NATURAL DISASTERS

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kmaherali
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August 30, 2008
Millions Are Displaced by Floods in India
By HEATHER TIMMONS and HARI KUMAR

There is a photograph at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/30/world ... ref=slogin

Villagers navigated floodwaters on Friday in Jankipur, India. Aid workers said the official death toll, currently at 12, was low. An antipoverty agency estimated that 2,000 people had died.


By HEATHER TIMMONS and HARI KUMAR
Published: August 29, 2008

NEW DELHI — Millions of farmers and their families may be displaced for months after severe floods in northern India wiped out crops and homes, leaving hundreds of villages under several feet of water.

The Kosi River in Bihar, one of India’s poorest and most populous states, jumped its banks this week after a dam burst in bordering Nepal, causing the worst floods in the area in 50 years.

Rescue efforts continued on Friday, and boats were dispatched and trains mobilized to find and move millions who have been left stranded by the rising waters. More than 2.1 million people and over 394 square miles have been affected by the flooding, the Bihar government said on Friday. About a quarter of a million people have been evacuated.

Evacuees may not be able to return to their homes, if those homes still exist, until fall, state government officials said. “This water will remain for some time,” said Devi Rajak, the chief engineer for Bihar’s water resource department. “It may start decreasing in September depending upon upstream discharge.”

The breach in the dam that caused the flooding is eight miles inside Nepal, he said, and therefore difficult to gain access to and fix. “We are facing labor problems, law and order problems, and logistics problems,” he said.

The Nepalese government said that work to fix the break was under way, and that its officials were cooperating with the Indian government. The river has flooded its banks in Nepal as well, displacing tens of thousands of people.

About a quarter of a million homes in India have already been destroyed by the floods, Indian officials say.

The official death toll from the flooding was set at 12 by the Bihar government, but aid workers and people in the area said that number was low, in part because access to the area to assess the damage and recover bodies is limited. ActionAid, an anti-poverty agency based in South Africa, estimates that 2,000 people have died and that thousands more are missing.

“We are helpless,” Rajiv Kumar Singh, 36, said in a telephone interview from Singheshwar, a village in the flooded Madhepura district of Bihar. Some people have been washed away as their families watched, he said, and survivors have been living for days on the roadside, in government offices or in schools. “This whole area is under three or four feet of water,” he said, adding that fevers and diarrhea were spreading. “There is only one doctor here, and he cannot cater to all the people,” he said.

Kamlesh Prasad Singh, 50, a farmer from the village of Patori in the Madhepura district, said in a telephone interview that his village was full of water four or five feet deep. “I left my home, my five cattle and my six acres of rice fields behind,” he said. “I am completely ruined.”

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh declared the situation a “national calamity” on Thursday and said the government had earmarked about $230 million in aid for the region.

Water continued to flow into new areas on Friday, and helicopters, hundreds of military boats and thousands of enlisted personnel were picking up stranded people.

Trains full of supplies were being sent from New Delhi to assist and transport evacuees. The situation is expected to worsen over the weekend, with meteorologists predicting heavy rain in the region.
kmaherali
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China quake damages more than 180,000 homes, 27 dead

Reuters


Sunday, August 31, 2008



CREDIT: Reuters
A local resident walks past a collapsed house after an earthquake hit Lixi town of Huili County, Sichuan province.

BEIJING -- An earthquake that hit southwest China's Sichuan and Yunnan provinces has killed 27 people, damaged or destroyed more than 180,000 homes and affected at least 800,000 residents, state media said on Sunday.

The epicentre of Saturday's quake, which struck around 4:30 p.m. (0730 GMT), was about 20 miles (30 km) southeast of Panzhihua, near Sichuan's border with Yunnan, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The quake was about 6 miles (10 km) deep.

The USGS put the magnitude of the quake at 5.7, while China's official Xinhua news agency said it measured 6.1.

A 5.6-magnitude aftershock hit the same area 24 hours later, the USGS said on Sunday. There were no immediate reports of further damage.

Xinhua said Saturday's quake had injured more than 350 people, and three more were missing in addition to the 27 already confirmed dead.

"More than 800,000 people were affected by the disaster. About 40,000 were evacuated to safe places," it said. "In addition, around 180,000 houses were destroyed. Three large bridges in Sichuan's Panzhihua city, the epicenter of the quake, were damaged. Cracks were found in three reservoirs."

It added that 656 schools had also been damaged and that heavy rain and difficult terrain were hampering rescue efforts, with mobile telephone communications patchy.

State media showed pictures of houses with large cracks in their sides, broken tiles on the road and people receiving medical attention under tents.

But state television said that operations at the Panzhihua steel group, one of western China's largest steel makers, had only been slightly affected, without providing further details.

The government was rushing disaster relief to the affected areas, including thousands of tents and blankets and tonnes of food and water, Xinhua said.

Parts of Sichuan province were devastated by an earthquake that killed about 70,000 people in May.

The province, known for its pandas and fiery cuisine, has struggled to rebuild after the disaster, which left 10 million people homeless.

© Reuters 2008

****
Three million displaced in India floods

Reuters

Sunday, August 31, 2008

CREDIT:
Flood-affected people move to safer grounds through a flooded road in Madhepura town in India's eastern state of Bihar August 30, 2008. Indian authorities, hampered by heavy rain and damaged roads, were struggling on Saturday to provide aid to millions of displaced villagers in Bihar hit by the worst flooding in 50 years. REUTERS/Krishna Murari Kishan

PATNA, India (Reuters) - Authorities struggling to provide aid after devastating floods in eastern India said on Sunday they needed more boats and rescuers to help hundreds of thousands of people still marooned in remote villages.

Bad weather and heavy rain over the past few days have hampered rescue and relief operations in the worst-ever floods to hit Bihar state in 50 years, officials said.

"I can't say specifically how many people are still stranded in floods," Nitish Mishra, the state's disaster management minister said on Sunday.

"But their numbers are in lakhs (hundreds of thousands) and we require more resources, more boats, army and rescue efforts to evacuate them."

Floods have killed more than 1,000 people in South Asia since the monsoon began in June, mainly in India's northern state of Uttar Pradesh, where 785 people died, and deaths were also reported in Nepal and Bangladesh.

In Bihar, the toll rose to 90 on Sunday with five more people drowning overnight in separate districts.

At least 3 million people have been displaced and those figures could rise as heavy rain continued, officials said.

Television pictures showed villagers holding on to tails of cattle as they crossed flooded roads with belongings on their heads. Some were seen frantically waving at a few boatmen to come and rescue them.

"I presented my buffalo to the boatman in exchange for a place in his boat since I don't have any money," Shambhoo Yadav, a rescued villager said.

Authorities also complained that thousands of villagers have refused to be evacuated and go to camps, saying they wanted to stay back and protect their belongings.

The latest flooding occurred after the Kosi river burst a dam in neighboring Nepal earlier this month and changed its course, swamp hundreds of villages in Bihar and destroy over 100,000 hectares (247,000 acres) of farmlands.

In Nepal, officials said repairing the dam was under way but turning the river back to its original course would take time.

At least seven people were killed in monsoon floods and landslides in Nepal on Saturday, raising the monsoon-related death toll in the Himalayan nation to more than 100 this year.

NO RELIEF

Villagers in Bihar complained that relief was not reaching them and many are living without food for three-four days.

"We ate after nearly a week today," Manohar Prasad, a rescued villager from flood-hit Madhepura district told reporters at a camp near Patna. "Some people donated us money," he said, while eating some bread.

The Bihar government has been severely criticized by newspapers for failing to act in time to evacuate villagers.

More than 350,000 people have been evacuated over the past 11 days, officials said, admitting they did not have enough boats or resources to step up relief operations.

A Reuters photographer in Bihar said people were fighting among themselves to lay their hands on air-dropped food.

Cases of diarrhea were beginning to be reported from many relief camps in the state, UNICEF said.

(Additional reporting by Gopal Sharma in Kathmandu; Writing by Bappa Majumdar; Editing by Alex Richardson)

© Reuters 2008
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September 8, 2008
Hurricane Ike Smashes West Through Caribbean
By MARC LACEY

MIAMI — Hurricane Ike barreled west across the already beleaguered islands of the Caribbean on Sunday, raising the death toll and destruction across the waterlogged region.

In Haiti, where the fourth-largest city, Gonaïves, remained underwater from Hurricane Gustav, rain fell and at least 10 more people died of drowning, according to reports from news services. By late Sunday the number of people reported killed in Haiti just from the effects of Hurricane Ike reached at least 58. The total of those killed in Haiti in the recent storms was in the hundreds.

