial government says this is a "climate change catastrophe" and that the people of Pakistan, especially in the poorer communities, have been the worst affected.
The solutions will not be quick - acres of land are waterlogged and the water is not receding fast enough for any rebuilding to take place here.
There's not much to do for the people but to wait - wait for the rains to stop, wait for the water to go down, wait for more resources to be allocated to these kinds of communities.
In the meantime, life continues to be difficult.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-62699886
**********
Re: NATURAL DISASTERS
Live Science
Did Noah's flood really happen?
Patrick Pester
Sun, May 14, 2023 at 4:00 AM CDT
Noah's flood is one of the most recognized Bible stories. According to the Old Testament, "In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened" (Genesis 7:11, English Standard Version).
As the text recounts, God saw wickedness within humans and sent a global inundation. Because Noah was righteous, God instructed him to build an ark for his family and save two of every beast, bird and creeping thing. But did Noah's flood really happen?
"The one thing we know for sure from geology is that a global flood never happened," said David Montgomery, a professor of geomorphology at the University of Washington in Seattle and author of "The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood" (W. W. Norton & Company, 2012). "If you look at it as literally a global flood that covered the world's highest mountains, I'm sorry, there's just not enough water on Earth to do that," he told Live Science.
If the "heavens" opened and all of the water in the atmosphere came down at once as rain, the planet would be submerged — but only to a depth of about 1 inch (2.5 centimeters), according to the U.S. Geological Survey. That's not enough water to justify a canoe, let alone a massive ark.
But what if more than the water in the "heavens" were considered? If all the world's glaciers and ice sheets were to melt, then sea levels would rise by more than 195 feet (60 meters), according to NASA, which would add a bit more water. Moreover, a 2016 study published in the journal Nature Geoscience estimated that there's 5.4 million cubic miles (22.6 million cubic kilometers) of groundwater stored in the upper 1.2 miles (2 km) of Earth's crust, which is enough to cover the land to a depth of 590 feet (180 m). That's a lot of water, but there are cities thousands of feet above sea level, and Mount Everest, the highest mountain on Earth, is more than 29,000 feet (8,849 m) above sea level. On top of that, geologists don't see evidence for a global flood in the rock record.
The biblical tale has other questionable sections. For example, Noah was 600 years old when the flood started — we know humans don't live that long — and most species wouldn't survive being reduced to just two animals as they wouldn't have enough genetic diversity to create a viable population. What's more, it's unclear how every animal would be capable of making it to the ark in the first place — imagine penguins waddling from Antarctica to the Middle East.
According to historical documents, Noah's flood is a retelling of older stories, and it's likely allegorical rather than a literal recounting of an event. Ira Spar, professor of ancient studies at Ramapo College of New Jersey, told Live Science that the biblical stories in the Old Testament, which were written down between 800 B.C. and 500 B.C., likely came from older oral traditions and multiple sources.
There are slightly different accounts of Noah's flood story in other religious books, such as the Quran, while earlier versions of a cataclysmic flood stem from ancient Mesopotamian texts. Spar noted that there's a Sumerian flood story recorded in fragments that dates back to the late third millennium B.C.
"Who knows how far back the story goes?" Spar said.
If we consider the sources of Noah's flood to be regional floods and not a global flood, then it's not so far-fetched. Montgomery explained that some "geologically plausible" floods could have occurred that inspired the story.
For example, in the late 1990s, oceanographers William Ryan and Walter Pitman hypothesized at an American Geophysical Union meeting that around 7,500 years ago, the Mediterranean Sea started flowing into the then-isolated Black Sea, causing massive flooding around the Black Sea, which could be the origins of Noah's flood, the journal Science reported in 1998.
"That would have been a disruptive event that flooded the whole known world to the people who were living there, and that could have gone on to seed the story of Noah's flood with some of the survivors who fled to Mesopotamia," Montgomery said.
A 2009 study published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews argued that the flooding would have been much more minor than what Ryan and Pitman proposed, if it happened at all. But while the inspiration for the story of Noah's flood is open to debate, there are plenty of other flood stories from around the world that have been seemingly inspired by regional events.
Montgomery said that many Indigenous American stories in the Pacific Northwest, for example, involve floods that sound a lot like tsunamis, with great waves crashing onto the shore. The same is true for stories from the seismically active coasts of South America and the South Pacific islands.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/lifesty ... 00351.html
Did Noah's flood really happen?
Patrick Pester
Sun, May 14, 2023 at 4:00 AM CDT
Noah's flood is one of the most recognized Bible stories. According to the Old Testament, "In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened" (Genesis 7:11, English Standard Version).
As the text recounts, God saw wickedness within humans and sent a global inundation. Because Noah was righteous, God instructed him to build an ark for his family and save two of every beast, bird and creeping thing. But did Noah's flood really happen?
"The one thing we know for sure from geology is that a global flood never happened," said David Montgomery, a professor of geomorphology at the University of Washington in Seattle and author of "The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood" (W. W. Norton & Company, 2012). "If you look at it as literally a global flood that covered the world's highest mountains, I'm sorry, there's just not enough water on Earth to do that," he told Live Science.
If the "heavens" opened and all of the water in the atmosphere came down at once as rain, the planet would be submerged — but only to a depth of about 1 inch (2.5 centimeters), according to the U.S. Geological Survey. That's not enough water to justify a canoe, let alone a massive ark.
But what if more than the water in the "heavens" were considered? If all the world's glaciers and ice sheets were to melt, then sea levels would rise by more than 195 feet (60 meters), according to NASA, which would add a bit more water. Moreover, a 2016 study published in the journal Nature Geoscience estimated that there's 5.4 million cubic miles (22.6 million cubic kilometers) of groundwater stored in the upper 1.2 miles (2 km) of Earth's crust, which is enough to cover the land to a depth of 590 feet (180 m). That's a lot of water, but there are cities thousands of feet above sea level, and Mount Everest, the highest mountain on Earth, is more than 29,000 feet (8,849 m) above sea level. On top of that, geologists don't see evidence for a global flood in the rock record.
The biblical tale has other questionable sections. For example, Noah was 600 years old when the flood started — we know humans don't live that long — and most species wouldn't survive being reduced to just two animals as they wouldn't have enough genetic diversity to create a viable population. What's more, it's unclear how every animal would be capable of making it to the ark in the first place — imagine penguins waddling from Antarctica to the Middle East.
According to historical documents, Noah's flood is a retelling of older stories, and it's likely allegorical rather than a literal recounting of an event. Ira Spar, professor of ancient studies at Ramapo College of New Jersey, told Live Science that the biblical stories in the Old Testament, which were written down between 800 B.C. and 500 B.C., likely came from older oral traditions and multiple sources.
There are slightly different accounts of Noah's flood story in other religious books, such as the Quran, while earlier versions of a cataclysmic flood stem from ancient Mesopotamian texts. Spar noted that there's a Sumerian flood story recorded in fragments that dates back to the late third millennium B.C.
"Who knows how far back the story goes?" Spar said.
If we consider the sources of Noah's flood to be regional floods and not a global flood, then it's not so far-fetched. Montgomery explained that some "geologically plausible" floods could have occurred that inspired the story.
For example, in the late 1990s, oceanographers William Ryan and Walter Pitman hypothesized at an American Geophysical Union meeting that around 7,500 years ago, the Mediterranean Sea started flowing into the then-isolated Black Sea, causing massive flooding around the Black Sea, which could be the origins of Noah's flood, the journal Science reported in 1998.
"That would have been a disruptive event that flooded the whole known world to the people who were living there, and that could have gone on to seed the story of Noah's flood with some of the survivors who fled to Mesopotamia," Montgomery said.
A 2009 study published in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews argued that the flooding would have been much more minor than what Ryan and Pitman proposed, if it happened at all. But while the inspiration for the story of Noah's flood is open to debate, there are plenty of other flood stories from around the world that have been seemingly inspired by regional events.
Montgomery said that many Indigenous American stories in the Pacific Northwest, for example, involve floods that sound a lot like tsunamis, with great waves crashing onto the shore. The same is true for stories from the seismically active coasts of South America and the South Pacific islands.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/lifesty ... 00351.html
Re: NATURAL DISASTERS
Related thread on Noah's ark : viewtopic.php?p=644#p644
Evacuations Ordered in Delhi: Monsoon Flooding in Pictures
The authorities warned of widespread flooding in the Indian capital after days of torrential rains claimed dozens of lives in neighboring states.
image:
People carrying bulls to safety through the flooded waters of Yamuna River after heavy monsoon rains in New Delhi on Wednesday.Credit...Arun Sankar/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Thousands of people were evacuated from their homes in Delhi on Thursday after the authorities warned of widespread flooding following days of torrential rains that have battered large swaths of northern India.
The level of the Yamuna River, which flows through the Indian capital and is a tributary of the Ganges, had breached the so-called danger mark by three meters (about 10 feet) on Thursday, according to the Central Water Commission. That forced the chief minister of the capital region, Arvind Kejriwal, to shut schools and convert them into disaster relief camps.
ImageTwo people wade through hip-deep water under a bridge.
Credit...Adnan Abidi/Reuters
Many migrant workers, who live on the banks of the river, were camping on the roads alongside it as their makeshift homes were swallowed by the water. Others had to evacuate to try to reach higher ground.
Image
A group of people takes part in an evacuation, carrying belongings and climbing to higher ground to escape flooding.
Credit...Adnan Abidi/Reuters
Many others were looking for shelter as water enveloped sections of residential areas and historical sites like the Red Fort.
Image
Three men stand in ankle-deep water that has flooded a row of residences.
Credit...Associated Press
So far this monsoon season, officials said, landslides and flash floods have claimed at least 91 lives in six north Indian states near Delhi, and disrupted millions of others. Indian Army personnel were seen rescuing villagers after the Sutlej River flooded in the state of Punjab, on Wednesday.
Image
A boat full of soldiers and some civilians sails through a swollen river.
Credit...Shammi Mehra/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Entire streets were flooded in the capital.
Image
A caravan of people carrying their belongings on rickshaws through a flooded street.
Credit...Adnan Abidi/Reuters
In the city of Amritsar in Punjab, people waited for trains inside a station after rail services were disrupted by heavy rains on Tuesday.
Image
People lay where they can, covering the floor and benches in a train station.
Credit...Narinder Nanu/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Three water treatment plants were shuttered in the capital because they were flooded, and many neighborhoods in what is one of the biggest metropolitan regions in the country could face shortages of drinking water.
“Twenty-five percent of the water supply will be affected by this,” Mr. Kejriwal said about the closure of water treatment plants. “People will face difficulties, and they have to bear it. I appeal to the people not to come out of their homes and do maximum work from home.”
Residential areas like the upscale Civil Lines, where Mr. Kejriwal lives, were also flooded. A boy walked on a wall of his flooded house in Delhi, on Wednesday.
Image
A boy walks along a wall surrounded by flood waters.
Credit...Adnan Abidi/Reuters
Residents sought dry ground.
Image
People try to climb from a flooded road onto a highway overpass.
Credit...Adnan Abidi/Reuters
A woman collected her belongings before relocating from a low lying area near the Yamuna River in northeast Delhi.
Image
A woman collects clothes at her flooded home.
Credit...Arun Sankar/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
And rescue crews worked to evacuate people from the high waters.
Image
Men orange life vests try to rescue a man floating in flood water.
Credit...Adnan Abidi/Reuters
So far this season, the hardest-hit area has been the Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh, where at least 45 people have died since Saturday. The rains have destroyed infrastructure worth millions of dollars there, and in the state of Haryana, thousands of acres of agricultural crops. Tens of thousands of people remain stranded in the state of Uttarakhand, where roads leading to four important Hindu pilgrim sites have been blocked for the last few days.
India has often experienced extreme weather patterns, including record heat waves and heavy floods in monsoon season. Every year, the monsoon brings 80 percent of South Asia’s annual rainfall in a season that starts in June and ends in August. But in recent years, it has become erratic and more extreme, delivering death and destruction through floods and landslides.
Image
A man carries his belongings through ankle-deep water.
Credit...Adnan Abidi/Reuters
Sameer Yasir is a reporter based in New Delhi. He joined The Times in 2020. More about Sameer Yasir
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/13/worl ... 778d3e6de3
image:
People carrying bulls to safety through the flooded waters of Yamuna River after heavy monsoon rains in New Delhi on Wednesday.Credit...Arun Sankar/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Thousands of people were evacuated from their homes in Delhi on Thursday after the authorities warned of widespread flooding following days of torrential rains that have battered large swaths of northern India.
The level of the Yamuna River, which flows through the Indian capital and is a tributary of the Ganges, had breached the so-called danger mark by three meters (about 10 feet) on Thursday, according to the Central Water Commission. That forced the chief minister of the capital region, Arvind Kejriwal, to shut schools and convert them into disaster relief camps.
ImageTwo people wade through hip-deep water under a bridge.
Credit...Adnan Abidi/Reuters
Many migrant workers, who live on the banks of the river, were camping on the roads alongside it as their makeshift homes were swallowed by the water. Others had to evacuate to try to reach higher ground.
Image
A group of people takes part in an evacuation, carrying belongings and climbing to higher ground to escape flooding.
Credit...Adnan Abidi/Reuters
Many others were looking for shelter as water enveloped sections of residential areas and historical sites like the Red Fort.
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Three men stand in ankle-deep water that has flooded a row of residences.
Credit...Associated Press
So far this monsoon season, officials said, landslides and flash floods have claimed at least 91 lives in six north Indian states near Delhi, and disrupted millions of others. Indian Army personnel were seen rescuing villagers after the Sutlej River flooded in the state of Punjab, on Wednesday.
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A boat full of soldiers and some civilians sails through a swollen river.
Credit...Shammi Mehra/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Entire streets were flooded in the capital.
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A caravan of people carrying their belongings on rickshaws through a flooded street.
Credit...Adnan Abidi/Reuters
In the city of Amritsar in Punjab, people waited for trains inside a station after rail services were disrupted by heavy rains on Tuesday.
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People lay where they can, covering the floor and benches in a train station.
Credit...Narinder Nanu/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Three water treatment plants were shuttered in the capital because they were flooded, and many neighborhoods in what is one of the biggest metropolitan regions in the country could face shortages of drinking water.
“Twenty-five percent of the water supply will be affected by this,” Mr. Kejriwal said about the closure of water treatment plants. “People will face difficulties, and they have to bear it. I appeal to the people not to come out of their homes and do maximum work from home.”
Residential areas like the upscale Civil Lines, where Mr. Kejriwal lives, were also flooded. A boy walked on a wall of his flooded house in Delhi, on Wednesday.
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A boy walks along a wall surrounded by flood waters.
Credit...Adnan Abidi/Reuters
Residents sought dry ground.
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People try to climb from a flooded road onto a highway overpass.
Credit...Adnan Abidi/Reuters
A woman collected her belongings before relocating from a low lying area near the Yamuna River in northeast Delhi.
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A woman collects clothes at her flooded home.
Credit...Arun Sankar/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
And rescue crews worked to evacuate people from the high waters.
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Men orange life vests try to rescue a man floating in flood water.
Credit...Adnan Abidi/Reuters
So far this season, the hardest-hit area has been the Himalayan state of Himachal Pradesh, where at least 45 people have died since Saturday. The rains have destroyed infrastructure worth millions of dollars there, and in the state of Haryana, thousands of acres of agricultural crops. Tens of thousands of people remain stranded in the state of Uttarakhand, where roads leading to four important Hindu pilgrim sites have been blocked for the last few days.
