Haiti earthquake disaster reveals a lot
It has been a month or so since the Haiti disaster.
The main lesson learned is that it was a huge disaster. More people were directly killed by that earthquake than we have seen in a long time. The Indonesia tsunami was terrible but it also involved a huge wall of water that swept in from the ocean. Haiti was struck by a quake that was directly under its main city.
The scale of the disaster showed the capability of some organizations to respond to almost any kind of a disaster, the limits of other organizations to control people who need help and those that want to take that help away. It showed how some people try to profit from a disaster, no matter what the cost to others- even if they just get a little out of it.
It also showed again than humanitarian aid knows no bounds of distance and that generosity, not just greed - is a human trait.
Labels: disaster
Crime has really escalated to intolerable levels since the year 2000.
While we saw a big dip in crime during the 1990s, now it is way back up again. My own town has seen a rise first in murders - then a surge in property crimes: robberies and car thefts.
Now one of the
Washington Redskins has been murdered.
Hopefully, his killer(s) can be brought to justice.
Labels: crime, florida, miami, murder, sports
Major, serious flooding in Virginia today.
Heavy rain forces evacuations in Va. - Yahoo! News:
RICHMOND, Va. - Up to 9 inches of rain soaked parts of Virginia, forcing the evacuation Saturday about 100 people in a six-block section of this capital city and causing scattered flooding in the southeastern part of the state.
Nine inches of rain in a roughly 24 hour period is surreal.
Indonesia has been taking it on the chin from the tsunamis, H5N1, and volcanos.
The latest pony to strut into island's apocalyptic parade of disasters is a mud geyser/leak of epic proportions.
Oh, and the mud is coming up with toxic chemical.
So much of the mud has come up since this problem started, that there are now 8 villages buried in muck. A highway and train track have been cut off.
New Indonesia Calamity: A Man-Made Mud Bath - New York Times:
It started as a natural gas well. It has become geysers of mud and water, and in a country plagued by earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis another calamity in the making, though this one is largely man-made.
Indonesia has become a State of Disasters.
There were 210 people killed in Ethiopia when heavy rains caused a river to escape its banks. Of those people, AP reports that 39 were children.
Associated PressThe article describes flash floods strong enough to destroy homes that struck the country and took with them many lives.
Ethiopia is not normally a place I think of as flooding a lot. I think in the 1980s it was known for droughts and famines, if I am not mistaken.
It is kind of odd it was struck by such heavy flooding the same week as Indian and Pakistan. It is apparently kind of normal for parts of India to flood this time of year - Mumbai (Bombay) flooded this time a year ago.
But ...Ethiopia? Strange....
One thing India and Pakistan have in common this week is water - a lot of it.
Both companies suffered serious flooding from relentless rains over the last week.
Reuters: Floods maroon hundreds of thousands in India and Pakistan - nearly 300 people dead already.
Schools and industries are shut down in some areas. Hundreds of thousands of people have had to be shifted to higher ground.
While some have been killed by the water, others have been killed by mudslides - like in Pakistani Kashmir.
Areas and cities affected include: Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay), Surat (an industrial town in Gujarat), and the Pakistani part of Kashmir, towns of Nasik and Nended in the state of Muharashtra.
Farms were hit badly by flash flooding in Baluchistan province, taking away the crops and livestock from the villagers' farms.
Got lightening?
I heard on the news this morning that there are 25 million lightening strikes per year in the US.
An NOAA spokesman made that statement and then went on to point out that if you hear thunder, then you are in danger and should go inside and stay away from metal things like metal pipes and wires and that sort of stuff.
I did not realize that there were so many lightening strikes in the US each year, nor that you were in significant danger outdoors if you could simply hear thunder.
I of course knew you have to get out of the water if you are swimming. But I did not realize that just standing around, not near a tree or tall pole that you were in particular danger. Apparently you are, though.
Kind of unsettling, considering how frequent thunderstorms are - especially in the summer.
Florida teenage boy attacked alongside Orlando area river
Another alligator attack took place recently. This one was one of the most dramatic - and had one of the happiest endings.
An alligator snatched the young man and bit down on his foot with its powerful jaws. He tried everything he could think of to free himself, to no avail.
Then he remembered some advice imparted by a Discovery Channel documentary about what to do if you are attacked by an alligator. Put your thumb in its eye and press. That is the only thing that will get them to let go of you.
He did. The alligator let go of him and swam away.
That documentary saved his life.