In Cuba, where relief efforts from Hurricane Gustav were under way in the west, the government evacuated vulnerable communities as the new hurricane bore down on the island with heavy winds and rain that could total 10 inches.

In the Florida Keys, the authorities also ordered residents and tourists to leave as the outer reaches of the storm could be felt.

The National Hurricane Center in Miami reported Monday morning that Hurricane Ike had weakened, from a Category 4 storm to Category 2, after it hit Cuba, but it was still considered a major hurricane with tremendous destructive force.

Earlier Sunday, it slammed into the southernmost islands of the Bahamas, where Janice McKinney, who ran a disaster shelter, told The Associated Press, “Oh my God, I can’t describe it.”

With winds up to 135 miles per hour, the storm also struck the Turks and Caicos Islands, where rain came in horizontally, according to witnesses, and more than 80 percent of the homes in some areas were reported damaged.

“They got hit really, really bad,” The Associated Press quoted Michael Misick, the chief minister of the islands, as saying. “A lot of people have lost their houses, and we will have to see what we can do to accommodate them.”

The effect of any rain at all on Haiti worried relief workers, who were struggling to reach hungry people cut off by floodwaters from a string of earlier storms. Officials opened an overflowing dam, further inundating residential and agricultural areas.

Meanwhile, a bridge collapsed, adding to the isolation of the suffering people of Gonaïves.

“What I saw in this city today is close to hell on earth,” Hédi Annabi, the United Nations special representative to Haiti, said on Saturday in Gonaïves, where children were chasing trucks carrying food and shouting, “Hungry! Hungry!”

The airport in Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, was closed for part of Sunday, and flights from Miami were canceled.

Some travelers who were lined up at the Miami airport toted huge duffel bags that they said contained supplies for ailing relatives.

Exactly which path Hurricane Ike would take next remained unclear as night fell Sunday, causing alarm in island after island.

The National Hurricane Center said Ike was expected to continue on a path that would turn toward the west-northwest on Monday, heading toward the Gulf Coast possibly by Wednesday.

The hurricane center said the storm was generating large swells at sea that could generate life-threatening rip currents along portions of coast in the southeastern United States, still recovering from Gustav, which made landfall on Louisiana and Mississippi on Monday, and Tropical Storm Hanna, which hit the Carolinas on Saturday and by late Sunday was dumping rain on Canada.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/08/world ... nted=print
kmaherali
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September 10, 2008
Ike Gains Strength Over Gulf and Aims for Texas
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:34 a.m. ET

HAVANA (AP) -- Hurricane Ike grew stronger as it barreled across the warm, energizing waters of the Gulf of Mexico Wednesday toward the Texas coast after crashing through Cuba's tobacco country and toppling aging Havana buildings.

Forecasters said the Category 1 storm could become major Category 3 storm before slamming into Texas or northern Mexico on Saturday.

Ike has already killed at least 80 people in the Caribbean, and Texas put 7,500 National Guard members on standby and urged coastal residents to stock up on supplies.

The U.S. Federal Emergency Management agency still was uncertain about the timing of evacuations along the coast.

Cuban state television said some 2.6 million people -- nearly a fourth of the island's population -- sought refuge from Ike, which killed four people and shredded hundreds of homes as it swept across the country. Power was still spotty in Havana on Wednesday morning.

As it left Cuba, Hurricane Ike delivered a punishing blow to towns such as Los Palacios, which already suffered a direct hit from a Category-4 Hurricane Gustav on Aug. 30.

In a poor neighborhood along the train tracks, the combined fury of Ike and Gustav left nearly two-thirds of the wooden homes leveled or without roofs.

''The first one left me something, but this one left me nothing,'' said Olga Atiaga, a 53-year-old housewife. Gustav obliterated her roof and some walls. Then Ike blew away a mattress and smashed the kitchen sink.

''I don't even have anything to sleep on,'' she said.

Odalis Cruz, a 45-year-old housing inspector, said she evacuated to a shelter in the town's rice mill when it became clear Ike was following Gustav's path through Pinar del Rio, the westernmost province where Cuba produces tobacco used in its famous cigars.

She surveyed the damage to her home Tuesday.

''We repaired the roof two days ago and this one took the new one,'' she said. ''I'm ready to move to Canada! We have spent eight days drying out things, cleaning everything, sleeping on the floor, and now we are hit again.''

Gustav damaged at least 100,000 homes but didn't kill anyone because of massive evacuations. Cubans were ordered to evacuate for Ike as well, with those in low-lying or wooden homes seeking safety with friends or relatives in sturdier structures. Others were taken to government shelters.

State television said two men were killed removing an antenna from a roof, a woman died when her home collapsed and a man was killed by a falling tree.

Evacuations are not mandatory except for pregnant women and small children, but in an authoritarian state, few people ignore the government's advice.

In Havana, towering waves broke over the seaside Malecon promenade as downpours soaked historic but crumbling buildings in the capital's picturesque older areas. Some of the most dilapidated structures collapsed, including four houses on a single block.

Police told 21-year-old Niyel Rodriguez she had to move to a shelter with her 19-day-old daughter Chanel. She huddled Tuesday with 109 expectant and new mothers and their children in a wing of an Old Havana maternity hospital.

''They came looking for me yesterday and brought me here in a patrol car,'' Rodriguez said. ''I probably would have been scared to stay at home with my little one, and here they take good care of us.''

Elsewhere in Cuba, officials evacuated about 10,000 tourists from vulnerable seaside hotels, mostly from Varadero beach, east of Havana.

Ike's possible threat to Gulf oil installations didn't keep crude oil prices from dipping to US$102.40 a barrel in Wednesday morning trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Mexican officials warned that unrelated heavy rains in the northern part of the country had caused more than a dozen dams to reach capacity or spill over. If Ike brings more rain to the area, evacuations may be needed.

Ike was centered about 225 miles (365 kilometers) west-southwest of Key West, Florida, and about 430 miles (695 kilometers) southeast of the mouth of the Mississippi River late Wednesday morning.

It was generally moving northwest at 8 mph (13 kph). Maximum sustained winds remained near 90 mph (150 kph), still at Category 1 storm.

Meanwhile, Tropical Storm Lowell weakened to a tropical depression off Mexico's Pacific coast and it was expected to move across the Baja California Peninsula Wednesday night or Thursday morning. It had maximum sustained of near 35 mph (55 kph).

------

Associated Press writers Andrea Rodriguez and Anita Snow in Havana, and Kathy Corcoran in Mexico City contributed to this report.
kmaherali
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Post by kmaherali »

There is a related multimedia linked at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/11/world ... haiti.html

September 11, 2008
Meager Living of Haitians Is Wiped Out by Storms
By MARC LACEY

GONAÏVES, Haiti — Their cupboards were virtually bare before the winds started whipping, the skies opened up and this seaside city filled like a caldron with thick, brown, smelly muck.

Suffering long ago became normal here, passed down through generations of children who learn that crying does no good.

But the enduring spirit of the people of Gonaïves is being tested by a string of recent tropical storms and hurricanes whose names Haitians spit out like curses: Fay, Gustav, Hanna and Ike.

After four fierce storms in less than a month, the little that many people had has turned to nothing at all. Their humble homes are under water, forcing them onto the roofs. Schools are canceled. Hunger is now intense. Difficult lives have become untenable ones and, if that was not enough, hurricane season has only just reached the traditional halfway mark.

One can see the misery in the eyes of Edith Pierre, who takes care of six children on her roof in the center of Gonaïves, a city of about 300,000 in Haiti’s north. She has strung a sheet up to shield them, somewhat, from the piercing sun. The few scraps of clothing she could salvage sit in heaps off to a side. “Now I have nothing,” she said before pausing a minute, staring down from the roof at the river of floodwater and then saying again in an even more forlorn way: “Nothing.”

At the home of Daniel Dupiton, who leads the local Red Cross, displaced relatives, friends and complete strangers have moved in, more than 100 in all, taking up every inch of floor space as well as the surrounding yard. “There are official shelters, and then there are unofficial ones, like my house,” he said.

More misery in Haiti is an almost unfathomable thing. Already the poorest place in the Western Hemisphere, it has become even more destitute. Haitians were struggling to feed themselves before the hurricanes battered their agricultural lands, killed their livestock and washed away their tiny stores of rice. Now, the country will be even more dependent on imports, and the high food prices across the globe will only increase the sting.

“Life was very, very difficult even before this,” said Raphael Chuinard, who is organizing the distribution of emergency aid in Gonaïves for the United Nations World Food Program. “The malnutrition rate was too high. People were resigned to suffer.”