India has often experienced extreme weather patterns, including record heat waves and heavy floods in monsoon season. Every year, the monsoon brings 80 percent of South Asia’s annual rainfall in a season that starts in June and ends in August. But in recent years, it has become erratic and more extreme, delivering death and destruction through floods and landslides.
Image
A man carries his belongings through ankle-deep water.
Credit...Adnan Abidi/Reuters
Sameer Yasir is a reporter based in New Delhi. He joined The Times in 2020. More about Sameer Yasir
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/13/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Scenes From Morocco: A Deadly Earthquake Strikes
The quake centered about 50 miles from Marrakesh turned homes into rubble and left survivors terrified.
A powerful earthquake struck about 50 miles from the southern city of Marrakesh in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco, killing more than 2,000 people, turning houses and buildings into rubble and terrifying residents.
Morocco has a history of serious earthquakes, and the one that hit shortly after 11 p.m. on Friday was the strongest to strike the area in more than a century. The full extent of the casualties and damages was not yet known.
“It didn’t last long,” said one person who experienced the quake in Amizmiz, about 30 miles southwest of Marrakesh, “but felt like years.”
Residents sit in a temporary shelter in the village of Azgour.
A destroyed house in the village of Azgour.
Residents walk past destroyed buildings in Amizmiz.
A damaged mosque in the old city of Marrakesh.
A kitten sitting on a destroyed vehicle in the old city of Marrakesh.
A damaged hotel in Moulay Brahim.
The earthquake struck late Friday night, forcing many residents of Marrakesh to evacuate their homes and shelter in open spaces in the city.
Using heavy equipment to search for survivors in a heavily damaged building in Marrakesh.
The wall of a house collapsed into a neighboring building in the village of Tansghart.
Inspecting the damage in Marrakesh.
Residents of the village of Ouirgane digging graves for victims of the earthquake.
Rescue workers searching for survivors in Moulay Brahim, near the epicenter.
Bodies pulled from the rubble of destroyed homes in Moulay Brahim.
A woman outside a heavily damaged building in the old city of Marrakesh.
Red Crescent workers removing large boulders that were blocking a road connecting the High Atlas Mountains to Marrakesh.
In Marrakesh, some of the older homes inside the walled old city, or medina, were constructed from stone, wood and mortar, making them susceptible to earthquakes.
A home of more modern construction did not escape the damage in Moulay Brahim.
People lining up to donate blood in Marrakesh.
Sunlight filtering through a hole in the side of a house caused by the earthquake in the village of Tansghart.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/09/worl ... 778d3e6de3
A powerful earthquake struck about 50 miles from the southern city of Marrakesh in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco, killing more than 2,000 people, turning houses and buildings into rubble and terrifying residents.
Morocco has a history of serious earthquakes, and the one that hit shortly after 11 p.m. on Friday was the strongest to strike the area in more than a century. The full extent of the casualties and damages was not yet known.
“It didn’t last long,” said one person who experienced the quake in Amizmiz, about 30 miles southwest of Marrakesh, “but felt like years.”
Residents sit in a temporary shelter in the village of Azgour.
A destroyed house in the village of Azgour.
Residents walk past destroyed buildings in Amizmiz.
A damaged mosque in the old city of Marrakesh.
A kitten sitting on a destroyed vehicle in the old city of Marrakesh.
A damaged hotel in Moulay Brahim.
The earthquake struck late Friday night, forcing many residents of Marrakesh to evacuate their homes and shelter in open spaces in the city.
Using heavy equipment to search for survivors in a heavily damaged building in Marrakesh.
The wall of a house collapsed into a neighboring building in the village of Tansghart.
Inspecting the damage in Marrakesh.
Residents of the village of Ouirgane digging graves for victims of the earthquake.
Rescue workers searching for survivors in Moulay Brahim, near the epicenter.
Bodies pulled from the rubble of destroyed homes in Moulay Brahim.
A woman outside a heavily damaged building in the old city of Marrakesh.
Red Crescent workers removing large boulders that were blocking a road connecting the High Atlas Mountains to Marrakesh.
In Marrakesh, some of the older homes inside the walled old city, or medina, were constructed from stone, wood and mortar, making them susceptible to earthquakes.
A home of more modern construction did not escape the damage in Moulay Brahim.
People lining up to donate blood in Marrakesh.
Sunlight filtering through a hole in the side of a house caused by the earthquake in the village of Tansghart.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/09/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Hundreds Reported Dead in Severe Libya Flooding
The waters swept away hundreds of homes as emergency officials raced to find survivors of the flooding caused by torrential weekend rains. Officials in one city described “catastrophic” devastation.
Watch video at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/worl ... oding.html
Deadly floods swept through northeastern Libya over the weekend, with the top official in the region warning that the toll could exceed 2,000 dead as rescue teams searched for survivors.
The Libyan Red Crescent, a nonprofit aid group whose volunteers had helped evacuate residents, said late on Monday that more than 300 people had died in the floods in the port city of Derna in eastern Libya. And more than 5,000 to 6,000 were missing because of floods in the city, apparently caused by the collapse of dams above Derna, said a spokesman for the Libyan National Army that controls eastern Libya, according to The Associated Press.
Exact figures on the scale of fatalities were difficult because of ongoing search efforts on Monday, a spokesman for authorities in that region said on Monday evening.
Libya has been divided between an internationally recognized government based in Tripoli and a separately administered region in the east.
It was not immediately clear what the head of the divided country’s eastern region, Osama Hamad, or the military spokesman, Ahmed Mismari, were basing their numbers on. But the flooding was centered in the region under Mr. Hamad’s administration, with parts of it declared a disaster zone in the aftermath and rescuers struggling to gain access to the area to provide help.
The internationally recognized authority in western Libya, in Tripoli, did not put out fatality figures, but its leaders held an emergency meeting on Monday on the crisis and said they had sent ambulances, rescue convoys and doctors to the area. They declared three days of mourning for the victims of the flooding.
For years, Libya has been fractured between the two rival governments and prime ministers — and the militias they control.
Heavy rainfall over the weekend in the country’s northeast swelled waters past riverbanks and officials said the force of the floodwaters swept away hundreds of homes and washed away roads. Stranded residents posted accounts of being trapped inside homes and cars, according to footage on social media.
“Entire neighborhoods have been swept away by the sea, and entire neighborhoods have disappeared with their inhabitants,” Mr. Hamad said in a phone interview with the Libyan television channel al-Masar on Monday from Derna, among one of the worst-hit cities.
The flooding also ravaged other areas, including the cities of Al-Bayda and Shahhat, where the rising waters forced more evacuations. One medical center in Al-Bayda said it had been forced to move patients, and it shared footage of workers desperately trying to sweep floodwaters outside of submerged hallways.
ImageThe flooding’s aftermath in Shahhat, Libya, on Monday.
The flooding’s aftermath in Shahhat, Libya, on Monday.Credit...Reuters
Derna appeared to have suffered the worst. Local officials in the port city have declared the area a disaster zone, with large parts of the city having been submerged in water. Roads into the city have been cut off, the City Council confirmed on Monday on its Facebook page. It called for the opening of a maritime passageway to the coastal city and for urgent international intervention.
“The situation is catastrophic,” the Council said. “The city of Derna is pleading for help.”
Residents of the area described chaotic scenes.
“What has happened is a tragedy and a humanitarian catastrophe for us,” said Mohammed Jadallah, a Derna resident who woke up his three children and fled the city on Sunday night after water began seeping into his home from the intensifying rain. Since then, with communications down, he has been unable to reach his siblings and has been unable to return to Derna because of the collapsed roads.
“We don’t know where our families are, we don’t have homes, and we’ve heard that there are a significant number of casualties,” he said, adding that he had already seen photos of his home, which had been washed away. “We have become displaced.”
Many of the victims’ bodies in Derna had been scattered through the city by the flooding, said Mohammed Abulammousha, a spokesman for the Hamad administration’s interior ministry. In a phone interview on Monday evening, he said he had witnessed “horrifying scenes.”
He cited a shortage of rescue capabilities and difficulties getting to some of the affected areas. But he added that the authorities were trying to rescue survivors, provide them with food and evacuate them from the city’s devastated areas.
“We call on international organizations and countries to assist us in the catastrophe that has befallen the city,” he said.
Some foreign governments and aid groups offered to help. The U.S. embassy in Libya said on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, that they were in close contact with the United Nations and Libyan authorities to quickly bring assistance. An emergency team was being prepared to support local authorities and parties, said Georgette Gagnon, the U.N’s humanitarian coordinator.
The United Arab Emirates also said that it would send urgent relief and rescue teams to Libya, according to the Emirati state news agency.
The drenching rains were part of a weather front that had unleashed major flooding in Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria last week, sweeping away buildings and killing more than a dozen people before moving toward Libya.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/worl ... oding.html
Watch video at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/worl ... oding.html
Deadly floods swept through northeastern Libya over the weekend, with the top official in the region warning that the toll could exceed 2,000 dead as rescue teams searched for survivors.
The Libyan Red Crescent, a nonprofit aid group whose volunteers had helped evacuate residents, said late on Monday that more than 300 people had died in the floods in the port city of Derna in eastern Libya. And more than 5,000 to 6,000 were missing because of floods in the city, apparently caused by the collapse of dams above Derna, said a spokesman for the Libyan National Army that controls eastern Libya, according to The Associated Press.
Exact figures on the scale of fatalities were difficult because of ongoing search efforts on Monday, a spokesman for authorities in that region said on Monday evening.
Libya has been divided between an internationally recognized government based in Tripoli and a separately administered region in the east.
It was not immediately clear what the head of the divided country’s eastern region, Osama Hamad, or the military spokesman, Ahmed Mismari, were basing their numbers on. But the flooding was centered in the region under Mr. Hamad’s administration, with parts of it declared a disaster zone in the aftermath and rescuers struggling to gain access to the area to provide help.
The internationally recognized authority in western Libya, in Tripoli, did not put out fatality figures, but its leaders held an emergency meeting on Monday on the crisis and said they had sent ambulances, rescue convoys and doctors to the area. They declared three days of mourning for the victims of the flooding.
For years, Libya has been fractured between the two rival governments and prime ministers — and the militias they control.
Heavy rainfall over the weekend in the country’s northeast swelled waters past riverbanks and officials said the force of the floodwaters swept away hundreds of homes and washed away roads. Stranded residents posted accounts of being trapped inside homes and cars, according to footage on social media.
“Entire neighborhoods have been swept away by the sea, and entire neighborhoods have disappeared with their inhabitants,” Mr. Hamad said in a phone interview with the Libyan television channel al-Masar on Monday from Derna, among one of the worst-hit cities.
The flooding also ravaged other areas, including the cities of Al-Bayda and Shahhat, where the rising waters forced more evacuations. One medical center in Al-Bayda said it had been forced to move patients, and it shared footage of workers desperately trying to sweep floodwaters outside of submerged hallways.
ImageThe flooding’s aftermath in Shahhat, Libya, on Monday.
The flooding’s aftermath in Shahhat, Libya, on Monday.Credit...Reuters
Derna appeared to have suffered the worst. Local officials in the port city have declared the area a disaster zone, with large parts of the city having been submerged in water. Roads into the city have been cut off, the City Council confirmed on Monday on its Facebook page. It called for the opening of a maritime passageway to the coastal city and for urgent international intervention.
“The situation is catastrophic,” the Council said. “The city of Derna is pleading for help.”
Residents of the area described chaotic scenes.
“What has happened is a tragedy and a humanitarian catastrophe for us,” said Mohammed Jadallah, a Derna resident who woke up his three children and fled the city on Sunday night after water began seeping into his home from the intensifying rain. Since then, with communications down, he has been unable to reach his siblings and has been unable to return to Derna because of the collapsed roads.
“We don’t know where our families are, we don’t have homes, and we’ve heard that there are a significant number of casualties,” he said, adding that he had already seen photos of his home, which had been washed away. “We have become displaced.”
Many of the victims’ bodies in Derna had been scattered through the city by the flooding, said Mohammed Abulammousha, a spokesman for the Hamad administration’s interior ministry. In a phone interview on Monday evening, he said he had witnessed “horrifying scenes.”
He cited a shortage of rescue capabilities and difficulties getting to some of the affected areas. But he added that the authorities were trying to rescue survivors, provide them with food and evacuate them from the city’s devastated areas.
“We call on international organizations and countries to assist us in the catastrophe that has befallen the city,” he said.
Some foreign governments and aid groups offered to help. The U.S. embassy in Libya said on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, that they were in close contact with the United Nations and Libyan authorities to quickly bring assistance. An emergency team was being prepared to support local authorities and parties, said Georgette Gagnon, the U.N’s humanitarian coordinator.
The United Arab Emirates also said that it would send urgent relief and rescue teams to Libya, according to the Emirati state news agency.
The drenching rains were part of a weather front that had unleashed major flooding in Greece, Turkey and Bulgaria last week, sweeping away buildings and killing more than a dozen people before moving toward Libya.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/11/worl ... oding.html
Scenes From a Deluge: Floods Devastate Libya
Powerful rains destroyed two dams, and the death toll in the North African country is estimated at more than 5,000.
Trouble was looming. That much was clear.
For days, Libyans looked across the Mediterranean to Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria, where a powerful storm had already killed more than a dozen people.
But when it got to the North African nation, disaster grew exponentially. Torrential rains swelled the waters behind two dams until they burst, inundating entire communities. More than 5,000 people were feared dead on Tuesday, and in the coastal city of Derna, entire neighborhoods were carried out to sea, the local authorities said.
The two dams that broke were near the city of Derna.
The city of Derna after the storm lifted.
In the city of Derna alone, at least 5,200 people died, one government official said.
Some fled Derna empty-handed — “as if they were born today, with nothing,” one Army official said.
Mourners gathering to pray in the capital, Tripoli. The photograph was released by the office of Libya’s Tripoli-based prime minister.
Checking bodies in Derna.
Some victims were placed into a common grave in Derna.
Water unleashed by the dams poured through Derna, a city of roughly 100,000 people.
“What happened in Derna was beyond imaginable — you would never think of such torrential rain in a desert country.”
As Libyans struggled to reach their loved ones, social media groups were filled with inquiries from relatives of people in Derna.
Thousands of people have been displaced.
Destroyed roadways in Al-Mukhaili.
Derna was built on the ruins of an ancient Greek colony. Now much of it is in ruins itself.
Trouble was looming. That much was clear.
For days, Libyans looked across the Mediterranean to Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria, where a powerful storm had already killed more than a dozen people.
But when it got to the North African nation, disaster grew exponentially. Torrential rains swelled the waters behind two dams until they burst, inundating entire communities. More than 5,000 people were feared dead on Tuesday, and in the coastal city of Derna, entire neighborhoods were carried out to sea, the local authorities said.
The two dams that broke were near the city of Derna.
The city of Derna after the storm lifted.
In the city of Derna alone, at least 5,200 people died, one government official said.
Some fled Derna empty-handed — “as if they were born today, with nothing,” one Army official said.
Mourners gathering to pray in the capital, Tripoli. The photograph was released by the office of Libya’s Tripoli-based prime minister.
Checking bodies in Derna.
Some victims were placed into a common grave in Derna.
Water unleashed by the dams poured through Derna, a city of roughly 100,000 people.
“What happened in Derna was beyond imaginable — you would never think of such torrential rain in a desert country.”
As Libyans struggled to reach their loved ones, social media groups were filled with inquiries from relatives of people in Derna.
Thousands of people have been displaced.
Destroyed roadways in Al-Mukhaili.