Medical News Today:
A 44-year-old man has died as a result of bird flu infection, say authorities in Indonesia. The man was from eastern Jakarta.
Authorities said the man had been in close contact with live poultry.
Maybe there will be an uptick in the practice of veganism as the H5N1 avian flu virus moves westward from Asia, across Europe, down through Africa - and eventually reaches the US and Canada.
Bad news for people hoping to never catch the bird flu. Good news for those looking for newsworthy examples of evolution in action.
Recombinomics:
The Qinghai strain is expanding its geographical reach and acquiring
new polymorphisms. Moreover, the Qinghai isolates are recombining
with each other and evolving rapidly
According to Recombinics:
To rapidly evolve, viruses use recombination, which involves swapping of genetic information within specific genes. This is accomplished by a copy choice
method in cells infected by two distinct viruses.
Gee, that does not sound very encouraging.
BBC NEWS | World | Asia-Pacific:
At least 115 people have been killed in floods and storms as Typhoon Bilis churns across China's south-east, state media reports.
The Fujian, Hunan and Guangdong provinces have been the most severely affected by the tropical storm, Xinhua news agency said.
Typhoons in Pacific Ocean / Asian continent region are nothing new. Neither is the consequent
flooding They have that
every year, right?
Seasonal heavy rains and typhoons causes hundreds of deaths in China each year. But meteorologists have predicted this summer will be particularly bad, with warm Pacific currents causing more typhoons than usual.
Those meteorologists seem to be saying the same thing about a lot of regions this summer.
There year also brought the
coldest winter throughout Europe: the coldest in a
century in some places. And then when spring came, some countries in central/eastern Europe saw the worst
flooding they had experienced in a
century.
Thank goodness there is no climate change going on around the Earth. Otherwise, we might be tempted to cut back on our energy usage as the planet heated up.
Bottom line: this is not a good year to expect good things from the weather.
Volcano threat on Indonesian island of Java has been officially lowered, following reduced activity in Mount Merapi the most fearsome volcano in the Pacific island's so-called
Ring of Fire
.
Now the people who live there that had to be evacuated a month ago can go home.
BBC NEWS | World | Asia-Pacific:
The Indonesian authorities have downgraded the alert status for Mount Merapi after a recent decrease in volcanic activity.
At least this is one thing that Indonesians on the isle of Java have to worry about a little bit less. The poor island has really been taking a beating the past few years.
Something else has gone horribly wrong in Indonesia. The island country has certainly been taking a beating from the environment, the Earth itself, lately.
- the infamous tsunami at the end of December 2004
- H5N1 wiped out the blood-related members of a family following infection of one of their members in 2006, shortly before the volcano erupted
- the volcano erupted sending searing gasses rolling down the mountainside, killing those farmers that were too slow to evacuate
And now, toxic mud steeped in hydrogen sulfide is pouring up from deep in the earth.
Apparently, a drilling company seeking to find a pocket of natural gas under the earth found some. However, it was not the gas they were looking for that they got. Plus, a lot of mud has come up with it - adding significant mass to the high volume problem they have inadvertently tapped into.
The article below says the community is getting at least 500 cubic meters of toxic mud every day from the drill sight. It says 8,000 people have been displaced - and 12 square kilometers of land has been covered, devastating 4 villages in the area.
ABC Finance News:
Poisonous mud and gas is erupting from kilometres below the earth and 8,000 people are displaced and hundreds hospitalised on the Indonesian island of Java.
The calamity has been caused by a gas exploration project near Surabaya in East Java that has gone horribly wrong, and for the past six weeks, has unleashed hundreds of tonnes of hot toxic mud.
Talk about your basic energy exploration project gone bad.
Environmentalists say the searing mud is a toxic brew of harmful chemicals churned up with dangerous gases.
Indonesian Environment Forum spokesman Torry Kuswardono says it can cause infection to the respiratory systems.
There are two things: first, it's the mud and second, it's the gas, the hydrogen sulphide
he said.
Something that hopefully would have been a financial boon for people in the area, the country, and foreign investors is now looking like a boondoggle of the first order of magnitude.
The rice paddies have been buried in toxic mud, the factories have several feet of the mud around them, and the villages are filled with the mud too.
The number of refuges after this series of geological and chemical disasters must be staggering.
Add to that mix the incipient threat of a infectious human borne strain of H5N1 that could be starting to materialize there, and the prospects of life in Indonesia are getting very gloomy.
Geologically, chemically, and perhaps biologically, Indonesia seems to be
skating on very thin ice.