And now that suffering has been turned up a notch. The hurricanes have struck all 10 of Haiti’s regions, and by knocking out bridges and washing away roads they have created isolated pockets of misery across the countryside. Relief workers and Haitian authorities have reported more than 300 deaths, most from Hanna, and they are just beginning to reach all the trouble spots.

In Gonaïves, still largely cut off from the rest of Haiti, sunny skies have helped bring the water levels down in recent days, but still residents move through the streets with their ankles, their knees and sometimes even their hips submerged in effluent. The hospital is covered with floodwater. So are thousands of homes.

At the main cathedral, the water rushed in the front door, toppling pews and leaving the place stained with mud and smelling of sewage. Upstairs, dozens of people have taken refuge, huddled together on the concrete floor. When a visitor arrived, they rubbed their bellies and pleaded for nourishment.

Getting food to the hungry is no easy task, dependent on planes, ships and helicopters — including a nearby United States Navy vessel — since trucks are getting stuck in the mud. Once food reaches a place like Gonaïves, the crush of desperate people turns handouts into melees. As a solution, food trucks, protected by heavily armed Argentine soldiers serving with the United Nations peacekeeping mission in the country, have begun setting out before dawn to distribute high-energy biscuits while most of the city still sleeps.

Haitian politicians, known more for their infighting than for comforting the country’s poor, were busy squabbling when the storms were striking. The legislature voted out President René Préval’s last prime minister in April, after food riots broke out, and then rejected two subsequent nominees. That left the government, ineffectual at the best of times, adrift.

Taking over as prime minister in the midst of the recovery effort is Michèle Pierre-Louis, who tried to reach Gonaïves by motorcade in recent days but could not get through. She flew over the disaster zone on Tuesday, prompting grumbling on the ground in Gonaïves that she did not land.

The Navy vessel is now shuttling food and United Nations personnel between Port-au-Prince and Gonaïves. As for the extent of the damage, Mr. Préval told The Miami Herald, “This is Katrina in the entire country, but without the means that Louisiana had.”

Gonaïves, the worst of the worst on the scale of the death and destruction, has always been especially vulnerable when hurricanes strike. A northern port city, it is located in a flood plain and fills up fast when rivers break their banks and rain rushes down mountains long ago stripped of trees. But that same geography gives the place agricultural potential, and much of the rice grown in the country is from the area around here.

It was just four years ago that Hurricane Jeanne hit Gonaïves, killing about 3,000 people and leveling much of the city. The ensuing years have been spent rebuilding.

This time, though, there is talk about whether it makes sense to try to recreate the same old place again. Authorities are talking about shifting some of the population away from the lowest-lying areas.

There is discussion of strengthening building codes so that structures are not so easily leveled in the next storm — and everyone knows there will be one. The local emergency operations center was flooded, and Yolène Surena, its coordinator, vowed that the new one would move to higher ground. “We should have done it before,” she acknowledged with a shake of her head.

In Port-au-Prince, Patrick Élie, a presidential adviser who is preparing a report on whether Haiti ought to reform its army, said the string of storms made it clearer than ever to him that the country’s biggest enemies were not other armies.

“We need a civil defense system,” he said. “These storms have pointed out the weakness of the Haitian state. Why are we surprised every time a storm hits when we know another one will come?”
kmaherali
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Post by kmaherali »

September 12, 2008
Editorial
Help for Cuba and Haiti

The devastating string of tropical storms and hurricanes that rushed through the Caribbean in the last month — Fay, Gustav, Hanna and Ike — left hundreds dead and tens of thousands of people hurt and displaced in Haiti. The country’s crops appear to be destroyed. In Cuba, Gustav and Ike destroyed or damaged hundreds of thousands of homes. A fifth of the population was evacuated to higher ground.

The scale of devastation calls for an extraordinary assistance effort that is, so far, not happening. While the United States has offered some emergency aid to Haiti, it has not done enough for an impoverished nation that Americans have a moral responsibility to help. And the Bush administration’s peculiar fixation with an obsolete trade embargo and deep-pocketed anti-Castro hard-liners in Miami is standing in the way of dispatching desperately needed assistance for Cuba.

In the last week, Washington has announced $10 million in aid for Haiti. It sent the amphibious assault ship Kearsarge, which carries helicopters and airplanes, to assist in the relief effort. It is a good start. But Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, will need more. Only half the American aid is new money — the rest is being diverted from less urgently needed programs. And the United Nations has asked for more than $100 million to help those stricken by the storm.

Aid to Cuba is being complicated by outdated cold-war politics. The United States has, so far, offered only $100,000 in aid, with a promise of more if Cuba allows an American team in to assess the damage. Havana has foolishly rejected it. And the United States is refusing to temporarily ease core aspects of the longstanding trade embargo to help Cuba deal with the emergency.

The Treasury Department increased the dollar limit that organizations authorized to work with Cuban dissidents may send to Cuba. But Washington is refusing Cuba’s request to buy American construction materials to rebuild homes and repair the mangled electricity grid. It won’t allow Cuba to buy American food on credit, and it has, so far, refused to lift restrictions on the money that Cuban-Americans may send back to their relatives.

We believe the embargo against Cuba is about as wrongheaded a policy as one can devise. It gives credibility to the regime in Havana while contributing to the misery of ordinary Cubans, all for the sake of some votes in Florida. But we are not even asking the Bush administration to lift the embargo forever. The right thing to do to alleviate the crisis wrought by the storms is to temporarily lift all the restrictions on private remittances and private aid flows to Cuba.
kmaherali
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There is a related multimedia linked at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/13/us/13cnd-ike.html

September 13, 2008
Hurricane Damage Extensive in Texas
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS and JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.

HOUSTON — Hurricane Ike barreled across a wide swath of Texas on Saturday, deluging the city of Galveston with a wall of water, flooding coastal towns and leaving extensive damage across metropolitan Houston.

With wind gusts approaching 100 miles per hour, the 600-mile-wide Category 2 hurricane peeled sheets of steel off skyscrapers in Houston, smashed bus shelters and blew out windows, sending shattered glass and debris across the nation’s fourth-largest city, with a population of 2.2 million.

The storm came ashore on Galveston Island, which in 1900 suffered one of the worst hurricanes to hit the United States. Winds covered the main highway with a layer of boats and debris, shutting it down. In Orange, Tex., near the Louisiana coast, the sea rose so rapidly that people were forced to flee to attics and roofs, and the city used trucks to rescue them, local police said.

Yet officials expressed relief that the damage was not as catastrophic as federal and state officials had warned it would be, in part because forecasters appear to have overestimated how much the sea would rise in the path of the storm.

“Fortunately the worst-case scenario did not occur,” Gov. Rick Perry of Texas said at a news conference Saturday afternoon. “The good news is the surge was not as big as we thought it would be.”

There were reports of as many as four people killed, but it could take days to search flooded homes to assess the full impact of the storm, officials said.

Authorities said the hurricane could still prove to be the most punishing storm to hit the area since Hurricane Alicia 25 years ago.

Almost the entire metropolitan area lost power, and authorities said more than three million people were trying to manage in the dark. Utility officials said it could be weeks before power is restored throughout the region.

The magnitude of the power loss and the flooding raised the possibility that several major oil refineries would take more than a week to reopen. As a result, gasoline prices will probably spike around the country, even if oil prices continue to ease on international markets. Overnight, prices rose an average of 5 cents a gallon, to $3.73 for regular gasoline, according to AAA.

The expectations at nightfall Friday that a virtual tsunami of 20-foot waves would crash directly into Galveston, a city of 57,000, were fortunately dashed after midnight when the eye of the hurricane hit shore. City officials estimated the seas rose about 12 feet, though some tide gauges showed a 15-foot rise, and federal officials said it would take time to determine the exact number.

Whatever the height of the surge, longtime residents of Galveston said the damage was still the worst they had ever seen.

More than two million people evacuated coastal areas of Texas and Louisiana before the storm struck, but the authorities estimated that more than 100,000 people throughout the region, including 20,000 in Galveston, had disregarded mandatory evacuation orders.

For industries in the area, officials at refining companies said early damage reports were encouraging, because the center of the storm missed the refineries. The surge of water into Galveston’s shipping channel, an important depot for imported oil, was not as strong as many had feared, and officials hope to reopen it early in the week if no major obstacles are blocking shipping lanes.

At least 100,000 homes were inundated by surging waters, while isolated fires broke out around the region when trees and flying objects fell on electrical transformers, causing sparks.

In Houston, only the downtown area and the medical center section had power as of Saturday evening.

“It’s going to be weeks before we get power to the last customers,” said Mike Rodgers, a spokesman for Entergy Texas, the primary electricity provider between Houston and the Louisiana border.

President Bush issued a major disaster declaration for 29 Texas counties and said federal officials were prepared to help with recovery efforts.