Derna was built on the ruins of an ancient Greek colony. Now much of it is in ruins itself.
Re: NATURAL DISASTERS
CNN
Libya floods death toll rises to 11,300 in Derna, UN says
Sahar Akbarzai, Richard Roth and Heather Chen, CNN
Sat, September 16, 2023 at 8:30 PM CDT
The death toll from devastating flooding in Libya’s eastern coastal city of Derna has risen to at least 11,300, according to a UN report released Saturday, as search efforts continue.
A further 170 people have been killed outside of Derna due to the flooding, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said.
And in Derna alone, at least 10,100 people remain missing.
“These figures are expected to rise as search-and-rescue crews work tirelessly to find survivors,” it added.
The city of Derna was split into two after floodwaters swept through entire neighborhoods. - Sarah Sirgany/CNN
More than 40,000 people have been displaced across northeastern Libya, the UN says.
The extreme rainfall that hit Libya was brought by a system called Storm Daniel.
Experts say that apart from the strong storm itself, the catastrophic flooding was greatly exacerbated by a lethal confluence of factors including aging, crumbling infrastructure, inadequate warnings and the impacts of the accelerating climate crisis.
Derna, the epicenter of the disaster, was split into two after flood waters swept entire neighborhoods.
It had a population of around 100,000 before the tragedy.
At least 30,000 people have been displaced in Derna alone, the UN said.
“With thousands of displaced people now on the move, the risk of exposure to landmines and Explosive Ordnance of War (ERW) leftover from years of conflict is on the rise, as flood waters have now shifted landmines and ERW,” OCHA said.
Almost 300,000 children who were exposed to the flooding due to Storm Daniel face increased risk of cholera, malnutrition, diarrhea, and dehydration. The children also face “increased risks of violence and exploitation,” the report added.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/li ... 45877.html
Libya floods death toll rises to 11,300 in Derna, UN says
Sahar Akbarzai, Richard Roth and Heather Chen, CNN
Sat, September 16, 2023 at 8:30 PM CDT
The death toll from devastating flooding in Libya’s eastern coastal city of Derna has risen to at least 11,300, according to a UN report released Saturday, as search efforts continue.
A further 170 people have been killed outside of Derna due to the flooding, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said.
And in Derna alone, at least 10,100 people remain missing.
“These figures are expected to rise as search-and-rescue crews work tirelessly to find survivors,” it added.
The city of Derna was split into two after floodwaters swept through entire neighborhoods. - Sarah Sirgany/CNN
More than 40,000 people have been displaced across northeastern Libya, the UN says.
The extreme rainfall that hit Libya was brought by a system called Storm Daniel.
Experts say that apart from the strong storm itself, the catastrophic flooding was greatly exacerbated by a lethal confluence of factors including aging, crumbling infrastructure, inadequate warnings and the impacts of the accelerating climate crisis.
Derna, the epicenter of the disaster, was split into two after flood waters swept entire neighborhoods.
It had a population of around 100,000 before the tragedy.
At least 30,000 people have been displaced in Derna alone, the UN said.
“With thousands of displaced people now on the move, the risk of exposure to landmines and Explosive Ordnance of War (ERW) leftover from years of conflict is on the rise, as flood waters have now shifted landmines and ERW,” OCHA said.
Almost 300,000 children who were exposed to the flooding due to Storm Daniel face increased risk of cholera, malnutrition, diarrhea, and dehydration. The children also face “increased risks of violence and exploitation,” the report added.
https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/li ... 45877.html
Entire Villages Razed as Death Toll Soars From Quakes in Afghanistan
Local officials reported 813 confirmed deaths, though the toll was expected to rise. Homes were reduced to rubble, and hospitals are overwhelmed.
A destroyed house after an earthquake on Saturday in Herat Province, in northwestern Afghanistan.Credit...Mohsen Karimi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The death toll from two major earthquakes in northwestern Afghanistan rose to at least 813 people on Sunday, according to the local authorities, making the dual shocks one of the deadliest natural disasters to hit the country in decades.
The two earthquakes, both 6.3 magnitude, hit Herat Province, along the country’s border with Iran, on Saturday, causing mud-brick homes in several districts to come crashing down and thousands of people in the province’s capital city to rush out of their houses and office buildings as the ground shook beneath them. At least seven tremors followed the initial quakes.
In the areas hit hardest, some villages were destroyed, with the number of casualties expected to rise as search-and-rescue efforts continued, according to Taliban officials and local volunteers. Earlier on Sunday, officials announced that around 2,000 people had been killed, but they later clarified that that figure included deaths and injuries, according to the Ministry of Disaster Management.
Aid workers who arrived in the remote, badly hit areas on Sunday found scenes of devastation: Homes had been reduced to rubble, and, in some cases, entire families had been killed. Hospitals and clinics — already teetering on the brink of collapse because of shortfalls in funding — were overwhelmed with hundreds of injured people.
In the provincial capital, Herat City, thousands of people slept outside in frigid temperatures on Saturday night for fear of additional aftershocks that could bring their homes crashing down.
Wakil Safi, 41, was at home in Herat City when the earthquake struck. He ran outside with his five children when the walls of his home began to tremble, he said, but fell to the ground because of the intensity of the quake.
//More on Afghanistan
//Fighting for Afghanistan’s Girls: Khalida Popal helped evacuate Afghan female soccer players on the national team after the Taliban takeover. Now she is demanding that world soccer officials let the women represent their country on the field again.
//Seeking New Battles: As a generation of fighters raised in war now finds itself stuck in a country at peace, young Taliban soldiers are crossing into Pakistan to continue waging jihad.
//Inside the Resistance Movement: The Taliban takeover in 2021 was so sudden and shocking, these men could not accept defeat. So they embarked on a mission that they knew was probably impossible: to overthrow the Taliban.
//Beauty Salons: Afghanistan shut down all beauty salons across the country after the Taliban administration declared that the women-only spaces were forbidden under Shariah law.
“In my 41 years of life, I have never seen such a strong earthquake,” he said. On Saturday night, he slept outside with his wife and children, a blustering wind chilling them to the bone. Between the cold and two tremors in the night, they barely slept, he added.
In one video circulating on social media, a survivor of the earthquake in a remote village, Wardakha, stood on a pile of rubble that used to be his home. He explained that he was the only surviving member of his family after the quake — all 14 of his relatives, including his 5-day-old child, had been killed when their home collapsed.
“Oh, my God. Oh, God, please help me — what should I do?” he said. Then, gasping for breath, he sunk his hands into the dust that was once his home and cried.
The earthquakes were the latest natural disaster to rattle Afghanistan, which has endured enormous floods, mudslides and earthquakes in recent years. In June 2022, a major earthquake struck southeastern Afghanistan and killed more 1,000 people, according to Taliban officials.
The twin shocks follow two other major quakes this year, in Turkey and Morocco, that killed tens of thousands of people combined.
The disasters have compounded the already dire humanitarian and economic crises that have engulfed Afghanistan since the Western-backed government collapsed two years ago, prompting millions of jobs to disappear practically overnight and the prices of basic goods to soar.
Today, nearly half of the country’s 39 million people face severe hunger, including around three million on the brink of starvation, according to the United Nations’ World Food Program.
Since the Taliban seized power in 2021, U.N. officials have said that Afghanistan represents the world’s largest humanitarian crisis. But two years into Taliban rule, aid money has begun to dry up as other crises have seized the world’s attention and the Taliban administration’s mounting restrictions on women have led to calls to cut off funding from the country entirely in response.
As the country heads into the frigid winter months, the suffering is expected to worsen as families are forced to choose between spending the little money they have on food or on firewood to keep their families warm.
The entrenched humanitarian crisis and series of natural disasters have tested the Taliban’s ability to coordinate vast and sustained aid efforts since seizing power in 2021.
After the earthquake on Saturday, Taliban officials said they had directed military and service organizations to prioritize rescue operations, transporting the injured, preparing homeless shelters and delivering food aid in the remote areas that were most affected. On Sunday, officials said that the country’s air force had made 32 flights transporting the wounded and that all relevant agencies were coordinating their response.
But the sudden and dire need for food, aid and shelter appeared to be overwhelming the government’s ability to respond.
“We sent tents, but the number of families was in the thousands, and we could only give tents to some families,” said Musa Ashari, the head of the Taliban’s disaster management department for Herat. “For example, 20 to 30 tents have been given to a hundred families. The rest of them don’t even have a tent to live in.”
At one school turned aid center on the outskirts of Herat City, hundreds of injured people from one of the worst-hit districts, Zinda Jan, lay on dusty blankets waiting for medical help to arrive on Sunday. Many were taken to Baba Ji High School on Saturday by volunteers who had dug them out of the piles of rubble that were once their homes.
Dazed and injured, they were brought to the school — which local leaders had designated as an aid distribution point — because hospitals and clinics were overwhelmed. But nearly 24 hours since they arrived, most had not received any water, medicine or food from government officials, according to a volunteer.
“The conditions are horrible,” said the volunteer, Jami, 44, who preferred to go by her last name for fear of retribution for speaking to the news media.
In many of the hardest-hit areas — mostly villages along mountainous dirt roads and where homes are little more than mud-brick single-story structures — volunteers said little, if any government aid had arrived.
Qudos Khatibi, 37, a resident of Herat City, traveled to the Zinda Jan District on Sunday morning with other volunteers carrying local donations of water, food and other aid. The devastation, he said, was worse than they could have imagined.
In some villages once home to hundreds of people, there were only a few survivors. The bodies of dozens of children were covered in dust and sheet metal from the religious school they were attending when the quake struck. Village after village was reduced to rubble.
“The situation is very bad,” he said. “You could not tell the difference between a house and an alley.”
Safiullah Padshah contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/08/worl ... 778d3e6de3
A destroyed house after an earthquake on Saturday in Herat Province, in northwestern Afghanistan.Credit...Mohsen Karimi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The death toll from two major earthquakes in northwestern Afghanistan rose to at least 813 people on Sunday, according to the local authorities, making the dual shocks one of the deadliest natural disasters to hit the country in decades.
The two earthquakes, both 6.3 magnitude, hit Herat Province, along the country’s border with Iran, on Saturday, causing mud-brick homes in several districts to come crashing down and thousands of people in the province’s capital city to rush out of their houses and office buildings as the ground shook beneath them. At least seven tremors followed the initial quakes.
In the areas hit hardest, some villages were destroyed, with the number of casualties expected to rise as search-and-rescue efforts continued, according to Taliban officials and local volunteers. Earlier on Sunday, officials announced that around 2,000 people had been killed, but they later clarified that that figure included deaths and injuries, according to the Ministry of Disaster Management.
Aid workers who arrived in the remote, badly hit areas on Sunday found scenes of devastation: Homes had been reduced to rubble, and, in some cases, entire families had been killed. Hospitals and clinics — already teetering on the brink of collapse because of shortfalls in funding — were overwhelmed with hundreds of injured people.
In the provincial capital, Herat City, thousands of people slept outside in frigid temperatures on Saturday night for fear of additional aftershocks that could bring their homes crashing down.
Wakil Safi, 41, was at home in Herat City when the earthquake struck. He ran outside with his five children when the walls of his home began to tremble, he said, but fell to the ground because of the intensity of the quake.
//More on Afghanistan
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“In my 41 years of life, I have never seen such a strong earthquake,” he said. On Saturday night, he slept outside with his wife and children, a blustering wind chilling them to the bone. Between the cold and two tremors in the night, they barely slept, he added.
In one video circulating on social media, a survivor of the earthquake in a remote village, Wardakha, stood on a pile of rubble that used to be his home. He explained that he was the only surviving member of his family after the quake — all 14 of his relatives, including his 5-day-old child, had been killed when their home collapsed.
“Oh, my God. Oh, God, please help me — what should I do?” he said. Then, gasping for breath, he sunk his hands into the dust that was once his home and cried.
The earthquakes were the latest natural disaster to rattle Afghanistan, which has endured enormous floods, mudslides and earthquakes in recent years. In June 2022, a major earthquake struck southeastern Afghanistan and killed more 1,000 people, according to Taliban officials.
The twin shocks follow two other major quakes this year, in Turkey and Morocco, that killed tens of thousands of people combined.
The disasters have compounded the already dire humanitarian and economic crises that have engulfed Afghanistan since the Western-backed government collapsed two years ago, prompting millions of jobs to disappear practically overnight and the prices of basic goods to soar.
Today, nearly half of the country’s 39 million people face severe hunger, including around three million on the brink of starvation, according to the United Nations’ World Food Program.
Since the Taliban seized power in 2021, U.N. officials have said that Afghanistan represents the world’s largest humanitarian crisis. But two years into Taliban rule, aid money has begun to dry up as other crises have seized the world’s attention and the Taliban administration’s mounting restrictions on women have led to calls to cut off funding from the country entirely in response.
As the country heads into the frigid winter months, the suffering is expected to worsen as families are forced to choose between spending the little money they have on food or on firewood to keep their families warm.
The entrenched humanitarian crisis and series of natural disasters have tested the Taliban’s ability to coordinate vast and sustained aid efforts since seizing power in 2021.
After the earthquake on Saturday, Taliban officials said they had directed military and service organizations to prioritize rescue operations, transporting the injured, preparing homeless shelters and delivering food aid in the remote areas that were most affected. On Sunday, officials said that the country’s air force had made 32 flights transporting the wounded and that all relevant agencies were coordinating their response.
But the sudden and dire need for food, aid and shelter appeared to be overwhelming the government’s ability to respond.
“We sent tents, but the number of families was in the thousands, and we could only give tents to some families,” said Musa Ashari, the head of the Taliban’s disaster management department for Herat. “For example, 20 to 30 tents have been given to a hundred families. The rest of them don’t even have a tent to live in.”
At one school turned aid center on the outskirts of Herat City, hundreds of injured people from one of the worst-hit districts, Zinda Jan, lay on dusty blankets waiting for medical help to arrive on Sunday. Many were taken to Baba Ji High School on Saturday by volunteers who had dug them out of the piles of rubble that were once their homes.
Dazed and injured, they were brought to the school — which local leaders had designated as an aid distribution point — because hospitals and clinics were overwhelmed. But nearly 24 hours since they arrived, most had not received any water, medicine or food from government officials, according to a volunteer.
“The conditions are horrible,” said the volunteer, Jami, 44, who preferred to go by her last name for fear of retribution for speaking to the news media.
In many of the hardest-hit areas — mostly villages along mountainous dirt roads and where homes are little more than mud-brick single-story structures — volunteers said little, if any government aid had arrived.
Qudos Khatibi, 37, a resident of Herat City, traveled to the Zinda Jan District on Sunday morning with other volunteers carrying local donations of water, food and other aid. The devastation, he said, was worse than they could have imagined.
In some villages once home to hundreds of people, there were only a few survivors. The bodies of dozens of children were covered in dust and sheet metal from the religious school they were attending when the quake struck. Village after village was reduced to rubble.
“The situation is very bad,” he said. “You could not tell the difference between a house and an alley.”
Safiullah Padshah contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/08/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Powerful Earthquakes Hit Afghanistan for the Fourth Time in Just Over a Week
Herat Province, near the site of three earlier quakes that killed more than 1,000 people in recent days, was shaken violently again early Sunday.
Injured people being taken to a hospital after two more earthquakes on Sunday in Herat, Afghanistan.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Image
Two powerful earthquakes struck Herat Province in northwestern Afghanistan early on Sunday, jolting a region already hit by three major quakes over the past eight days that have killed more than 1,000 people.
The magnitude-6.3 and magnitude-5.4 temblors struck the province just after 8 a.m. local time at a depth of about six miles, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The epicenter of the quakes was around 20 miles northwest of Herat City, the provincial capital and a major economic hub near the country’s border with Iran.
At least two people died and more than 150 people were injured in Sunday’s quakes, according to Masoud Danish, the director of the Herat governor’s office.
The episode on Sunday capped an already devastating week in Herat. It began last on Oct. 7, when two major earthquakes hit the region, killing around 1,300 people and injuring about 1,700 more in the country’s deadliest natural disaster in decades, according to the United Nations.
Those quakes decimated entire villages in Zinda Jan district outside the city, turning clusters of mud-brick homes scattered across the desert into little more than piles of rubble.
Days later, another magnitude-6.3 quake hit just outside the city, injuring around 120 people and rattling Herat residents who were already on edge after the initial quakes. Thousands of people left their homes to live in makeshift tents scattered across the city, terrified of another tremor that they feared could bring buildings crashing down around them.
Image
People stand near tents in a large square in front of a mosque.
Herat on Thursday, where families had already been staying in temporary encampments after a series of earthquakes in the last days.Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York Times
Then, early Sunday, those fears were realized.
Mohammad Ghaznawi, 30, had been sleeping in a tent with his wife and two children in a park on the outskirts of the city after the first quakes struck. On Sunday morning, they woke up shivering from the biting wind and decided to return to their third-floor apartment, thinking that the temblors were finally over.
But as his wife put on a kettle for tea, the apartment building began to shake around them. Mr. Ghaznawi saw his iPad fall from the table, its screen smashing on the ground. Small pieces of white concrete from their ceiling crashed to the floor. He and his wife grabbed their son and daughter and rushed outside.
When the shaking finally ended, Mr. Ghaznawi decided he had had enough. He’s planning on taking his family to a relative’s home in Ghazni Province — around 500 miles from Herat in southeast Afghanistan — on Sunday afternoon until they feel it’s safe to return.
“I’m full of stress, I just want to leave Herat,” said Mr. Ghaznawi, who owns a handicraft shop in the city.
Around 20 minutes after the quake struck, ambulances began arriving at Herat’s regional public hospital, ferrying injured people from the outskirts of the city. One man was pulled onto a stretcher, his head and face coated in blood, according to Nazif Padshah, 27, who was at the hospital pharmacy when the quake struck.
Across the city, fresh cracks snaked up the walls of apartment buildings and people’s homes, photos from residents show. Toilet paper, boxes of tissues and small containers of hand sanitizer were strewn across the floor of one grocery store, next to shattered bottles of ketchup and cooking oil.
Like Mr. Ghaznawi, some residents who had been sleeping outside now plan to leave the province entirely, shaken by the seemingly relentless wave of quakes. Others are at a loss for what to do.
Hussain Karimi, 34, had been sleeping in a makeshift tent in the alley outside his home along with his wife, 4-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter.
On Sunday morning, they went inside their home to make tea and breakfast. A glass of tea was in his hand when suddenly the ground began to tremble beneath him. He dropped the glass, grabbed his daughter and ran to an alleyway opposite their home.
“The quake made me dizzy,” he said. “Both my legs are shaking even now.”
Now, he says, he does not know where to go to keep his family safe.
“We can’t sleep outside because of the cold. We can’t stay in our home because of the fear,” Mr. Karimi said. “I don’t know what to do.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/15/worl ... again.html
Injured people being taken to a hospital after two more earthquakes on Sunday in Herat, Afghanistan.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Image
Two powerful earthquakes struck Herat Province in northwestern Afghanistan early on Sunday, jolting a region already hit by three major quakes over the past eight days that have killed more than 1,000 people.
The magnitude-6.3 and magnitude-5.4 temblors struck the province just after 8 a.m. local time at a depth of about six miles, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The epicenter of the quakes was around 20 miles northwest of Herat City, the provincial capital and a major economic hub near the country’s border with Iran.
At least two people died and more than 150 people were injured in Sunday’s quakes, according to Masoud Danish, the director of the Herat governor’s office.
The episode on Sunday capped an already devastating week in Herat. It began last on Oct. 7, when two major earthquakes hit the region, killing around 1,300 people and injuring about 1,700 more in the country’s deadliest natural disaster in decades, according to the United Nations.
Those quakes decimated entire villages in Zinda Jan district outside the city, turning clusters of mud-brick homes scattered across the desert into little more than piles of rubble.
Days later, another magnitude-6.3 quake hit just outside the city, injuring around 120 people and rattling Herat residents who were already on edge after the initial quakes. Thousands of people left their homes to live in makeshift tents scattered across the city, terrified of another tremor that they feared could bring buildings crashing down around them.
Image
People stand near tents in a large square in front of a mosque.
Herat on Thursday, where families had already been staying in temporary encampments after a series of earthquakes in the last days.Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York Times
Then, early Sunday, those fears were realized.
Mohammad Ghaznawi, 30, had been sleeping in a tent with his wife and two children in a park on the outskirts of the city after the first quakes struck. On Sunday morning, they woke up shivering from the biting wind and decided to return to their third-floor apartment, thinking that the temblors were finally over.
But as his wife put on a kettle for tea, the apartment building began to shake around them. Mr. Ghaznawi saw his iPad fall from the table, its screen smashing on the ground. Small pieces of white concrete from their ceiling crashed to the floor. He and his wife grabbed their son and daughter and rushed outside.
When the shaking finally ended, Mr. Ghaznawi decided he had had enough. He’s planning on taking his family to a relative’s home in Ghazni Province — around 500 miles from Herat in southeast Afghanistan — on Sunday afternoon until they feel it’s safe to return.
“I’m full of stress, I just want to leave Herat,” said Mr. Ghaznawi, who owns a handicraft shop in the city.
Around 20 minutes after the quake struck, ambulances began arriving at Herat’s regional public hospital, ferrying injured people from the outskirts of the city. One man was pulled onto a stretcher, his head and face coated in blood, according to Nazif Padshah, 27, who was at the hospital pharmacy when the quake struck.
Across the city, fresh cracks snaked up the walls of apartment buildings and people’s homes, photos from residents show. Toilet paper, boxes of tissues and small containers of hand sanitizer were strewn across the floor of one grocery store, next to shattered bottles of ketchup and cooking oil.
Like Mr. Ghaznawi, some residents who had been sleeping outside now plan to leave the province entirely, shaken by the seemingly relentless wave of quakes. Others are at a loss for what to do.
Hussain Karimi, 34, had been sleeping in a makeshift tent in the alley outside his home along with his wife, 4-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter.
On Sunday morning, they went inside their home to make tea and breakfast. A glass of tea was in his hand when suddenly the ground began to tremble beneath him. He dropped the glass, grabbed his daughter and ran to an alleyway opposite their home.
“The quake made me dizzy,” he said. “Both my legs are shaking even now.”
Now, he says, he does not know where to go to keep his family safe.
“We can’t sleep outside because of the cold. We can’t stay in our home because of the fear,” Mr. Karimi said. “I don’t know what to do.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/15/worl ... again.html
Re: NATURAL DISASTERS
‘We’re Broken’: Wildfires on Chile’s Coast Kill 112 and Leave Hundreds Missing
Officials are warning of major destruction and loss of life after fast-moving fires swept through central Chile’s coastal hills.
Video: https;//nyti.ms/3ukDxWA
photos at; https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/04/worl ... 778d3e6de3
The fires swept through central Chile’s coastal hills, destroying thousands of homes and killing scores, with many more missing, according to officials.CreditCredit...Cristóbal Olivares for The New York Times
Days after devastating wildfires ripped through Chile’s Pacific Coast, ravaging entire neighborhoods and trapping people fleeing in cars, officials said on Sunday that at least 112 people had been killed and hundreds remained missing and warned that the number of dead could rise sharply.
“That number is going to go up, we know it’s going to go up significantly,” President Gabriel Boric said earlier in the day, when 64 deaths had been confirmed. He described the fires in the Valparaíso region as the worst disaster in the country since a cataclysmic earthquake in 2010 left more than 400 people dead and displaced 1.5 million.
“We’re standing before a tragedy of immense proportions,” said the president, who visited the fire zone and announced that the nation would observe two days of mourning. He said a top priority was to recover the bodies of victims.
Thousands of homes were destroyed in the flames, which swept through the hilly settlements around the resort town of Viña del Mar starting Friday, propelled by high winds. A regional state of emergency was declared and a nighttime curfew imposed.
The fires erupted as many were on summer vacations in Viña del Mar, a city of roughly 330,000, and swept through the smaller neighboring cities of Quilpué, Limache, and Villa Alemana. In some hillside areas, many older residents were not able to escape.
Omar Castro Vázquez, whose home was destroyed in the settlement of El Olivar, said an older neighbor had died in the fire.
ImageA man stands between two burned cards, his forearm raised and held over his eyes.
Omar Castro Vázquez walking on Sunday through his neighborhood in El Olivar, in the Valparaíso region.Credit...Cristóbal Olivares for The New York Times
“It was more like a nuclear bomb than a fire,” said Mr. Castro Vázquez, 72. “There’s nothing left.”
The destruction in the Valparaíso region came as dozens of fires were burning across central and southern Chile, amid what officials have said are higher-than-normal temperatures for this time of year.
Several other countries in South America have also struggled to contain wildfires. Colombia has seen dozens of fires erupt in recent weeks, including around the capital of Bogotá, as the country has experienced a spell of dry weather. Firefighters have also been battling blazes in Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina.
The cyclical climate phenomenon known as El Niño has exacerbated droughts and high temperatures through parts of the continent, creating conditions that experts say are ripe for forest fires.
Valparaiso’s fires sped toward the coast as winds rose on Friday.
Several fires, which also threatened the port city of Valparaíso, burned through Friday night. Authorities only began to grasp the extent of the damage starting Saturday.
Chile’s interior minister, Carolina Tohá, said on Sunday that the authorities hoped that improved conditions — lower temperatures, higher humidity and less wind — would help firefighters to quell hot spots and rescue workers to reach charred areas to remove bodies.
At dawn on Sunday, bands of smoke clung to the hillsides above Viña del Mar. Along a highway to the coast, banks of earth and bridges were burned and tree stumps smoldered on the hillsides. The incinerated husks of cars littered the roads.
Early signs point to flawed evacuation orders, which some residents said may have contributed to the casualty count.
Image
Power lines rest on the ground, surrounded by burned cars and homes.
Burned cars in the El Olivar area.Credit...Cristóbal Olivares for The New York Times
Photographs posted on the social media platform X showed long lines of burned cars that appeared to have been engulfed in flames as people attempted to leave Viña del Mar, drawing comparisons to the botched evacuation during last year’s fire in Lahaina in Maui, Hawaii.
Chile’s national disaster response service, Senapred, said alerts went out starting on Friday, and gave people evacuation instructions but did not order them to leave.
Regina Figueroa, 53, a resident of the Villa Independencia settlement outside Viña del Mar, said she received a cellphone alert with evacuation instructions on Friday when the fire was already closing in on her home.
“I got the alert,’’ she said, “and ran out into the street. When I got onto the road, the flames were already at the corner.”
Ms. Figueroa picked up her 5-year-old grandson, she said. The flames were so close, she could feel the heat as she ran. She stopped and dunked the boy, who was crying, in a swimming pool to cool him off, she said, then continued racing up a staircase to escape.
“The sky was black,’’ she said. “You couldn’t see anything. Everyone was screaming, shouting instructions, wailing into the wind.”
She reached the top of the staircase and stopped to catch her breath, sobbing.
“I couldn’t believe we were alive. But we were the lucky ones,” she said. “I lost my mother-in-law, my sister-in law. They died, calcified in the street because they couldn’t escape the flames.”
Several blocks of Villa Independencia were decimated by fire.
In El Olivar, Mr. Castro Vázquez said residents had fled to a local square when the cellphone alert came.
Black smoke plumed over a hill from a botanical gardens on the other side of the hill, he said, and within minutes their community was engulfed in tall orange flames.
Another resident, Andrés Calderón, 40, said several people in the neighborhood hadn’t wanted to leave their homes, fearing that thieves would burglarize them.
When he received the alert, Mr. Calderón said he jumped into his car and drove through smoke so thick he said he had to turn on his headlights.
“It was like entering hell,” Mr. Calderón said. “I couldn’t see, the wind was blowing the car almost off the road. I just kept driving.”
On Sunday, the area, which was a mix of decades-old public housing and improvised dwellings, had been reduced to rubble. The sides of road were covered in corrugated metal sheets and debris pushed into piles, everything blackened and smelling of smoke.
Mr. Castro Vázquez, a retired dockworker, said he had lost all of his clothes, possessions, documents and a chunk of his pension, which he had withdrawn and kept in cash.
Image
Two people embrace next to a burned car.
Residents of El Olivar on Sunday after their homes were destroyed by wildfires.Credit...Cristóbal Olivares for The New York Times
Residents helped one another remove rubble and burned appliances from the shells of homes.
“I haven’t cried, I haven’t come to terms with it. I’m just focused on cleaning my house and my neighbor’s,” Mr. Castro Vázquez said. “We’re broken.”
In the hills around Viña del Mar, police and medical examiners were starting to arrive on Sunday afternoon. Police officers picked through the rubble, asking locals if they had seen bodies.
Some survivors said they saw people swallowed by flames two stories high. Others described seeing bodies littering staircases.
Many residents in the settlements said they had been stranded without help or even information since their cellphones had run out of batteries and the power had gone out. They said that they had been largely left on their own to respond to the disaster. Shelters set up for evacuees were too far away to be useful, many said.
In the Las Praderas district, some survivors huddled in the shade while others raked over the twisted remains of their homes. A taxi distributed bottled water and empanadas as a first-year medical student treated minor injuries.
The mayor of Viña del Mar, Macarena Ripamonti, said at a news conference on Sunday morning that as of Saturday night, 372 people in the municipality were missing. She said officials would ensure that the bodies of those who died in the fires were removed as quickly as possible.
“They are our neighbors, they’re our family, they are our friends, they are people from Viña del Mar. That moves the population,” she said. “People are living through the worst situation.”
Natalie Alcoba contributed reporting from Buenos Aires.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/04/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Officials are warning of major destruction and loss of life after fast-moving fires swept through central Chile’s coastal hills.
Video: https;//nyti.ms/3ukDxWA
photos at; https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/04/worl ... 778d3e6de3
The fires swept through central Chile’s coastal hills, destroying thousands of homes and killing scores, with many more missing, according to officials.CreditCredit...Cristóbal Olivares for The New York Times
Days after devastating wildfires ripped through Chile’s Pacific Coast, ravaging entire neighborhoods and trapping people fleeing in cars, officials said on Sunday that at least 112 people had been killed and hundreds remained missing and warned that the number of dead could rise sharply.
“That number is going to go up, we know it’s going to go up significantly,” President Gabriel Boric said earlier in the day, when 64 deaths had been confirmed. He described the fires in the Valparaíso region as the worst disaster in the country since a cataclysmic earthquake in 2010 left more than 400 people dead and displaced 1.5 million.
“We’re standing before a tragedy of immense proportions,” said the president, who visited the fire zone and announced that the nation would observe two days of mourning. He said a top priority was to recover the bodies of victims.
Thousands of homes were destroyed in the flames, which swept through the hilly settlements around the resort town of Viña del Mar starting Friday, propelled by high winds. A regional state of emergency was declared and a nighttime curfew imposed.