“Obviously, this is a huge storm that is causing a lot of damage not only in Texas, but also in parts of Louisiana,” Mr. Bush said. “Some people didn’t evacuate when asked, and I’ve been briefed on the rescue teams there in the area. They’re prepared to move as soon as weather conditions permit.”

Senator Barack Obama canceled an appearance on “Saturday Night Live,” aides said, because he felt it would be inappropriate.

Civic leaders asked residents to conserve water and call 911 only in life-or-death situations.

“We don’t know what we’re going to find,” said Mayor Lyda Ann Thomas of Galveston, according to The Houston Chronicle. “We hope we’ll find that the people who didn’t leave here are alive and well.”

Despite the devastating flooding in Galveston, experts said the storm surge had not been as severe as some predicted.

Benton McGee, a hydrologist with the United States Geological Survey, told The Associated Press that the surge at Galveston, where the storm made landfall, was about 11 feet. Forecasters had predicted a surge of up to 25 feet.

But Stacey Stewart, a senior hurricane analyst at the National Hurricane Center, defended the government’s predictions of a 15- to 20-foot surge and said it would take time to determine the exact rise in sea level.

“I wouldn’t go out and say that surge values weren’t as high as predicted,” he said. “We have received reports of 15 feet and the sea wall being topped.”

Mr. Stewart said a shift in the storm’s track to the north just before landfall may have kept the rise in sea levels on the lower side of what had been forecast.

The storm moved through the region more quickly than some previous hurricanes and tropical storms, limiting flooding. By early afternoon, the National Hurricane Center had downgraded Ike to a tropical storm.

Mike Varela, chief of the Galveston Fire Department, said flooding was 8- to 10-feet deep in some areas of the city. “The low-lying neighborhoods are extremely flooded right now,” Chief Varela said.

Twenty-two men aboard a crippled freighter, which was adrift off the coast of Galveston when the hurricane hit, came through the storm safely, the Coast Guard said.

Initial reports from residential neighborhoods around Houston suggested that flooding and property damage were not as serious as some had feared early in the morning after hearing reports from downtown, where windows were shattered on skyscrapers and hotels. Winds downtown were particularly intense.

At Reliant Park, in southwest Houston, the storm tore chunks from the retractable roof of the football stadium, the park’s president and general manager told The Associated Press. The game between the Texans and the Baltimore Ravens scheduled for Monday night would probably have to be postponed, he said.

-Late in the afternoon, Air Force helicopters began plucking people out of flooded homes in Galveston and carrying them to shelters on the mainland.

Joyce Williams, 58, arrived on the first chopper with her 80-year-old mother, Eunice Haley, who had spent the night in a house with four feet of water on the ground floor. Ms. Williams was trying to get her mother out of the swamped house when she saw the helicopter and waved. “I was relieved,” she said.

Steven Rushing, who had tried to ride out the storm at his Galveston home with his family, eventually left by boat. Mr. Rushing, six relatives and two dogs wound up at a hotel in Galveston.

“I know my house was dry at 11 o’clock, and at 12:30 a.m., we were floating on the couch putting lifejackets on,” he said. Once the water reached the television, four feet off the floor, Mr. Rushing said, he retrieved his boat from the garage and loaded his family into it.

“I didn’t keep my boat there to plan on evacuating because I didn’t plan on the water getting that high, but I sure am glad it was there,” he said.


Thayer Evans contributed reporting from Galveston, Tex., and Rick Rojas from College Station.
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There is a related multimedia presentation at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/30/world ... ?ref=world

October 30, 2008
Quake in Pakistan Kills at Least 215
By SALMAN MASOOD
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A powerful earthquake jolted parts of southwestern Pakistan on Wednesday, causing widespread destruction in one of the poorest areas of the country, officials said.

The Associated Press put the death toll at 215 early Thursday. Hundreds more were injured as hundreds of mud houses in desolate villages and hamlets in several districts of Baluchistan Province were leveled by the magnitude 6.5 quake, which struck at 5:10 a.m. Army and paramilitary troops and aid workers scrambled to help the survivors and pull bodies and the injured out of the rubble, but they were hampered by significant damage to roads and the telecommunications network.

The death toll is expected to rise as reports from remote areas funnel in. Meanwhile, an estimated 15,000 people left homeless are trying to withstand the cold and serious aftershocks. Local television showed residents sitting in the open, shivering in the cold. Women huddled in groups with their panicked children. Debris of mud houses with caved roofs presented a bleak sight.

People were shown searching through the rubble for survivors and belongings. There were reports of mass burials.

“It was a shallow earthquake, which is very destructive,” said Qamar Zaman Chaudhry, the director general of the Pakistan Meteorological Department. “The aftershocks will be felt for a week with more or less the same intensity.” Indeed, one on Wednesday evening had a magnitude of 6.2.

The quake struck along a 44-mile stretch including Quetta, the provincial capital, which lies on a fault line and was leveled in 1935 by a quake that killed 35,000 people.

“It was scary,” Malik Siraj Akbar, a resident of Quetta and a journalist for The Daily Times, an English-language daily, said by telephone. “The walls of the apartment complex where I live shook so hard that I just closed my eyes and waited for the roof to collapse. I feel so lucky to be alive.”

Aid workers said that 2,000 to 3,000 homes were damaged and that 500 had collapsed.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said it had sent two teams of aid workers to the area, a total of 28 staff members and volunteers, and two mobile health teams.

“Shelter is the most critical need now,” said Hasan Muzamdar, the country director of the relief agency CARE, noting that nighttime temperatures fall to 40 degrees. “Winter has already started here.”

The earthquake on Wednesday brought back bitter memories of the magnitude 7.6 earthquake that struck in October 2005 and left more than 75,000 people dead and hundreds of thousands homeless in the northern parts of Pakistan and parts of the Himalayan region of Kashmir, which is divided between Pakistan and India. In that disaster, frustration with the slow pace of government assistance tended to run high.

A poor government response in Baluchistan, where bitterness against the federal government in Islamabad has simmered for years, could be very damaging. One of Pakistan’s four provinces, Baluchistan is rich with natural resources and sparsely populated, and armed Baluch nationalists have been demanding greater autonomy and a larger share of the national wealth. However, the affected area is inhabited by Pashtuns, a strongly tribal ethnic group that constitutes the majority of the population of Afghanistan.

But officials in Islamabad said the government was taking necessary measures. “It is a localized affair,” said Farooq Ahmed Khan, head of the National Disaster Management Authority, at a news conference in Islamabad.

He said that 2,000 tents, 5,000 blankets and 4,000 plastic mats had been sent to Baluchistan and that 12 helicopters were taking part in the rescue operation. “There were no major buildings in the area,” he said. “So, there was no need for a technical search-and-rescue operation.”

In the hilly tourist resort of Ziarat, a tent village has been established for women and children, as well as a field hospital in the worst-affected district. Eight villages were completely flattened there, officials said.

Mr. Khan said there was no immediate need to appeal for international assistance but also welcomed “any outside help.”

Jane Perlez contributed reporting.
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Burst dam'tsunami' kills 58 in Indonesia

Dozens missing as up to 500 homes are destroyed

By Arlina Arshad, Agence France-PresseMarch 28, 2009

A wall of water that broke through this dam near Jakarta killed at least 58 people Friday, sweeping through homes as residents slept.
Photograph by: Reuters, Agence France-Presse
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Adam burst its banks near the Indonesian capital Jakarta on Friday, drowning at least 58 people in a torrent of muddy water that flooded hundreds of homes, officials said.

Dozens remained missing after a huge wall of water broke through the man-made earthen dam as residents slept, giving them little chance to flee their low-lying homes.

One resident compared it to a tsunami, recalling the 2004 disaster that killed 168,000 people in Indonesia.

Houses and concrete buildings were flattened and buckled by the force of the water, which left many survivors in the suburbs of Cireundeu and Ciputat trapped on rooftops waiting to be rescued.

"This disaster happened so suddenly," said Danang Susanto, an official with the health ministry's crisis centre. "Because people were sleeping, they couldn't get away."

He estimated up to 500 homes were destroyed or submerged after heavy rains caused the breach in the dam at the edge of Situ Gintung lake in Cireundeu. The flooding in some places was six metres high.

Crisis centre head Rustam Pakaya put the death toll at 58, saying dozens more were injured.

A nearby university assembly hall was converted into a makeshift morgue, where mud-smeared residents searched for missing loved ones among the bodies of the dead lined up on the floor.

Ghufron, a 17-year-old student, said he narrowly escaped waters that crashed into his home, but an uncle was dead and three other relatives were missing.