The fires erupted as many were on summer vacations in Viña del Mar, a city of roughly 330,000, and swept through the smaller neighboring cities of Quilpué, Limache, and Villa Alemana. In some hillside areas, many older residents were not able to escape.
Omar Castro Vázquez, whose home was destroyed in the settlement of El Olivar, said an older neighbor had died in the fire.
ImageA man stands between two burned cards, his forearm raised and held over his eyes.
Omar Castro Vázquez walking on Sunday through his neighborhood in El Olivar, in the Valparaíso region.Credit...Cristóbal Olivares for The New York Times
“It was more like a nuclear bomb than a fire,” said Mr. Castro Vázquez, 72. “There’s nothing left.”
The destruction in the Valparaíso region came as dozens of fires were burning across central and southern Chile, amid what officials have said are higher-than-normal temperatures for this time of year.
Several other countries in South America have also struggled to contain wildfires. Colombia has seen dozens of fires erupt in recent weeks, including around the capital of Bogotá, as the country has experienced a spell of dry weather. Firefighters have also been battling blazes in Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina.
The cyclical climate phenomenon known as El Niño has exacerbated droughts and high temperatures through parts of the continent, creating conditions that experts say are ripe for forest fires.
Valparaiso’s fires sped toward the coast as winds rose on Friday.
Several fires, which also threatened the port city of Valparaíso, burned through Friday night. Authorities only began to grasp the extent of the damage starting Saturday.
Chile’s interior minister, Carolina Tohá, said on Sunday that the authorities hoped that improved conditions — lower temperatures, higher humidity and less wind — would help firefighters to quell hot spots and rescue workers to reach charred areas to remove bodies.
At dawn on Sunday, bands of smoke clung to the hillsides above Viña del Mar. Along a highway to the coast, banks of earth and bridges were burned and tree stumps smoldered on the hillsides. The incinerated husks of cars littered the roads.
Early signs point to flawed evacuation orders, which some residents said may have contributed to the casualty count.
Image
Power lines rest on the ground, surrounded by burned cars and homes.
Burned cars in the El Olivar area.Credit...Cristóbal Olivares for The New York Times
Photographs posted on the social media platform X showed long lines of burned cars that appeared to have been engulfed in flames as people attempted to leave Viña del Mar, drawing comparisons to the botched evacuation during last year’s fire in Lahaina in Maui, Hawaii.
Chile’s national disaster response service, Senapred, said alerts went out starting on Friday, and gave people evacuation instructions but did not order them to leave.
Regina Figueroa, 53, a resident of the Villa Independencia settlement outside Viña del Mar, said she received a cellphone alert with evacuation instructions on Friday when the fire was already closing in on her home.
“I got the alert,’’ she said, “and ran out into the street. When I got onto the road, the flames were already at the corner.”
Ms. Figueroa picked up her 5-year-old grandson, she said. The flames were so close, she could feel the heat as she ran. She stopped and dunked the boy, who was crying, in a swimming pool to cool him off, she said, then continued racing up a staircase to escape.
“The sky was black,’’ she said. “You couldn’t see anything. Everyone was screaming, shouting instructions, wailing into the wind.”
She reached the top of the staircase and stopped to catch her breath, sobbing.
“I couldn’t believe we were alive. But we were the lucky ones,” she said. “I lost my mother-in-law, my sister-in law. They died, calcified in the street because they couldn’t escape the flames.”
Several blocks of Villa Independencia were decimated by fire.
In El Olivar, Mr. Castro Vázquez said residents had fled to a local square when the cellphone alert came.
Black smoke plumed over a hill from a botanical gardens on the other side of the hill, he said, and within minutes their community was engulfed in tall orange flames.
Another resident, Andrés Calderón, 40, said several people in the neighborhood hadn’t wanted to leave their homes, fearing that thieves would burglarize them.
When he received the alert, Mr. Calderón said he jumped into his car and drove through smoke so thick he said he had to turn on his headlights.
“It was like entering hell,” Mr. Calderón said. “I couldn’t see, the wind was blowing the car almost off the road. I just kept driving.”
On Sunday, the area, which was a mix of decades-old public housing and improvised dwellings, had been reduced to rubble. The sides of road were covered in corrugated metal sheets and debris pushed into piles, everything blackened and smelling of smoke.
Mr. Castro Vázquez, a retired dockworker, said he had lost all of his clothes, possessions, documents and a chunk of his pension, which he had withdrawn and kept in cash.
Image
Two people embrace next to a burned car.
Residents of El Olivar on Sunday after their homes were destroyed by wildfires.Credit...Cristóbal Olivares for The New York Times
Residents helped one another remove rubble and burned appliances from the shells of homes.
“I haven’t cried, I haven’t come to terms with it. I’m just focused on cleaning my house and my neighbor’s,” Mr. Castro Vázquez said. “We’re broken.”
In the hills around Viña del Mar, police and medical examiners were starting to arrive on Sunday afternoon. Police officers picked through the rubble, asking locals if they had seen bodies.
Some survivors said they saw people swallowed by flames two stories high. Others described seeing bodies littering staircases.
Many residents in the settlements said they had been stranded without help or even information since their cellphones had run out of batteries and the power had gone out. They said that they had been largely left on their own to respond to the disaster. Shelters set up for evacuees were too far away to be useful, many said.
In the Las Praderas district, some survivors huddled in the shade while others raked over the twisted remains of their homes. A taxi distributed bottled water and empanadas as a first-year medical student treated minor injuries.
The mayor of Viña del Mar, Macarena Ripamonti, said at a news conference on Sunday morning that as of Saturday night, 372 people in the municipality were missing. She said officials would ensure that the bodies of those who died in the fires were removed as quickly as possible.
“They are our neighbors, they’re our family, they are our friends, they are people from Viña del Mar. That moves the population,” she said. “People are living through the worst situation.”
Natalie Alcoba contributed reporting from Buenos Aires.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/04/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Re: NATURAL DISASTERS
Floods Batter Russia and Kazakhstan, Forcing Tens of Thousands to Evacuate
More than 100,000 people had to leave their homes after spring floods engulfed cities and villages in vast sections of neighboring countries.
Emergency workers near a flooded street in Orsk, Russia, on Monday after a dam burst on the Ural River, near Russia’s border with Kazakhstan.Credit...Associated Press
More than 100,000 people were forced to evacuate on Wednesday after devastating spring floods engulfed cities and villages across vast sections of Russia and Kazakhstan.
The floods affected multiple settlements across Russia in the South Urals region east of Moscow, in Western Siberia and near the Volga River, as well as at least five regions of Kazakhstan, which shares a long border with Russia.
Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, said on Wednesday that the situation was “quite tense” and the forecast was “unfavorable” as “large amounts of water are coming to new regions.”
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is receiving reports about the flooding but has no plans to visit the affected areas, Mr. Peskov said. On Tuesday, Mr. Putin discussed the emergency with his Kazakh counterpart, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, the Kremlin said in a statement.
Image
Soldiers wearing camouflage carry bags of sand on a muddy bank.
Filling sand bags to construct a flood barrier in the settlement of Zarechny, Russia, near Petropavl, Kazakhstan, on Wednesday.Credit...Evgeniy Lukyanov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Image
Floodwaters lap at two buildings in the distance under a gray sky.
Flooded buildings in the settlement of Pokrovka, near Petropavl, Kazakhstan, on Tuesday.Credit...Evgeniy Lukyanov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
In the Central Asian country of Kazakhstan, the authorities said on Wednesday that more than 96,000 people had been evacuated and rescued, and more than 3,400 buildings remained flooded in five regions.
Heavy floods are a regular feature of the spring season in Russia. But the situation appeared to be substantially worse this year after a brisk heat wave caused large amounts of snow to melt rapidly, prompting local rivers to rise, the Russian emergency authorities said.
Waterlogged soil that froze during the winter and heavy precipitation also contributed to the flooding, the Emergency Situations Ministry said.
Parts of the Russian city of Orenburg, a regional capital of about 540,000 people, were deluged with water on Wednesday as the Ural River that runs through it swelled more than 33 feet and continued to rise, the mayor said in a post on the Telegram messaging app.
More than 7,700 people were evacuated in the Orenburg region, the regional government said.
Image
An older woman wearing a knit cap holds onto the side of a building. She is submerged up to her hips in floodwater.
A woman near her home in Orenburg, Russia, on Wednesday. The regional governor said the floods there were the worst in recorded history.Credit...Associated Press
Image
A satellite image of flooded areas.
Flooded areas of Akbulak, Russia, a settlement southeast of Orenburg, last week.Credit...Maxar Technologies, via Associated Press
Overall, more than 13,000 residential buildings have been flooded across Russia, according to TASS, a Russian state news agency. Russian state television showed residents paddling along roads and water touching the windows of traditional wooden houses.
Government officials urged local residents in affected areas or in those localities that were under threat of flooding to evacuate. Local prosecutors warned shops against raising prices on bottled drinking water.
On Wednesday, the situation in Orsk, a major Russian town near the border with Kazakhstan, began to improve after a flood destroyed an embankment dam on Friday, submerging the old part of the city and its smaller residential buildings.
The situation angered hundreds of residents, who went in front of Orsk’s City Hall to demand a swifter response from the local government, according to Kommersant, a Russian newspaper.
The regional governor said the situation was unprecedented and that the floods were the worst in recorded history.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/10/worl ... tions.html
More than 100,000 people had to leave their homes after spring floods engulfed cities and villages in vast sections of neighboring countries.
Emergency workers near a flooded street in Orsk, Russia, on Monday after a dam burst on the Ural River, near Russia’s border with Kazakhstan.Credit...Associated Press
More than 100,000 people were forced to evacuate on Wednesday after devastating spring floods engulfed cities and villages across vast sections of Russia and Kazakhstan.
The floods affected multiple settlements across Russia in the South Urals region east of Moscow, in Western Siberia and near the Volga River, as well as at least five regions of Kazakhstan, which shares a long border with Russia.
Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, said on Wednesday that the situation was “quite tense” and the forecast was “unfavorable” as “large amounts of water are coming to new regions.”
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is receiving reports about the flooding but has no plans to visit the affected areas, Mr. Peskov said. On Tuesday, Mr. Putin discussed the emergency with his Kazakh counterpart, President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, the Kremlin said in a statement.
Image
Soldiers wearing camouflage carry bags of sand on a muddy bank.
Filling sand bags to construct a flood barrier in the settlement of Zarechny, Russia, near Petropavl, Kazakhstan, on Wednesday.Credit...Evgeniy Lukyanov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Image
Floodwaters lap at two buildings in the distance under a gray sky.
Flooded buildings in the settlement of Pokrovka, near Petropavl, Kazakhstan, on Tuesday.Credit...Evgeniy Lukyanov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
In the Central Asian country of Kazakhstan, the authorities said on Wednesday that more than 96,000 people had been evacuated and rescued, and more than 3,400 buildings remained flooded in five regions.
Heavy floods are a regular feature of the spring season in Russia. But the situation appeared to be substantially worse this year after a brisk heat wave caused large amounts of snow to melt rapidly, prompting local rivers to rise, the Russian emergency authorities said.
Waterlogged soil that froze during the winter and heavy precipitation also contributed to the flooding, the Emergency Situations Ministry said.
Parts of the Russian city of Orenburg, a regional capital of about 540,000 people, were deluged with water on Wednesday as the Ural River that runs through it swelled more than 33 feet and continued to rise, the mayor said in a post on the Telegram messaging app.
More than 7,700 people were evacuated in the Orenburg region, the regional government said.
Image
An older woman wearing a knit cap holds onto the side of a building. She is submerged up to her hips in floodwater.
A woman near her home in Orenburg, Russia, on Wednesday. The regional governor said the floods there were the worst in recorded history.Credit...Associated Press
Image
A satellite image of flooded areas.
Flooded areas of Akbulak, Russia, a settlement southeast of Orenburg, last week.Credit...Maxar Technologies, via Associated Press
Overall, more than 13,000 residential buildings have been flooded across Russia, according to TASS, a Russian state news agency. Russian state television showed residents paddling along roads and water touching the windows of traditional wooden houses.
Government officials urged local residents in affected areas or in those localities that were under threat of flooding to evacuate. Local prosecutors warned shops against raising prices on bottled drinking water.
On Wednesday, the situation in Orsk, a major Russian town near the border with Kazakhstan, began to improve after a flood destroyed an embankment dam on Friday, submerging the old part of the city and its smaller residential buildings.
The situation angered hundreds of residents, who went in front of Orsk’s City Hall to demand a swifter response from the local government, according to Kommersant, a Russian newspaper.
The regional governor said the situation was unprecedented and that the floods were the worst in recorded history.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/10/worl ... tions.html
Re: NATURAL DISASTERS
Flash Flooding in Afghanistan Kills at Least 300, With More Missing
Heavy seasonal rains have set off floods in the northern province of Baghlan and in at least three other provinces.
Video ID: 100000009463676
Heavy seasonal rains set off floods in three provinces, including the northern province of Baghlan. More than 300 people were killed.CreditCredit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
By Safiullah Padshah, Christina Goldbaum and Najim Rahim
Safiullah Padshah reported from Kabul, Afghanistan, Christina Goldbaum from London, and Najim Rahim from San Francisco.
May 11, 2024
Heavy seasonal rains have set off flash floods across Afghanistan, killing more than 300 people in one province and destroying thousands of homes, according to United Nations officials. The floods have displaced thousands of others and engulfed entire villages, Afghan officials say.
The flood’s toll in the northern province of Baghlan, which appeared to have suffered the worst devastation, was likely to rise, said Hedayatullah Hamdard, the director of the provincial disaster management department. Most of the dead there were women and children, he said. At least 2,000 homes have been destroyed, according to the U.N. World Food Program.
Flooding began around 4 p.m. Friday and continued into the evening in Baghlan Province. Abdul Aziz Ayyar, a tribal elder, was in his home in the Baghlan-e-Markazi District when rain began pouring down. He stepped outside and saw a torrent of water rushing down a nearby mountain toward his village.
He grabbed his two children and wife and began sprinting to a different nearby mountain, shouting as he ran to warn the other villagers, he said. His 30-year-old niece was running behind him, carrying her 1-year-old and 3-year-old daughters. At one point, his niece tried to grab his hand to steady her and her children, he said, but before he could grab her, floodwater crashed over them, carrying them away.
“We returned to the village after midnight to save people, but they were all dead,” Mr. Ayyar said on Saturday. “Everything was flooded. There are three villages in our area where no houses are left; all have been razed by the flood.”
Flooding also killed at least one person in Badakhshan, a mountainous eastern province, where homes, small dams and bridges were destroyed and 2,000 livestock were killed, the provincial diaster management department said.
The provinces of Ghor and Herat, in central and western Afghanistan, were also affected by flooding, according to the Taliban authorities. And doctors were being deployed in Parwan Province — north of Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital — said Hekmatullah Shamim, the spokesman for the province’s governor, though details of the toll there were not immediately available.
Rescue teams were sending food, aid, medical teams and ambulances to the affected areas of Baghlan Province, said Sharafat Zaman, a spokesman for the Health Ministry.
Image
Flooding has destroyed thousands of homes in Baghlan province.Credit...Mehrab Ibrahimi/Associated Press
Images published by the government on Saturday showed roads in Baghlan submerged in muddy water, with people trying to move vehicles that had been stuck in the sludge.
Videos from the Burka District of Baghlan Province, verified by The New York Times, showed entire villages submerged in muddy floodwater, with debris from destroyed houses and elsewhere piled up on the villages’ edges. The videos also showed women and children, covered head to toe in thick brown mud, crying out on a hilltop as they looked out over the destruction.