"By the time I woke up the water was up to my nose. I climbed to the roof to save myself. I heard people screaming and shouting," he said.

Dewi Masitoh, a 40-year-old house-wife, said she narrowly escaped with her husband and two daughters after they saw rising water reach the door of their stilt house.

"We were on the second floor but my daughter went back downstairs when the window broke and water gushed in. My husband jumped in and pulled her out of the water by her neck.

"I punched a hole through the roof and we all climbed up through," she said, showing cuts and scratches on her arms.

Television images showed bodies floating through the twisting streets nearby and water rushing through the breach in the dam, emptying the lake.

"It was like being in the middle of a

© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
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April 7, 2009
Death Toll in Italian Quake Rises to 150
By RACHEL DONADIO and ELISABETTA POVOLEDO

L’AQUILA, Italy — A powerful earthquake shook central Italy early Monday, killing 150 people, Italy’s ANSA news reported.

The 6.3 magnitude quake also injured some 1500 people, left tens of thousands homeless and wrought major damage to historic buildings in the medieval hill towns of Abruzzo Region east of Rome, officials said.

Most of the deaths and damage were centered in L’Aquila, a picturesque fortress town at the quake’s epicenter.

“It’s a disaster never before seen,” said Franco Totani, a lawyer who said he was leaving the town to stay at an uncle’s house in Rome. “I’ve seen earthquakes before but this is a catastrophe.”

Outside a damaged convent, a dozen nuns still dressed in bright orange and blue bathrobes climbed into a van headed to an assistance center. Sister Lidia, the mother superior, said an 82-year old nun had died of shock. “The quake, it was very strong,” she said.

The narrow streets of the historic center were filled with rubble, and parked cars were crushed under large blocks of debris.

The damage to historic monuments was extensive. The cupola of the 18th-century Santa Maria del Suffragio church cracked open like an eggshell, exposing the stucco patterns inside the dome.

Part of the transept of the 13th-century Santa Maria di Collemaggio basilica collapsed, as well as a small cupola in the 18th-century church of Sant’Agostino.

Other historic buildings were damaged in at least 26 surrounding towns in the Apennine mountains. “Some towns in the area have been virtually destroyed in their entirety,” Gianfranco Fini, speaker of the lower house of Parliament, said in Rome before the chamber observed a moment of silence.

Aftershocks shuddered through the area during the day, and rain came in the evening, hampering rescue efforts as people clawed through the debris by hand, frantically seeking survivors.

Friday night, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi said on national television that 150 people had been killed. Mr. Berlusconi, who canceled a trip to Moscow to survey the region by helicopter, declared a state of emergency.

Authorities said 1,500 people had been injured. A spokesman for Italy’s Civil Protection Agency said on national television that an estimated 40,000 to 50,000 people had been left homeless.

The situation is “extremely critical, as many buildings have collapsed,” Luca Spoletini, a spokesman for the civil protection agency, told ANSA shortly after the quake struck.

In L’Aquila, authorities assisted elderly residents in leaving the historic main square, where they had fled in search of safety.

Parts of the main hospital were evacuated because they were at risk of collapse, The Associated Press reported, and only two operating rooms were in use. Bloodied victims waited in hospital hallways or in the courtyard and many were being treated in the open.

Four children died in the hospital after their house collapsed, ANSA reported. A fifth child died in the village of Fossa, eight miles from L’Aquila, a town of 80,000.

The quake struck around 3:30 a.m. and could be felt as far away as Rome, some 60 miles to the west, where it rattled furniture and set off car alarms. The United States Geological Survey said the earthquake that hit L’Aquila was just one of several quakes to hit the region overnight.

Part of a student dormitory in L’Aquila collapsed, and initial reports said one person died and seven people were missing in the debris. At midday, shaken students sat outside the rubble of the four-story dormitory, expressing fears for the fate of others who may not have survived.

“We’re waiting for my son,” said a woman who declined to give her name. She stood among a knot of anxious onlookers and hid her red eyes behind large sunglasses.

“This shouldn’t have happened,” said Gabriele Magrini, 21, a physics student at L’Aquila University, who had been across town at a friend’s house when the quake struck. He said he had been waiting at the university since 4 a.m., adding: “We’ve only seen two people come out. We’re still waiting for 10.”

The worst hit seemed to be the city center in L’Aquila. The Italian Culture Ministry also reported damage to the steeple of the church of San Bernardino, a palazzo housing the state archives and parts of the 16th century castle that houses the National Museum of Abruzzo, which has been closed to the public.

But modern buildings in the outer part of the city were also affected. Residents wheeling dusty suitcases wandered through the streets as rescue workers sifted through the rubble. Electricity, phone and gas lines were also reported damaged.

In a letter to the archbishop of L’Aquila, the Vatican secretary of state, Tarcisio Bertone, wrote that Pope Benedict XVI was praying “for the victims, in particular for children.”

Speaking on Rainews 24, Guido Bertolaso, Italy’s top civil protection official said that the earthquake was “comparable if not superior to the one which struck Umbria in 1997.” That quake killed 10 people and damaged medieval buildings and churches across the region, including Assisi’s famed basilica.

Seismic activity is relatively common in Italy, but intensity like that of Monday’s quake is rare. The L’Aquila quake was the worst to hit Italy since 1980, when a 6.9-magnitude earthquake struck Eboli, south of Naples, leaving more than 2,700 people dead.

The last major quake to hit central Italy struck the south-central Molise region on Oct. 31, 2002, killing 28 people, including 27 children who died when their school collapsed.

Rachel Donadio reported from L’Aquila, and Elisabetta Povoledo from Rome.

****

Update:

Quake victims laid to rest

Thousands mourn at funeral for 205

By Gunther Kern, Agence France-Presse

April 11, 2009 7:47 AM

Italy bade a final farewell Friday to the nearly 300 people killed in the earthquake that devastated the central Abruzzo region, with thousands attending an emotional funeral.

The families of 205 of the 290 victims laid their loved ones to rest after the ceremony, with top government and Catholic Church dignitaries among a throng of more than 5,000.

Many broke into sobs at the sight of so many coffins covered with floral wreaths and arrayed on red carpets at a military college near the devastated Abruzzo capital L'Aquila, nestled in a valley of the Apennine Mountains.

Small, white children's coffins set atop brown ones holding adult victims deepened the sense of loss at the ceremony on Good Friday, the most sombre day of the Christian calendar, marking the death of Jesus Christ.

A toy motorcycle was attached to one of the baby coffins.

Pope Benedict told the mourners in a message: "In this tragic hour . . . I feel spiritually close to you and share your anguish."

The Pontiff, who is expected to visit the region after Easter, wished for "rapid healing for the wounded and courage to have the strength to continue," in the message read out by his personal secretary Georg Ganswein.

http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/Quake ... story.html

*****
There is a related multimedia linked at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/11/arts/ ... ?th&emc=th

Where Culture Is Another Casualty
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
L’AQUILA, Italy — Nadia Gabrielli and her sister, Giuliana, dragged suitcases over the rubble of what remained of L’Aquila. The earthquake early on Monday morning devastated this city of about 68,000 in the Abruzzo region of central Italy. Nearly 300 were killed in the area, and some 28,000 people forced into tent villages and other temporary shelters. Save for a few like the Gabriellis, desperate to retrieve belongings, only stray dogs and rescue workers now wander this city’s empty streets, picking through debris.

Anxiously, the two women asked for help fetching medicine from an apartment in a building that had cracked like a hard-boiled egg, a gaping horizontal fissure running straight through the second-story windows and balcony. Afterward the sisters lamented what had happened to their beloved “city of culture,” as Nadia Gabrielli put it.

In the aftermath, tending to the injured and the dead comes first. But local residents as well as teams of officials have already begun to assess the cultural damage. The earthquake 12 years ago that ravaged Umbria wasn’t nearly as severe but it made headlines abroad because it damaged tourist sites like the famous basilica in Assisi. Less glamorous, Abruzzo is rich in its own heritage, which is priceless to the people here.

“I lived in Latin America and South America for many years,” Nadia Gabrielli added, “but I came back here because this is my city, my culture. It’s our identity.”

Italy is not like America. Art isn’t reduced here to a litany of obscene auction prices or lamentations over the bursting bubble of shameless excess. It’s a matter of daily life, linking home and history. Italians don’t visit museums much, truth be told, because they already live in them and can’t live without them. The art world might retrieve a useful lesson from the rubble.
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April 12, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor
Confusing Patterns With Coincidences
By SUSAN HOUGH
Pasadena, Calif.

IN the aftermath of the earthquake at L’Aquila, Italy, on Monday that killed nearly 300 people, splashy headlines suggested that these victims didn’t have to die.