Barkatullah Sulaimani, a school principal in the Haji Wakil village of the Burka District, said on Saturday that when floodwater began rushing through his village, he ran to a hilltop on its outskirts. By about 11 p.m. Friday, he said, about 100 people from Haji Wakil had made it to safety, but nearly every family was missing some relatives. About 200 people from the village were unaccounted for, Mr. Sulaimani said.
Throughout the night, he took calls from people who were not in the village at the time of the flood and were seeking information about missing relatives.
“I told them I don’t see anything but water,” Mr. Sulaimani said. “They are not with us here. Maybe they are dead or alive.” Of their village, only some walls of some houses remained, he said, and the rest was destroyed.
In recent years, Afghanistan has experienced a dire economic crisis, faced a spate of natural disasters, and dealt with the turmoil of war and clashes with its neighbor Pakistan.
The wet conditions this year have been brought on in part by the El Niño phenomenon, raising the risk of floods, which hinder crop production and the flow of food supplies, particularly in the country’s north and northeast, the International Rescue Committee said in a statement last week.
Flash floods from heavy rains inundated much of Afghanistan last month, killing more than 100 people, destroying more than 1,000 homes and ruining more than 60,000 acres of farmland, the group said.
The damage to roads, bridges and the power infrastructure could hinder the delivery of humanitarian aid there, it said. Floods are also economically devastating in a country where at least 80 percent of the population derives its income from agriculture, according to the United Nations.
“Any additional flooding will have a detrimental impact on large swaths of the population,” the International Rescue Committee said, “which are already reeling from an economic collapse, high levels of malnutrition and conflict.”
John Yoon contributed reporting from Seoul.
Afghanistan Weather
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/11/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Heavy seasonal rains have set off floods in the northern province of Baghlan and in at least three other provinces.
Video ID: 100000009463676
Heavy seasonal rains set off floods in three provinces, including the northern province of Baghlan. More than 300 people were killed.CreditCredit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
By Safiullah Padshah, Christina Goldbaum and Najim Rahim
Safiullah Padshah reported from Kabul, Afghanistan, Christina Goldbaum from London, and Najim Rahim from San Francisco.
May 11, 2024
Heavy seasonal rains have set off flash floods across Afghanistan, killing more than 300 people in one province and destroying thousands of homes, according to United Nations officials. The floods have displaced thousands of others and engulfed entire villages, Afghan officials say.
The flood’s toll in the northern province of Baghlan, which appeared to have suffered the worst devastation, was likely to rise, said Hedayatullah Hamdard, the director of the provincial disaster management department. Most of the dead there were women and children, he said. At least 2,000 homes have been destroyed, according to the U.N. World Food Program.
Flooding began around 4 p.m. Friday and continued into the evening in Baghlan Province. Abdul Aziz Ayyar, a tribal elder, was in his home in the Baghlan-e-Markazi District when rain began pouring down. He stepped outside and saw a torrent of water rushing down a nearby mountain toward his village.
He grabbed his two children and wife and began sprinting to a different nearby mountain, shouting as he ran to warn the other villagers, he said. His 30-year-old niece was running behind him, carrying her 1-year-old and 3-year-old daughters. At one point, his niece tried to grab his hand to steady her and her children, he said, but before he could grab her, floodwater crashed over them, carrying them away.
“We returned to the village after midnight to save people, but they were all dead,” Mr. Ayyar said on Saturday. “Everything was flooded. There are three villages in our area where no houses are left; all have been razed by the flood.”
Flooding also killed at least one person in Badakhshan, a mountainous eastern province, where homes, small dams and bridges were destroyed and 2,000 livestock were killed, the provincial diaster management department said.
The provinces of Ghor and Herat, in central and western Afghanistan, were also affected by flooding, according to the Taliban authorities. And doctors were being deployed in Parwan Province — north of Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital — said Hekmatullah Shamim, the spokesman for the province’s governor, though details of the toll there were not immediately available.
Rescue teams were sending food, aid, medical teams and ambulances to the affected areas of Baghlan Province, said Sharafat Zaman, a spokesman for the Health Ministry.
Image
Flooding has destroyed thousands of homes in Baghlan province.Credit...Mehrab Ibrahimi/Associated Press
Images published by the government on Saturday showed roads in Baghlan submerged in muddy water, with people trying to move vehicles that had been stuck in the sludge.
Videos from the Burka District of Baghlan Province, verified by The New York Times, showed entire villages submerged in muddy floodwater, with debris from destroyed houses and elsewhere piled up on the villages’ edges. The videos also showed women and children, covered head to toe in thick brown mud, crying out on a hilltop as they looked out over the destruction.
Barkatullah Sulaimani, a school principal in the Haji Wakil village of the Burka District, said on Saturday that when floodwater began rushing through his village, he ran to a hilltop on its outskirts. By about 11 p.m. Friday, he said, about 100 people from Haji Wakil had made it to safety, but nearly every family was missing some relatives. About 200 people from the village were unaccounted for, Mr. Sulaimani said.
Throughout the night, he took calls from people who were not in the village at the time of the flood and were seeking information about missing relatives.
“I told them I don’t see anything but water,” Mr. Sulaimani said. “They are not with us here. Maybe they are dead or alive.” Of their village, only some walls of some houses remained, he said, and the rest was destroyed.
In recent years, Afghanistan has experienced a dire economic crisis, faced a spate of natural disasters, and dealt with the turmoil of war and clashes with its neighbor Pakistan.
The wet conditions this year have been brought on in part by the El Niño phenomenon, raising the risk of floods, which hinder crop production and the flow of food supplies, particularly in the country’s north and northeast, the International Rescue Committee said in a statement last week.
Flash floods from heavy rains inundated much of Afghanistan last month, killing more than 100 people, destroying more than 1,000 homes and ruining more than 60,000 acres of farmland, the group said.
The damage to roads, bridges and the power infrastructure could hinder the delivery of humanitarian aid there, it said. Floods are also economically devastating in a country where at least 80 percent of the population derives its income from agriculture, according to the United Nations.
“Any additional flooding will have a detrimental impact on large swaths of the population,” the International Rescue Committee said, “which are already reeling from an economic collapse, high levels of malnutrition and conflict.”
John Yoon contributed reporting from Seoul.
Afghanistan Weather
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/11/worl ... 778d3e6de3
Re: NATURAL DISASTERS
Papua New Guinea Landslide Has Buried 2,000 People, Officials Say
Just getting to survivors has proved to be an enormous challenge, with a blocked highway and unstable ground “posing ongoing danger” to rescue workers.
Video
The deadly landslide toppled buildings and vehicles, trapping thousands of people under rubble, officials said.CreditCredit...New Porgera Limited, via Reuters
More than 2,000 people were buried alive in the landslide that smothered a Papua New Guinea village and work camp on Friday in the country’s remote northern highlands, the authorities told the United Nations on Monday.
Government officials visited the disaster site on Sunday. And even as the official death toll jumped from a few dozen to 670, they warned that far more victims than expected appeared to still be caught under the rubble.
Satellite images show size of landslide
Before
Highlands Highway
Homes
PAPUA NEW
GUINEA
Site of landslide
After
Highlands Highway
1,950 ft
Site of landslide
1,000 feet
Satellite images by Planet Labs on May 15 and May 26, 2024. By Agnes Chang
Papua New Guinea Landslide Has Buried 2,000 People, Officials Say - The New York Times
“The landslide buried more than 2,000 people alive and caused major destruction to buildings, food gardens and caused major impact on the economic lifeline of the country,” Lusete Laso Mana, an official in the national disaster center, said in a letter to the United Nations.
The letter stressed that rescue efforts continued to be a challenge. The main highway to the area is blocked, the letter said, and the ground remains unstable as water flows beneath the rocks, shifting land and “posing ongoing danger to both the rescue teams and survivors alike.”
The region, in Enga Province, is densely populated and located near the Porgera gold mine operated by Barrick Gold, a company based in Canada, in collaboration with Zijin Mining, a Chinese group. It is an area of remote and difficult jungle terrain, in a country of around 12 million people that sits just north of Australia. Tropical and divided along tribal, ethnic and linguistic lines, Papua New Guinea is rich in natural resources but largely underdeveloped, making it especially vulnerable to natural disasters, which strike frequently.
The landslide took place in a populated area
Pacific
Ocean
Less populated
More populated
Site of
landslide
INDONESIA
PAPUA
NEW GUINEA
Port Moresby
Coral
Sea
200 miles
Sources: Kontur; Humanitarian Data Exchange; WorldPop; Open Street Map By Pablo Robles
U.N. officials have been closely monitoring the situation. And with the latest estimate in hand, they emphasized that the need for assistance would be long-term and complicated.
“This situation necessitates immediate action and international support to mitigate further losses and provide essential aid to those affected,” said Anne Mandal, a spokesperson for the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration.
Over the weekend, the agency estimated that, on top of the toll of dead and missing, more than 250 houses had been abandoned as residents feared additional slippage, with roughly 1,250 people displaced.
Just getting to survivors has proved to be an enormous challenge. An aid convoy reached the area on Saturday afternoon to deliver tarps and water, but no food. On Sunday, the local government secured food and water for around 600 people, according to the U.N., but heavy equipment still had not made it through, leaving people to search for bodies on dangerous, unstable debris using small shovels and pitchforks.
Tribal feuds have also added to the post-disaster safety risks.
Ruth Kissam, a community organizer in Enga Province, said giant boulders fell from the land of one tribe onto a residential town occupied by another tribe.
“There will be tension,” she said. “There is already tension.”
Even before the disaster, the region had been experiencing tribal clashes that led people to flee surrounding villages, with many ending up concentrated in the community buried in the landslide. In September of last year, much of Enga was in a government lockdown and under a curfew, with no flights in or out.
Now, as the search for the dead and living continues, anger and violence have been intensifying.
On Saturday morning, a quarrel flared between two clans, leaving people dead and dozens of houses burned down, said Serhan Aktoprak, the chief of mission at the International Organization for Migration’s office in Papua New Guinea. He added that the threat of violence makes it harder to deliver aid.
Papua New Guinea officials also stressed a need for calm.
“Following the inspection conducted by the team, it was determined that the damages are extensive and require immediate and collaborative actions from all players,” said the letter from government officials who visited the site.
The landslide struck the village about 3 a.m. Friday, when many residents were asleep. Some of the boulders that buried houses and cut off a major highway were larger than shipping containers. Even in a region with frequent heavy storms and earthquakes, the landslide has drawn intense expressions of grief from within the country and beyond — including the White House.
“Jill and I are heartbroken by the loss of life and devastation caused by the landslide in Papua New Guinea,” President Biden said in a statement after the disaster. “Our prayers are with all the families impacted by this tragedy and all the first responders who are putting themselves in harm’s way to help their fellow citizens.”
Christopher Cottrell contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/27/worl ... ogin-email
Just getting to survivors has proved to be an enormous challenge, with a blocked highway and unstable ground “posing ongoing danger” to rescue workers.
Video
The deadly landslide toppled buildings and vehicles, trapping thousands of people under rubble, officials said.CreditCredit...New Porgera Limited, via Reuters
More than 2,000 people were buried alive in the landslide that smothered a Papua New Guinea village and work camp on Friday in the country’s remote northern highlands, the authorities told the United Nations on Monday.
Government officials visited the disaster site on Sunday. And even as the official death toll jumped from a few dozen to 670, they warned that far more victims than expected appeared to still be caught under the rubble.
Satellite images show size of landslide
Before
Highlands Highway
Homes
PAPUA NEW
GUINEA
Site of landslide
After
Highlands Highway
1,950 ft
Site of landslide
1,000 feet
Satellite images by Planet Labs on May 15 and May 26, 2024. By Agnes Chang
Papua New Guinea Landslide Has Buried 2,000 People, Officials Say - The New York Times
“The landslide buried more than 2,000 people alive and caused major destruction to buildings, food gardens and caused major impact on the economic lifeline of the country,” Lusete Laso Mana, an official in the national disaster center, said in a letter to the United Nations.
The letter stressed that rescue efforts continued to be a challenge. The main highway to the area is blocked, the letter said, and the ground remains unstable as water flows beneath the rocks, shifting land and “posing ongoing danger to both the rescue teams and survivors alike.”
The region, in Enga Province, is densely populated and located near the Porgera gold mine operated by Barrick Gold, a company based in Canada, in collaboration with Zijin Mining, a Chinese group. It is an area of remote and difficult jungle terrain, in a country of around 12 million people that sits just north of Australia. Tropical and divided along tribal, ethnic and linguistic lines, Papua New Guinea is rich in natural resources but largely underdeveloped, making it especially vulnerable to natural disasters, which strike frequently.
The landslide took place in a populated area
Pacific
Ocean
Less populated
More populated
Site of
landslide
INDONESIA
PAPUA
NEW GUINEA
Port Moresby
Coral
Sea
200 miles
Sources: Kontur; Humanitarian Data Exchange; WorldPop; Open Street Map By Pablo Robles
U.N. officials have been closely monitoring the situation. And with the latest estimate in hand, they emphasized that the need for assistance would be long-term and complicated.
“This situation necessitates immediate action and international support to mitigate further losses and provide essential aid to those affected,” said Anne Mandal, a spokesperson for the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration.
Over the weekend, the agency estimated that, on top of the toll of dead and missing, more than 250 houses had been abandoned as residents feared additional slippage, with roughly 1,250 people displaced.
Just getting to survivors has proved to be an enormous challenge. An aid convoy reached the area on Saturday afternoon to deliver tarps and water, but no food. On Sunday, the local government secured food and water for around 600 people, according to the U.N., but heavy equipment still had not made it through, leaving people to search for bodies on dangerous, unstable debris using small shovels and pitchforks.
Tribal feuds have also added to the post-disaster safety risks.
Ruth Kissam, a community organizer in Enga Province, said giant boulders fell from the land of one tribe onto a residential town occupied by another tribe.
“There will be tension,” she said. “There is already tension.”
Even before the disaster, the region had been experiencing tribal clashes that led people to flee surrounding villages, with many ending up concentrated in the community buried in the landslide. In September of last year, much of Enga was in a government lockdown and under a curfew, with no flights in or out.
Now, as the search for the dead and living continues, anger and violence have been intensifying.
On Saturday morning, a quarrel flared between two clans, leaving people dead and dozens of houses burned down, said Serhan Aktoprak, the chief of mission at the International Organization for Migration’s office in Papua New Guinea. He added that the threat of violence makes it harder to deliver aid.
Papua New Guinea officials also stressed a need for calm.
“Following the inspection conducted by the team, it was determined that the damages are extensive and require immediate and collaborative actions from all players,” said the letter from government officials who visited the site.
The landslide struck the village about 3 a.m. Friday, when many residents were asleep. Some of the boulders that buried houses and cut off a major highway were larger than shipping containers. Even in a region with frequent heavy storms and earthquakes, the landslide has drawn intense expressions of grief from within the country and beyond — including the White House.
“Jill and I are heartbroken by the loss of life and devastation caused by the landslide in Papua New Guinea,” President Biden said in a statement after the disaster. “Our prayers are with all the families impacted by this tragedy and all the first responders who are putting themselves in harm’s way to help their fellow citizens.”
Christopher Cottrell contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/27/worl ... ogin-email
Re: NATURAL DISASTERS
Death toll from Ethiopian landslides jumps to 229: official
Reuters Published July 23, 2024 Updated about 10 hours ago
The aftermath of a landslide in Gofa zone in Southern Ethiopia regional state, July 23. — Reuters
The death toll from two landslides in southern Ethiopia has jumped to 229 and could rise further as the search for survivors and casualties continued into a second day, a government official said on Tuesday.