An Italian researcher, Giampaolo Giuliani, began to sound alarm bells a month earlier, warning that an earthquake would strike near L’Aquila on March 29. The prediction was apparently based on anomalous radon gas concentrations in the air; the region had also experienced a number of small tremors starting in mid-January. Mr. Giuliani was denounced for inciting panic by Italy’s Civil Protection Agency, and he was forced to take his warning off the Web after March 29 came and went without significant activity.

Should Italian officials have listened? Should the public have heeded the warnings? With 20-20 hindsight the answer certainly appears to be yes. The real answer is no.

Scientists have been chasing earthquake prediction — the holy grail of earthquake science — for decades. In the 1970s American seismologists declared that the goal was reachable. Yet we have little to no real progress to show for our efforts. We have a good understanding of the planet’s active earthquake zones. We’re pretty good at forecasting the long-term rates of earthquakes in different areas. But prediction per se, which involves specifying usefully narrow windows in time, location and magnitude, has eluded us.

The key question is, can we find precursors that tell us that a large earthquake is imminent? Various phenomena have been investigated: radon levels, changes in earthquake wave speeds, the warping of the earth’s crust, even the behavior of cockroaches and other animals.

The game goes like this: you look back at past recordings of X, where X is radon or whatever, and find that X had shown anomalies before large earthquakes. But the problem is that X is typically what we call a “noisy signal” — data that includes a lot of fluctuations, often for varied and not entirely understood reasons — so finding correlations looking backward is about as meaningful as finding animals in the clouds.

We do know that some earthquakes, including the L’Aquila event, have foreshocks, but we can’t sound alarm bells every time little earthquakes happen because the overwhelming majority — 95 percent or so — will not indicate a coming major quake.

The public heard about Mr. Giuliani’s prediction because it appears to have been borne out, albeit several days after he said the earthquake would happen. But there are scores of other predictions that the public never hears about. And that is a good thing because scientists have yet to be able to accurately predict coming earthquakes. Investigating precursors like radon is a legitimate avenue of research, but until and unless the track record of a method is shown to be statistically significant, making public predictions is irresponsible.

Progress is slow in developing prediction methods, since, after all, they can be tested only by waiting for earthquakes to happen, and the earthquakes we care most about, like the deadly 6.3 magnitude quake in Italy, fortunately don’t happen every day. In the meantime, society’s keen interest in the subject occasionally collides with deliberative research, and misunderstandings like that involving Mr. Giuliani are the unfortunate consequences.

The public would like scientists to predict earthquakes. We can’t do that. We might never be able to do that. What people and government can do is work to make sure our houses, schools and hospitals don’t fall down when the next big one strikes, and that we’re all prepared for the difficult aftermaths. We can look around our homes and our workplace and think about what would happen to them if the terra firma suddenly ceased being firm. We can stop worrying about predicting the unpredictable, and start doing more to prepare for the inevitable.

Susan Hough is a geophysicist with the United States Geological Survey.
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April 30, 2009
Op-ed Contributor
How to Prevent a Pandemic
By NATHAN WOLFE
Washington

THE swine flu outbreak seems to have emerged without warning. Within a few days of being noticed, the flu had already spread to the point where containment was not possible. Yet the virus behind it had to have existed for some time before it was discovered. Couldn’t we have detected it and acted sooner, before it spread so widely? The answer is likely yes — if we had been paying closer attention to the human-animal interactions that enable new viruses to emerge.

While much remains unknown about how pandemics are born, we are familiar with the kinds of microbes — like SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome), influenza and H.I.V. — that present a risk of widespread disease. We know that they usually emerge from animals and most often in specific locations around the world, places like the Congo Basin and Southeast Asia.

By monitoring people who are exposed to animals in such viral hotspots, we can capture viruses at the very moment they enter human populations, and thus develop the ability to predict and perhaps even prevent pandemics.

Over the past 10 years, my colleagues and I have demonstrated that such monitoring is possible. In Cameroon, we have studied hunters who are exposed to the blood and body fluids of monkeys, bats, wild pigs and other hunted animals. By collecting specimens from both the hunters and their prey, we have discovered previously unknown viruses and documented how they’ve jumped from animals to humans. We have seen, for example, a gorilla retrovirus, never before seen in humans, infect one of our study subjects.

Then, by monitoring infected people and those who are in contact with them, we observe what effects these novel viruses have on people, and how easily they can move from person to person.

We can also identify a virus’s genetic and immunological signatures and other biological information that is needed to create diagnostic tests, vaccines and treatments — so that when a disease appears, it is possible to respond as quickly as possible.

Had similar monitoring systems been in place at farms in Mexico, where the current swine flu outbreak is assumed to have emerged, perhaps we would have been able to identify the movement of the virus at or near the point where it entered humans. Such information could have significantly speeded up our response.

We are not alone in working on pandemic prevention. Many federal agencies — including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the United States Agency for International Development and the Department of Defense — as well as the World Health Organization and private conservation organizations like the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Wildlife Trust are also looking for ways to stop pandemics early. But much more work is needed.

My organization and its collaborators have recently set up virus monitoring stations in China, Laos, Madagascar, Malaysia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Yet this is just a beginning. To establish a worldwide safety net, we would need to monitor thousands of people exposed to animals in dozens of sites around the world — not only hunters but also people working on farms and in animal markets. It is important that the American government make pandemic prevention a priority and devote more resources to expanding disease surveillance in people and in wild and domestic animal populations throughout the world.

Our current global public health strategies are reminiscent of cardiology in the 1950s — when doctors focused solely on responding to heart attacks and ignored the whole idea of prevention.

We needn’t have been so surprised by the swine flu last week, and we must make sure that we are not caught off guard by the epidemics that will certainly follow it.

Nathan Wolfe, the director of the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative, is a visiting professor of human biology at Stanford.
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Thousands homeless after typhoon

At least 22 killed in northern Philippines

Agence France-PresseMay 9, 2009

The mangled roof of a gas station is seen in the town of Alaminos, Pangasinan province, after typhoon Chan-hom hit the northern Philippines on Thursday.
Photograph by: AFP-Getty Images, Agence France-Presse

A t least 22 people were killed and thousands displaced overnight as typhoon Chan-hom raked the northern Philippines, officials said Friday.

The typhoon blew out into the Philippine Sea off the northeast coast of Luzon island early Friday after unleashing landslides, floods, and power cuts across the north of the country.

Among the worst-hit areas was the mountain town of Kiangan and nearby areas that were devastated by landslides, and the cape of Bolinao on the South China Sea coast that bore the full force of its landfall late Thursday.

"Bolinao -- well frankly speaking it's devastated,"De-fence Secretary Gilberto Teodoro told reporters in Manila after a helicopter overflight of the coastal region swamped with floods and littered with downed pylons.

Chan-hom killed 12 people in Bolinao and nearby towns, where strong winds knocked down houses, trees and electric posts, he added.

In the Cordillera mountain region northeast of Bolinao, nine villagers were crushed to death by large boulders that rolled down slopes in Kiangan and nearby towns on Thursday night, Olive Luces of the local civil defence office said.

The rocks hit homes and a truck, whose driver was killed. Five people were injured, while two elderly residents were missing after two houses were buried by another landslide in the neighbouring town of Lagawe, Luces added.

The civil defence office in Manila said a man died of a heart attack in a landslide in Olongapo city, northwest of Manila.

The weather disturbance displaced more than 4,000 people, it added.

Power was knocked out in many areas while entire towns in the north remained flooded. Ferry services between south-ern Luzon and nearby islands resumed Friday, allowing more than 1,000 passengers stranded overnight Tuesday to leave the ports.

© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald

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Landslides in southern Philippines kill 10

ReutersMay 19, 2009

Landslides triggered by several days of heavy rains killed 10 people and about 20 more were missing in a mining village in the southern Philippines, local government officials said on Monday.

About 30 small-scale miners were rescued with minor injuries after they were pulled out from under tonnes of mud and debris near Pantukan town on the southern island of Mindanao, said Arturo Uy, governor of Compostela Valley province.

Uy told reporters rescue teams backed by soldiers and police officers rushed to the disaster area to look for survivors.

"Based on the latest reports, at least 10 bodies have been dug up by the rescue teams," he said. "We're still looking for nearly two dozen more, but our teams lack equipment. Some have shovels but most of the rescuers are using their bare hands."

Uy said several days of rain caused the heavily mined slopes to collapse and bury dozens of make-shift houses. About 200 people live in the town.

Last month, the local government ordered the suspension of small-scale mining operations in the area due to bad weather conditions, but some miners ignored the order and continued working despite the dangers.