A landslide buried people in the Gofa zone in Southern Ethiopia regional state on Sunday night, and then a second one engulfed others who had gathered to help on Monday morning.
“I don’t know when it will stop. We are still recovering bodies,” Markos Melese, head of the National Disaster Response agency in Gofa Zone, told Reuters by phone.
“We are still digging,” Melese said.
On Monday, an official said at least 50 people had died and children and police officers were among the dead.
Footage shared by the local administration showed people digging up bodies with shovels and bare hands.
“The death toll surged after the people who came to rescue also got trapped,” said Gofa district administrator Misikir Mitiku.
“It is a very sad incident,” Mitiku said.
President Abiy Ahmed said he was deeply saddened by the terrible loss of life, and that federal officials had been deployed to reduce the impact of the disaster.
“We stand in strong solidarity with the people and government of Ethiopia as rescue efforts continue to find the missing and assist the displaced,” African Union chairperson Moussa Faki Mahamat wrote on the social media platform X.
The head of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who is Ethiopian, said he was thinking of all the families affected and that a WHO team had been sent to support immediate health needs.
https://www.dawn.com/news/1847545/death ... 9-official
Reuters Published July 23, 2024 Updated about 10 hours ago
The aftermath of a landslide in Gofa zone in Southern Ethiopia regional state, July 23. — Reuters
The death toll from two landslides in southern Ethiopia has jumped to 229 and could rise further as the search for survivors and casualties continued into a second day, a government official said on Tuesday.
A landslide buried people in the Gofa zone in Southern Ethiopia regional state on Sunday night, and then a second one engulfed others who had gathered to help on Monday morning.
“I don’t know when it will stop. We are still recovering bodies,” Markos Melese, head of the National Disaster Response agency in Gofa Zone, told Reuters by phone.
“We are still digging,” Melese said.
On Monday, an official said at least 50 people had died and children and police officers were among the dead.
Footage shared by the local administration showed people digging up bodies with shovels and bare hands.
“The death toll surged after the people who came to rescue also got trapped,” said Gofa district administrator Misikir Mitiku.
“It is a very sad incident,” Mitiku said.
President Abiy Ahmed said he was deeply saddened by the terrible loss of life, and that federal officials had been deployed to reduce the impact of the disaster.
“We stand in strong solidarity with the people and government of Ethiopia as rescue efforts continue to find the missing and assist the displaced,” African Union chairperson Moussa Faki Mahamat wrote on the social media platform X.
The head of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who is Ethiopian, said he was thinking of all the families affected and that a WHO team had been sent to support immediate health needs.
https://www.dawn.com/news/1847545/death ... 9-official
Re: NATURAL DISASTERS
Floods Wreak Havoc Across Four Continents
Flooding events around the world share a common factor of an atmosphere made warmer by climate change. What can be done to help citizens prepare?
The swollen Elbe river in Dresden, Germany, on Tuesday.Credit...Filip Singer/EPA, via Shutterstock
Chad. Vietnam. Austria. The American South.
In very disparate regions of the world, extreme rainfall in recent weeks has killed thousands of people, submerged entire towns, set off landslides and left millions without power. It’s a harbinger of the wild weather events that are a hallmark of climate change, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, and it is highlighting the need to urgently adapt, in rich and poor countries alike.
Bursts of extreme rainfall are making both coastal and riverine flooding more dangerous and unpredictable.
“Extreme events are getting stronger everywhere, so we should expect floods to be bigger regardless of where we are,” said Michael Wehner, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “There is no question that these kinds of floods all over the world are getting worse.”
What’s the climate connection?
Some of the recent deadly floods, like the landslides in Kerala, in southern India, earlier this summer, can be directly attributable to human-induced climate change.
A scientific study, released in August, found that the downpour that caused the landslide was 10 percent heavier because of human-caused climate change.
There are no similar attribution studies yet for the floods of recent weeks. Though some studies are underway, there simply aren’t enough resources to carry out an attribution study for every single event.
Image
Workers in orange life jackets sift through muddy water with green mountains in the background.
Sifting through debris at the site of a landslide in Lao Cai province in Vietnam in the aftermath of Typhoon Yagi last week.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Nonetheless, the science is clear: A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture. That can cause bursts of extreme rainfall, on top of other meteorological factors. For instance, Storm Boris, a sluggish, low-pressure system, has dumped five times September’s average rainfall across Europe since the storm began last week. A blast of cold polar air collided with a sweep of warm Mediterranean air dense with water vapor, producing an unusually powerful storm that brought heavy rains and strong winds. As of Wednesday, at least 23 people have died in Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland and Romania, according to Reuters.
In the United States, North and South Carolina are being battered this week by equally rare storms. Some areas recorded 18 inches of rain over 12 hours, an amount so statistically rare it’s considered a one-in-a-thousand-year event.
Typhoon Yagi, one of the region’s most powerful storms, brought rain and winds up to 127 miles per hour across northern Vietnam. At least 143 people have died in the aftermath, including 22 who died following a landslide in Lao Cai, a mountainous province bordering China. The storm marched on to Myanmar, killing at least 110 more people in flash floods and landslides.
Death tolls are higher in places already at risk
The latest floods come on top of accumulating hazards that have whittled away at people’s ability to cope.
Parts of Northern Nigeria were battered by seven days of nonstop heavy rainfall that caused a dam to burst, killing at least 200 people and submerging half the city of Maiduguri. Local officials told Reuters it was the worst flooding in two decades. The rain came just months after scorching pre-monsoon heat and after years of conflict in the area between Boko Haram militants and the Nigerian government forces. The governor of Borno state said that the floods had displaced more than a million people and that there was a high risk of diseases spreading.
Image
People crowd around the back of an open truck in a crowded street.
People displaced by floods arrived in Maiduguri, Nigeria, on Sept. 12.Credit...Audu Marte/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Likewise in Chad, reeling from years of conflict and the influx of refugees from neighboring countries, 341 people have died in flooding in recent days, according to the United Nations.
Extreme weather is exceptionally costly for African governments. On average, African nations are losing 5 percent of their economies because of floods, droughts and heat, according to the World Meteorological Organization. Many are spending up to a tenth of their budgets just managing extreme weather disasters. Many of those extreme events are driven by the emissions of planet-heating greenhouse gases, but Africa is responsible for only a fraction of the world’s annual emissions.
Adaptation is urgent
The latest floods have made it abundantly clear that both rich and poor countries need to invest in shoring up their physical infrastructure and their public policies to minimize the effects of extreme weather.
The United Nations has pressed governments to put in place more early-warning systems, which are relatively inexpensive and potentially effective in saving lives. The U.N. says 101 countries now have early-warning protocols, at least on paper, which is double the number that reported having them in 2015.
There are many feasible measures to reduce the loss of lives caused by flooding. They include giving small amounts of cash to people so they can move out of harm’s way, and putting in emergency water and power systems to prevent the outbreak of disease after floods.
Image
A golf car drives down a flooded street pulling a person ‘surfing’ behind it.
Flooding from Tropical Storm Debby in Isle of Palms, S.C., in August.Credit...Marco Bello/Reuters
Harder to do, but essential, local officials and disaster management specialists say, is to prevent deforestation and construction in areas that are prone to heavy flooding and landslides. The floods in Kerala were all the more devastating because of widespread deforestation and unplanned development in ecologically sensitive areas.
In wealthy countries like the United States, local governments have invested heavily in expensive infrastructure. North and South Carolina, for instance, both veterans of powerful storms, have spent millions of dollars retrofitting roads to better withstand extreme rainfall and starting to protect natural flood barriers, like wetlands, from development.
By contrast, low-income countries that are already strapped and weighed down by debts have been less able to maintain their roads, let alone build flood-resilient infrastructure.
“We need to develop critical infrastructure,” said Olasunkanmi Habeeb Okunola, an urban planner from Nigeria who is working as a visiting scientist at United Nations University’s Institute for Environment and Human Security. “If you get that right, to some extent, you can lessen the impact of climate change.”
There is little doubt that climate change is making weather wilder and more erratic. That requires preparing for the unexpected.
“We don’t know exactly when or which type of event will come,” said Diana Urge-Vorsatz, a professor at Central European University and vice chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “Unfortunately there’s no question that more severe events are coming.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/18/clim ... 778d3e6de3
Flooding events around the world share a common factor of an atmosphere made warmer by climate change. What can be done to help citizens prepare?
The swollen Elbe river in Dresden, Germany, on Tuesday.Credit...Filip Singer/EPA, via Shutterstock
Chad. Vietnam. Austria. The American South.
In very disparate regions of the world, extreme rainfall in recent weeks has killed thousands of people, submerged entire towns, set off landslides and left millions without power. It’s a harbinger of the wild weather events that are a hallmark of climate change, driven by the burning of fossil fuels, and it is highlighting the need to urgently adapt, in rich and poor countries alike.
Bursts of extreme rainfall are making both coastal and riverine flooding more dangerous and unpredictable.
“Extreme events are getting stronger everywhere, so we should expect floods to be bigger regardless of where we are,” said Michael Wehner, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “There is no question that these kinds of floods all over the world are getting worse.”
What’s the climate connection?
Some of the recent deadly floods, like the landslides in Kerala, in southern India, earlier this summer, can be directly attributable to human-induced climate change.
A scientific study, released in August, found that the downpour that caused the landslide was 10 percent heavier because of human-caused climate change.
There are no similar attribution studies yet for the floods of recent weeks. Though some studies are underway, there simply aren’t enough resources to carry out an attribution study for every single event.
Image
Workers in orange life jackets sift through muddy water with green mountains in the background.
Sifting through debris at the site of a landslide in Lao Cai province in Vietnam in the aftermath of Typhoon Yagi last week.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Nonetheless, the science is clear: A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture. That can cause bursts of extreme rainfall, on top of other meteorological factors. For instance, Storm Boris, a sluggish, low-pressure system, has dumped five times September’s average rainfall across Europe since the storm began last week. A blast of cold polar air collided with a sweep of warm Mediterranean air dense with water vapor, producing an unusually powerful storm that brought heavy rains and strong winds. As of Wednesday, at least 23 people have died in Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland and Romania, according to Reuters.
In the United States, North and South Carolina are being battered this week by equally rare storms. Some areas recorded 18 inches of rain over 12 hours, an amount so statistically rare it’s considered a one-in-a-thousand-year event.
Typhoon Yagi, one of the region’s most powerful storms, brought rain and winds up to 127 miles per hour across northern Vietnam. At least 143 people have died in the aftermath, including 22 who died following a landslide in Lao Cai, a mountainous province bordering China. The storm marched on to Myanmar, killing at least 110 more people in flash floods and landslides.
Death tolls are higher in places already at risk
The latest floods come on top of accumulating hazards that have whittled away at people’s ability to cope.
Parts of Northern Nigeria were battered by seven days of nonstop heavy rainfall that caused a dam to burst, killing at least 200 people and submerging half the city of Maiduguri. Local officials told Reuters it was the worst flooding in two decades. The rain came just months after scorching pre-monsoon heat and after years of conflict in the area between Boko Haram militants and the Nigerian government forces. The governor of Borno state said that the floods had displaced more than a million people and that there was a high risk of diseases spreading.
Image
People crowd around the back of an open truck in a crowded street.
People displaced by floods arrived in Maiduguri, Nigeria, on Sept. 12.Credit...Audu Marte/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Likewise in Chad, reeling from years of conflict and the influx of refugees from neighboring countries, 341 people have died in flooding in recent days, according to the United Nations.
Extreme weather is exceptionally costly for African governments. On average, African nations are losing 5 percent of their economies because of floods, droughts and heat, according to the World Meteorological Organization. Many are spending up to a tenth of their budgets just managing extreme weather disasters. Many of those extreme events are driven by the emissions of planet-heating greenhouse gases, but Africa is responsible for only a fraction of the world’s annual emissions.
Adaptation is urgent
The latest floods have made it abundantly clear that both rich and poor countries need to invest in shoring up their physical infrastructure and their public policies to minimize the effects of extreme weather.
The United Nations has pressed governments to put in place more early-warning systems, which are relatively inexpensive and potentially effective in saving lives. The U.N. says 101 countries now have early-warning protocols, at least on paper, which is double the number that reported having them in 2015.
There are many feasible measures to reduce the loss of lives caused by flooding. They include giving small amounts of cash to people so they can move out of harm’s way, and putting in emergency water and power systems to prevent the outbreak of disease after floods.
Image
A golf car drives down a flooded street pulling a person ‘surfing’ behind it.
Flooding from Tropical Storm Debby in Isle of Palms, S.C., in August.Credit...Marco Bello/Reuters
Harder to do, but essential, local officials and disaster management specialists say, is to prevent deforestation and construction in areas that are prone to heavy flooding and landslides. The floods in Kerala were all the more devastating because of widespread deforestation and unplanned development in ecologically sensitive areas.
In wealthy countries like the United States, local governments have invested heavily in expensive infrastructure. North and South Carolina, for instance, both veterans of powerful storms, have spent millions of dollars retrofitting roads to better withstand extreme rainfall and starting to protect natural flood barriers, like wetlands, from development.
By contrast, low-income countries that are already strapped and weighed down by debts have been less able to maintain their roads, let alone build flood-resilient infrastructure.
“We need to develop critical infrastructure,” said Olasunkanmi Habeeb Okunola, an urban planner from Nigeria who is working as a visiting scientist at United Nations University’s Institute for Environment and Human Security. “If you get that right, to some extent, you can lessen the impact of climate change.”
There is little doubt that climate change is making weather wilder and more erratic. That requires preparing for the unexpected.
“We don’t know exactly when or which type of event will come,” said Diana Urge-Vorsatz, a professor at Central European University and vice chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “Unfortunately there’s no question that more severe events are coming.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/18/clim ... 778d3e6de3
Re: NATURAL DISASTERS
Raging Waters, Abandoned Cars, Layers of Mud: More Than 150 Killed in Spanish Floods
Others are still missing, though how many remains unclear. Rescuers feared finding more bodies, the defense minister said.
Video: https://nyti.ms/48sxZc6
When some of the worst flash floods in decades in eastern Spain hit, Diego Hernandez was passing the city of Valencia on his way to his mother’s funeral.
As he and his wife drove on Tuesday night, a thin stream of muddy water started to appear under their tires. Soon, it was almost three feet high and nearing the top of their seats. Within seconds, another car had piled on top of theirs.
The couple fled their vehicle, initially hanging onto a tree as trash cans, car wheels, sofas and chairs streamed by in the raging floodwaters.
“It was like an apocalypse,” he said.
They were hardly alone. Thousands of people found themselves trapped — in cars, in trucks and in homes — as heavy rainfall pounded southern Spain this week.
The death toll jumped to at least 158 people on Thursday. Others are still missing, and rescuers feared finding more bodies, said Margarita Robles, Spain’s defense minister, as teams dug into the mud.
Some areas in eastern and southern Spain received anywhere from a month’s to a year’s worth of rain in a single day, or even in eight hours. Rain fell into Thursday morning as cities and towns surveyed the damage.
Some districts of Valencia and Catalonia, on Spain’s eastern coast, remained on high alert, with more rain expected during the day, the national weather agency said.
Photos and Videos
A Catastrophic Deluge Leaves Parts of Spain in Ruins https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/31/worl ... hotos.html
Flash flooding across Spain killed more than 150 people after torrential rain left towns and villages submerged and turned streets into rivers.