Landslides and flash floods are common in the disaster-prone Philippines during the monsoon months between May and October, particularly near mining areas, low-lying and coastal areas.

© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
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Cyclone's sea surge hits India, Bangladesh

Agence France-PresseMay 27, 2009

People carry their belongings as they wade through flooded roads to safety in the Indian state of West Bengal on Tuesday after cyclone Aila swept over coastal regions.
Photograph by: Rupak De Chowdhuri, Reuters, Agence France-Presse

Bangladesh and India launched major relief operations Tuesday after a cyclone tore into the northern coast of the Bay of Bengal, killing at least 126 people and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless.

Many children drowned when cyclone Aila triggered a four-metre ocean surge as it made landfall Monday.

About 430,000 people were marooned, and military and civil defence teams were struggling to deliver food, water and emergency shelters.

Bangladesh's Disaster Management Minister Abdur Razzak said people on remote islands had been worst affected and could not be reached because of rough seas.

"Army helicopters are being deployed to carry food and other supplies until the seas calm, but they could not land in some of the islands because of bad weather," he said.

The minister said 91 people in Bangladesh were confirmed dead, including 23 from one village that was swept out to sea after a dam burst.

"Tidal water has started receding, but there is a huge crisis of drinking water in the remotest areas. We have ordered army to set up some 278 water purification plants there," he added.

Dalil Uddin, a spokesman in the disaster control room, said several hundred people were injured as the storm tore over an area where about three million people live, damaging or destroying 180,000 mud and bamboo homes.

"Hundreds of kilometres of roads and embankments have been wiped out," he said.

At least 35 people were killed in India's West Bengal when the cyclone hit crowded Kolkata, bringing down trees and electricity pylons and smashing cars.

© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald
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Second Session of the Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction

2 June 2009- More than 1,500 delegates, from 150 Governments and over 120 regional and national organisations will gather in Geneva from 16-19 June 2009 for the Second Session of the Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction (GP09).

The Global Platform is the main bi-annual forum on disaster risk reduction bringing together a wide cross-section of the worldwide disaster risk reduction community worldwide, including heads of state, senior ministers, UN agencies, NGOs, scientific and technical experts, and others. Under the slogan ‘invest today for a safer tomorrow’, the event will focus on the linkages between climate change adaptation, poverty and disaster risk reduction.

The full program of the conference will be distributed in the next briefing on Friday 5 June together with another media advisory which will provide full details on the event.

The main highlights include:
 Opening Ceremony presided by John Holmes, United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, and Convener of the Global Platform and Keynote Speakers,
 Five High Level Panels exploring relevant thematic issues: Investment, Climate Change Adaptation, Community Resilience, Safer Hospitals and Schools, Building Back Better;
 Five Roundtables – Early Warning, NGOs, Local Authorities, Education, Ecosystems
 Five Special Events – including the public launch of the Red Cross Red Crescent World Disasters Report, a BBC World Debate featuring some hard hitting dialogue between disaster risk reduction specialists in front of a TV audience and a Film Debate highlighting climate change adaptation films
 Some 40 side events organised by ISDR partners
 A market-place featuring more than 30 booths/exhibits from ISDR partners
 Chair’s Summary session followed by the Closing Ceremony
“Public awareness of disaster risk reduction issues and initiatives is intensifying and more questions are being asked of governments,” says Margareta Wahlström, the UN’s Assistant Secretary-General
for Disaster Risk Reduction. “The Global Platform will be a pivotal conference, not only in setting the disaster risk reduction agenda for the coming two years and beyond, but also in the run up to sealing a deal on climate change adaptation in Copenhagen this December.”

Launch Venue and Date
The Second Session of the Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction will take place at CICG, International Centre of Geneva, rue de Varembe 17, 1202 Geneva from 16 to 19 June 2009 Media are welcome to the Launch Ceremony on 16 June and are invited to attend all the events
during the Global Platform
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400,000 evacuated after earthquake hits China

M ore than 400,000 people were being evacuated Friday after an earthquake hit southwestern China, killing one person, injuring hundreds and flattening more than 18,000 homes, officials said.

A government relief official in Yao'an county, a mountainous area of remote Yunnan province, told AFP one person had died and 328 had been injured.

The U. S. Geological Survey (USGS) said the 5.7-magnitude quake struck at 7:19 p. m. Thursday at a shallow depth of 10 kilometres in Yunnan province.

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; Typhoon shuts down Manila; Two missing as fierce storm slams Philippines
Agence France-presseJuly 18, 2009

A Manila resident stands at the door to her house partially submerged by floodwaters from typhoon Molave Friday.
Photograph by: Erik De Castro, Reuters, Agence France-presse

Two people were missing and more than 4,000 others displaced as typhoon Molave caused widespread flooding that effectively shut down the Philippine capital Friday, rescuers and officials said.

The eye of Molave hit the sparsely populated Batan island group near Taiwan on Friday night as weather services upgraded it from a tropical storm into a typhoon packing maximum sustained winds of 95 kilometres an hour.

Despite the centre of the disturbance being hundreds of kilometres away, President Gloria Arroyo declared a government holiday in the capital Manila and a large chunk of the main island of Luzon as roads flooded.

However, she said on government television that "those in emergency, medical and security services" should stay put at work.

The civil defence office in Manila said two people are missing and more than 4,000 people displaced amid widespread flooding in and around the metropolis of 12 million people.

A nine-year-old boy fell into a flooded storm drain in San Mateo town east of Manila while a young man tumbled into a creek near Imus town, south of the capital and was swept away, it said in a report.

Schools, offices and the country's stock exchange also shut as the Marikina river burst its banks, threatening the capital's eastern districts, while some domestic airlines suspended flights.

Weather services said the northern Philippines could expect up to 200 millimetres of rain within a 24-hour period, leading to potential flash floods and landslides.

The Philippine Stock Exchange said it suspended operations midmorning "due to lack of clearing facilities" as the central bank had curtailed its activities because of the weather.

Manila residents were seen wading knee-deep in dirty brown water.

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August 11, 2009
Death Toll Rises as Typhoons Soak Asia
By MICHAEL WINES

BEIJING — Deaths and damage from two Pacific typhoons rose on Monday, with nine reported dead in Japan and a rural village in south-central Taiwan buried in a mudslide. The number of dead there was not known. Thirty-seven people had already been reported dead in the Philippines, Taiwan, and China.

Initial reports from the Taiwanese village, Hsiao-lin, were sketchy. A spokesman for the National Fire Administration, Liang Yu-chu, said that 45 people had been pulled alive from the mudslide, but that no dead had been found.

Other unverified reports from local residents, quoted by news services, suggested that as many as 600 people were missing. Hundreds of people are scattered in houses outside the more concentrated boundaries of the village, and the scope of the landslide was not known.

“The whole village was buried in the landslide, so it’s hard to be certain,” Mr. Liang said. “They’re still searching.”

The storm, Morakot, unleashed record rains that dropped up to 83 inches in some parts of Taiwan between Friday and Sunday, causing what officials say is the worst flooding in half a century. The number of known dead in Taiwan was 15, with 32 severely injured. Those figures did not include potential landslide victims.

Morakot, which means emerald in Thai, struck the Philippines last week, killing 21 people, including a French tourist and two Belgian tourists, according to officials there. Seven others were reported missing.

Three people also were killed on mainland China, where Morakot struck Sunday.

In Japan on Monday, at least nine people were killed, and nine others were missing after another typhoon, Etau, slammed the western part of the country, bringing heavy rain that led to floods and landslides, The A.P. reported. On Sunday evening, an earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 6.9 rattled Tokyo and eastern Japan, according to the Japan Meteorological Agency.

Taiwan’s central government had warned earlier of landslide dangers after Morakot battered the island, dumping its record rains across the south. Helicopters took rescuers into the landslide site, in Kaohsiung County, and officials said accurate information on the situation was likely to emerge before daylight on Tuesday. Rescue efforts were complicated by continuing rain.

The Reuters news service quoted an army general involved in the rescue effort, Richard Hu, as saying that “no small number of single-story homes have been covered” by the mudslide.

More than 170,000 people remained without power on Monday, the government said.

In China, one of the reported dead was a 4-year-old child in Wenzhou, a city of nearly 1.4 million people in Zhejiang Province, where officials said the storm had leveled nearly 1,500 homes. The child was among five people buried when the winds collapsed five adjacent houses.

The weakened storm was still churning over Wenzhou on Monday morning. Skies there had cleared, but heavy rain was predicted later. “I’m living in the center of town, which is not so bad,” one woman, Yang Weiwei, said from Wenzhou in a telephone interview. “However, some parts of the city are in a mess.”