Oct. 31, 2024
Thousands of households were without electricity or a phone connection, the authorities said. More than a dozen municipalities reported having no clean drinking water, emergency services in Valencia said.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez traveled to Valencia and visited some of the worst-affected areas after the government declared three days of national mourning. The leader of the main opposition party, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, also visited the areas.
“We are not going to leave the people of Valencia on their own,” Mr. Sánchez said after visiting an emergency coordination center there. He also urged people to stay home, “because in that way we will be saving lives.”
Members of the Emergency Military Unit, civil guards and police officers were participating in the search-and-rescue operation, Mr. Sánchez said.
King Felipe VI of Spain also instructed the Royal Guard to join the search-and-rescue operation. “All of us join this shared pain,” the king said.
At least 155 people had been confirmed dead in the Valencia region alone, the emergency coordination center in Valencia said in a statement. Regional governments in Castilla-La Mancha and Andalusia said three people had died in those regions.
In and around the city of Valencia, the regional capital, water had gushed into ground-floor apartments, trapping some people. It flooded shopping centers, dog shelters and even a nursing home, killing some of its residents. Other victims died in places where it did not rain, swept away by water that came roaring through.
ImageA house next to a muddy area. The front section of the building is partly open and damaged.
A damaged house in Letur, Spain, southwest of Valencia.Credit...Oscar Del Pozo/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
On Wednesday, as coroners worked to identify the bodies, some of the hardest-hit villages remained cut off, with roads and bridges broken or inundated by the flash floods.
Dozens of roads remain closed, including major highways, the Civil Guard said. Three of Valencia’s subway lines have collapsed, and train service, including a high-speed link to Madrid, may be suspended for as long as three weeks, said Óscar Puente, the transport minister.
Assessing the damage in Valencia, Mr. Puente said “the entire regional road network is seriously damaged.”
The authorities have deployed security forces to guard against looting. The national police said they had arrested 39 people in one operation and recovered “a multitude of stolen items.”
Thousands of trucks and cars were abandoned on streets and highways, buried in thick layers of mud. Their owners were housed in makeshift shelters, unable to make it home. Dead bodies were trapped in some vehicles, the Transport Ministry said.
Toni Zamorano, 59, sat on the ground outside a basketball hall in Valencia that had been turned into a dormitory. He was driving home when his car filled with water on Tuesday night. He pushed his door open and jumped into the water. Within a few minutes, he saw that his car had been completely covered in water and was floating away.
“I started swimming, walking, swimming,” he said. He was alone on a stretch of flooded highway, with the water up to his chest, as sofas, computers and cars floated by.
“Cars were like boats,” he said. “I honestly thought it was all over.”
Mr. Zamorano lives in the village of Sedavi, a few kilometers south of Valencia. He has not been able to make it home yet.
“I don’t know what I’m going to find,” he said. “My whole town must be devastated, and I don’t know what my home is like.”
Victims of the flooding in Valencia will receive a minimum of 6,000 euros, about $6,500, as part of a €250 million aid package announced by Carlos Mazon, the leader of the Valencia region.
Image
A person reclining on a sofa with a blanket in a dimly lit room with a large window.
Spending the night at a makeshift emergency shelter in an Ikea store south of Valencia.Credit...Manaure Quintero/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Mr. Hernandez, 56, did not make it to his mother’s funeral. His wife eventually managed to cling onto a lamppost, but he did not, and was carried away. He tried to grab floating tires and poles until he managed to enter a bus that was stuck in the stream. The upper part of the bus was still dry, and he took off his wet clothes and wrapped himself in its curtains.
At about 4 a.m. on Wednesday, rescuers came for him. For hours, he had no idea what had happened to his wife.
He did not have his cellphone, and none of the emergency workers he spoke to had any information. Mr. Hernandez and his wife have known each other since they were both children, and they had been married nearly 30 years.
Finally, on Wednesday morning, he called his brother, and got the news he was waiting for: She was alive. She also blamed him for not holding onto the lamppost as she did, his brother said.
If she was complaining about him, “it’s a sign she is doing well,” Mr. Hernandez said with a laugh, as he stood smoking outside a sports hall while wearing a sweater from the local basketball team that the rescuers had given him.
Inside, the eight courts had been turned into a dormitory, with dozens of mattresses laid geometrically below the backboards.
In Madrid, Ana de la Cuadra frantically exchanged text messages with members of her family, who were trapped in Catarroja, a town in southern Valencia.
“They’ve warned that another wave of water may come,” Cristina de la Cuadra, her sister, said via text messages, accompanied by videos of rivers water gushing down the street. “We are in bad shape, without water or electricity.”
Soon after, she switched off her phone to conserve its battery.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/31/worl ... _id=181825
Others are still missing, though how many remains unclear. Rescuers feared finding more bodies, the defense minister said.
Video: https://nyti.ms/48sxZc6
When some of the worst flash floods in decades in eastern Spain hit, Diego Hernandez was passing the city of Valencia on his way to his mother’s funeral.
As he and his wife drove on Tuesday night, a thin stream of muddy water started to appear under their tires. Soon, it was almost three feet high and nearing the top of their seats. Within seconds, another car had piled on top of theirs.
The couple fled their vehicle, initially hanging onto a tree as trash cans, car wheels, sofas and chairs streamed by in the raging floodwaters.
“It was like an apocalypse,” he said.
They were hardly alone. Thousands of people found themselves trapped — in cars, in trucks and in homes — as heavy rainfall pounded southern Spain this week.
The death toll jumped to at least 158 people on Thursday. Others are still missing, and rescuers feared finding more bodies, said Margarita Robles, Spain’s defense minister, as teams dug into the mud.
Some areas in eastern and southern Spain received anywhere from a month’s to a year’s worth of rain in a single day, or even in eight hours. Rain fell into Thursday morning as cities and towns surveyed the damage.
Some districts of Valencia and Catalonia, on Spain’s eastern coast, remained on high alert, with more rain expected during the day, the national weather agency said.
Photos and Videos
A Catastrophic Deluge Leaves Parts of Spain in Ruins https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/31/worl ... hotos.html
Flash flooding across Spain killed more than 150 people after torrential rain left towns and villages submerged and turned streets into rivers.
Oct. 31, 2024
Thousands of households were without electricity or a phone connection, the authorities said. More than a dozen municipalities reported having no clean drinking water, emergency services in Valencia said.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez traveled to Valencia and visited some of the worst-affected areas after the government declared three days of national mourning. The leader of the main opposition party, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, also visited the areas.
“We are not going to leave the people of Valencia on their own,” Mr. Sánchez said after visiting an emergency coordination center there. He also urged people to stay home, “because in that way we will be saving lives.”
Members of the Emergency Military Unit, civil guards and police officers were participating in the search-and-rescue operation, Mr. Sánchez said.
King Felipe VI of Spain also instructed the Royal Guard to join the search-and-rescue operation. “All of us join this shared pain,” the king said.
At least 155 people had been confirmed dead in the Valencia region alone, the emergency coordination center in Valencia said in a statement. Regional governments in Castilla-La Mancha and Andalusia said three people had died in those regions.
In and around the city of Valencia, the regional capital, water had gushed into ground-floor apartments, trapping some people. It flooded shopping centers, dog shelters and even a nursing home, killing some of its residents. Other victims died in places where it did not rain, swept away by water that came roaring through.
ImageA house next to a muddy area. The front section of the building is partly open and damaged.
A damaged house in Letur, Spain, southwest of Valencia.Credit...Oscar Del Pozo/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
On Wednesday, as coroners worked to identify the bodies, some of the hardest-hit villages remained cut off, with roads and bridges broken or inundated by the flash floods.
Dozens of roads remain closed, including major highways, the Civil Guard said. Three of Valencia’s subway lines have collapsed, and train service, including a high-speed link to Madrid, may be suspended for as long as three weeks, said Óscar Puente, the transport minister.
Assessing the damage in Valencia, Mr. Puente said “the entire regional road network is seriously damaged.”
The authorities have deployed security forces to guard against looting. The national police said they had arrested 39 people in one operation and recovered “a multitude of stolen items.”
Thousands of trucks and cars were abandoned on streets and highways, buried in thick layers of mud. Their owners were housed in makeshift shelters, unable to make it home. Dead bodies were trapped in some vehicles, the Transport Ministry said.
Toni Zamorano, 59, sat on the ground outside a basketball hall in Valencia that had been turned into a dormitory. He was driving home when his car filled with water on Tuesday night. He pushed his door open and jumped into the water. Within a few minutes, he saw that his car had been completely covered in water and was floating away.
“I started swimming, walking, swimming,” he said. He was alone on a stretch of flooded highway, with the water up to his chest, as sofas, computers and cars floated by.
“Cars were like boats,” he said. “I honestly thought it was all over.”
Mr. Zamorano lives in the village of Sedavi, a few kilometers south of Valencia. He has not been able to make it home yet.
“I don’t know what I’m going to find,” he said. “My whole town must be devastated, and I don’t know what my home is like.”
Victims of the flooding in Valencia will receive a minimum of 6,000 euros, about $6,500, as part of a €250 million aid package announced by Carlos Mazon, the leader of the Valencia region.
Image
A person reclining on a sofa with a blanket in a dimly lit room with a large window.
Spending the night at a makeshift emergency shelter in an Ikea store south of Valencia.Credit...Manaure Quintero/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Mr. Hernandez, 56, did not make it to his mother’s funeral. His wife eventually managed to cling onto a lamppost, but he did not, and was carried away. He tried to grab floating tires and poles until he managed to enter a bus that was stuck in the stream. The upper part of the bus was still dry, and he took off his wet clothes and wrapped himself in its curtains.
At about 4 a.m. on Wednesday, rescuers came for him. For hours, he had no idea what had happened to his wife.
He did not have his cellphone, and none of the emergency workers he spoke to had any information. Mr. Hernandez and his wife have known each other since they were both children, and they had been married nearly 30 years.
Finally, on Wednesday morning, he called his brother, and got the news he was waiting for: She was alive. She also blamed him for not holding onto the lamppost as she did, his brother said.
If she was complaining about him, “it’s a sign she is doing well,” Mr. Hernandez said with a laugh, as he stood smoking outside a sports hall while wearing a sweater from the local basketball team that the rescuers had given him.
Inside, the eight courts had been turned into a dormitory, with dozens of mattresses laid geometrically below the backboards.
In Madrid, Ana de la Cuadra frantically exchanged text messages with members of her family, who were trapped in Catarroja, a town in southern Valencia.
“They’ve warned that another wave of water may come,” Cristina de la Cuadra, her sister, said via text messages, accompanied by videos of rivers water gushing down the street. “We are in bad shape, without water or electricity.”
Soon after, she switched off her phone to conserve its battery.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/31/worl ... _id=181825
Re: NATURAL DISASTERS
At Least 10 Killed in Indonesia After Volcano Erupts
The authorities warned of more volcanic activity at Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki, which has erupted dozens of times in the past few weeks.
Video: https://nyti.ms/4hyIizB
Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki erupted on Sunday, killing several people and forcing others to flee their villages.CreditCredit...Arnold Welianto/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
By Jin Yu Young and Hasya Nindita
Nov. 4, 2024, 2:16 a.m. ET
At least 10 people were killed when a volcano in eastern Indonesia erupted, officials said on Monday, warning that there would be a greater risk of earthquakes in the coming days.
Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki, in the southeastern part of Flores island, erupted for more than 24 minutes late on Sunday, according to Indonesia’s Center for Volcanology and Geological Hazard Mitigation. It erupted several more times overnight, and by 6 a.m. on Monday, the smoke column rising from the volcano stood at 300 meters, according to the Indonesian volcanology institute.
The eruption triggered more than a dozen earthquakes, and the government warned that more could strike the region.
The National Agency for Disaster Management said on Monday that at least nine bodies had been recovered. Another body was known to be trapped under the rubble.
The eruption caused damage in seven villages, home to 10,000 people, many of whom fled to other villages, according to the government. The authorities warned residents to stay more than seven kilometers, or 4.3 miles, from the volcano.
ImageSearch and rescue operations take place among debris in a village that was damaged by the eruption on Sunday
Rescuers searched for victims on Monday in Klatanlo, one of several villages that were damaged by the volcano. Credit...Arnold Welianto/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Indonesia’s thousands of islands are situated along the so-called Ring of Fire, where tectonic plates clash under the surface of the Pacific Ocean, causing earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The nation’s volcanoes are some of the most active in the world and have caused some of the deadliest eruptions in history. More than 20 people were killed last year when Mount Marapi erupted on Sumatra.
Since late October, Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki has erupted 43 times, according to the nation’s Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources. Last week, an eruption launched ash as high as 800 meters above the peak.
Muhammad Wafid, the head of Indonesia’s Geological Agency, said in a statement that there had been a “significant increase” of volcanic activity at the mountain.
Indonesian Volcanos
Mount Ruang Erupts in Indonesia, Spewing Lava Thousands of Feet Into the Sky https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/17/worl ... ruang.html
April 17, 2024
‘Cold Lava’ and Flash Floods Kill 37 in Indonesia https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/13/worl ... nesia.html
May 13, 2024
Jin Yu Young reports on South Korea
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/04/worl ... 778d3e6de3
The authorities warned of more volcanic activity at Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki, which has erupted dozens of times in the past few weeks.
Video: https://nyti.ms/4hyIizB
Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki erupted on Sunday, killing several people and forcing others to flee their villages.CreditCredit...Arnold Welianto/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
By Jin Yu Young and Hasya Nindita
Nov. 4, 2024, 2:16 a.m. ET
At least 10 people were killed when a volcano in eastern Indonesia erupted, officials said on Monday, warning that there would be a greater risk of earthquakes in the coming days.
Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki, in the southeastern part of Flores island, erupted for more than 24 minutes late on Sunday, according to Indonesia’s Center for Volcanology and Geological Hazard Mitigation. It erupted several more times overnight, and by 6 a.m. on Monday, the smoke column rising from the volcano stood at 300 meters, according to the Indonesian volcanology institute.
The eruption triggered more than a dozen earthquakes, and the government warned that more could strike the region.
The National Agency for Disaster Management said on Monday that at least nine bodies had been recovered. Another body was known to be trapped under the rubble.
The eruption caused damage in seven villages, home to 10,000 people, many of whom fled to other villages, according to the government. The authorities warned residents to stay more than seven kilometers, or 4.3 miles, from the volcano.
ImageSearch and rescue operations take place among debris in a village that was damaged by the eruption on Sunday
Rescuers searched for victims on Monday in Klatanlo, one of several villages that were damaged by the volcano. Credit...Arnold Welianto/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Indonesia’s thousands of islands are situated along the so-called Ring of Fire, where tectonic plates clash under the surface of the Pacific Ocean, causing earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The nation’s volcanoes are some of the most active in the world and have caused some of the deadliest eruptions in history. More than 20 people were killed last year when Mount Marapi erupted on Sumatra.
Since late October, Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki has erupted 43 times, according to the nation’s Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources. Last week, an eruption launched ash as high as 800 meters above the peak.
Muhammad Wafid, the head of Indonesia’s Geological Agency, said in a statement that there had been a “significant increase” of volcanic activity at the mountain.
Indonesian Volcanos
Mount Ruang Erupts in Indonesia, Spewing Lava Thousands of Feet Into the Sky https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/17/worl ... ruang.html
April 17, 2024
‘Cold Lava’ and Flash Floods Kill 37 in Indonesia https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/13/worl ... nesia.html
May 13, 2024
Jin Yu Young reports on South Korea
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/04/worl ... 778d3e6de3