On Sunday, the authorities said the storm had whipped up waves as high as 26 feet in the East China Sea and in the strait between mainland China and Taiwan.

Typhoon Morakot, the eighth of the season, hit the Chinese mainland at 4:20 p.m. on Sunday at Xiapu County, in northern Fujian Province. China’s state-controlled Xinhua news service said more than 490,000 people had been moved to safety in Fujian, and 48,000 boats summoned back to harbor.

In Zhejiang Province, between Fujian and Shanghai, 505,000 others were evacuated and 35,000 boats called in.

Both provinces are manufacturing centers with large port cities. Shanghai, just north of the typhoon’s landfall, was spared the worst winds but canceled airline flights and lowered river reservoirs to prepare for flooding. Trees were uprooted and some snapped apart in Fujian Province, Xinhua reported, and farmers struggled with nets to recapture fish flushed out of fish farms.

Xinhua said relief teams were distributing food and water to rural villagers who had been stranded by high waters. By Sunday night, meteorologists reported that the typhoon had degraded close to tropical storm status, with 74-mile-an-hour winds.

The government reported that more than 83,000 Philippines residents were affected by floodwaters and landslides, and 22,000 had been evacuated.

Jonathan Ansfield contributed reporting, and Zhang Jin contributed research.

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Thousands of Indonesians left homeless by quake

Death toll mounts as damage assessed

By Pipit Prahoro And Heru Asprihanto, ReutersSeptember 3, 2009

Rescuers check the collapsed boarding school in Tasikmalay, West Java, for trapped victims following Wednesday's 7.0 magnitude earthquake in Indonesia. The quake struck less than 200 kilometres south of Jakarta.

Rescuers check the collapsed boarding school in Tasikmalay, West Java, for trapped victims following Wednesday's 7.0 magnitude earthquake in Indonesia. The quake struck less than 200 kilometres south of Jakarta.
Photograph by: Gede Bagja, AFP-Getty Images, Reuters

T he death toll from a powerful earthquake in Indonesia, which killed at least 42 people and forced thousands to flee buildings, is likely to rise, government agencies said early today.

The 7.0 magnitude quake shook buildings in the capital Jakarta on Wednesday afternoon and flattened homes in villages closer to the epicentre, in West Java.

Reuters reporters at the scene today saw many damaged houses, as well as makeshift tents and shelters on the streets and in fields.

"They have taken refuge not only because their houses were ruined, but also because they fear there will be aftershocks," said local official Obar Sobarna. There were about 5,000 people taking refuge in the area, he added.

At least 42 people were killed and more than 300 people injured, the government said. Officials said about 1,300 houses were damaged, although local media put the number at 3,500.

Another 42 people were missing, presumed dead, after the quake triggered a landslide in the district of Cianjur, about 100 kilometres south of Jakarta, said Priyadi Kardono, spokesman for the National Disaster Mitigation Agency.

Kardono told Reuters the death toll could be much higher as scores of houses and offices had collapsed or suffered severe damage.

Some areas near the epicentre could not be contacted, and communications were slow to recover.

"Communications with the coastal areas were completely cut, so we don't know the conditions there," Kardono said.

"No reports have come from those areas, although we assume those were the most affected ones. It's possible the death toll could grow higher."

The Health Ministry said it was sending medical teams to the affected areas in West Java. State news agency Antara reported that villagers were clearing rubble from collapsed buildings to try to find survivors and bodies.

Indonesia's 17,000 islands are scattered along a belt of volcanic and seismic activity known as the Pacific "ring of fire," one of the most quake-prone places on Earth.

More than 170,000 Indonesians were killed or listed missing after a 9.15 magnitude earthquake off Indonesia's Aceh province on Sumatra triggered a tsunami in December 2004. A total of 230,000 people died in affected Indian Ocean countries.

Indonesia's main power, oil and gas, steel, and mining companies with operations in West and Central Java island closest to the quake's epicentre said they had not been affected and suffered no damage.
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Record rains overwhelm Istanbul, 31 dead
By Murad Sezer And Ayla Jean Yackley,
ReutersSeptember 10, 2009

An aerial view shows flood-damaged vehicles on Wednesday in Istanbul. At least 31 people were killed as heavy overnight rains flooded parts of Turkey's biggest city, stranding motorists and flooding roads.
Photograph by: AFP-Getty Images, Reuters


F lash floods killed 31 people in northwest Turkey, sweeping through the city of Istanbul, swamping houses, turning highways into fast-flowing rivers and drowning seven women in a minibus that was taking them to work.

Twenty-six died in Istanbul, Turkey's largest city with 14 million inhabitants, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said late on Wednesday, after two days of the heaviest rain in 80 years produced sudden flood waters which engulfed low-lying areas.

Another five died in Saray, west of Istanbul, reportedly all from the same family. Nine more were missing, Erdogan said.

In Istanbul rescue workers, some on boats, put out planks and ladders to help drivers, stranded in fast-flowing waters, reach the safety of bridges and high land. Military helicopters also assisted bringing stranded people to safety.

The worst flooding occurred in areas in the west of the city, on the European side, where drainage is often poor.

The waters began to recede late on Wednesday revealing wrecked buildings and debris scattered across the streets, as distressed residents and workers started the cleanup.

Interior Minister Besir Atalay said the death toll could rise as waters continued to recede.

Witnesses said waves of muddy waters pulling cars, trees and debris crashed into homes and buildings early on Wednesday as people were getting up to break their fasting during the holy month of Ramadan.

"We heard a crashing sound and then saw the waters coming down carrying cars and debris," said Nuri Bitken, a 42-year-old night guard at a truck garage.

"We tried to wake up those who were still asleep in the trucks but some didn't make it. The dead had to be retrieved by boats," Bitken told Reuters.

CNN Turk television showed scenes of white blankets covering the bodies of people found in the western Halkali neighbourhood near Ataturk International airport. Airport officials said there was no disruption to flights.

"My friend got stuck in the truck after the water rose all at once. The vehicle stopped working after filling with water. We rescued him with a winch," Kamil Coskun told Reuters TV in Ikitelli district.

Istanbul's ancient district of Sultanahmet, with its famous mosques, the palaces of the waterfront and Beyoglu's area of narrow streets were largely unaffected.

In the Ikitelli commercial district, residents scrambled for office equipment amid debris. In other parts of the city, people waded chest-high through swamped highways.

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Scores killed as storm floods Philippines
Agence France-Presse

September 27, 2009

A Filipino girl is carried to safety through flood water brought by tropical storm Ketsana in Quezon City, near Manila, on Saturday.
Photograph by: Jay Directo, AFP; Getty Images, Agence France-Presse

At least 50 people were reported dead as tropical storm Ketsana lashed the Philippines, bringing massive flooding, television and radio reports said early today.

At least 40 were killed in Rizalprovince, eastofManila, as entire towns were inundated, Rizal Gov. Casimiro Ynares was quoted as saying by GMA television.

Radio stations had earlier reported 10 dead in Manila and its surrounding areas. This included a father and child killed by a collapsing wall weakened by the flood as well as others swept away by rising water.

Ynares said there were many more missing in flooded towns. The government declared Manila and 25 other provinces to be in a "state of calamity," Defence Secretary Gilberto Teodoro said, as heavy rains brought by the storm caused the worst flooding in the capital in 20 years.

Amid a rash of cellphone calls for help by people stranded on the roofs of their houses, President Gloria Arroyo appealed to the public to stay calm and follow the instructions of local officials.

Over 1,800 people were forced to flee their homes and take refuge in evacuation centres due to rising water, the civil defence office said.

Flooding was reported in many districts with water in some areas reaching as high as the rooftops of one-storey buildings, it added.

Power was cut in many areas of Manila, partly due to flooding, but also as a protective measure to prevent fallen lines electrocuting people trying to escape the waters.

In a radio broadcast, the defence secretary advised that "if you are on the roof, don't try to leave. Just remain there on the roof and we will do everything to rescue you." He remarked that even he had to swim through chest-deep water to reach his office.

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*****

Manila submerged in sea of muddy water

Flood leaves 86 dead, 330,000 homeless

Agence France-PresseSeptember 28, 2009

an aerial picture shows residents caught in heavy flooding brought by tropical storm Ketsana in Marikina city, east of the Philippine capital Manila on Sunday. The storm dumped the heaviest rainfall on Manila in more than four decades, officials said.
Photograph by: Noel Celis, AFP-Getty Images, Agence France-Presse

Seen from a military helicopter flying above the sprawling city, Manila was covered by a sea of brown on Sunday, with islands of desperate people clinging to corrugated rooftops.

One man, wearing only shorts and sandals, held up a piece of paper appealing for help with the words "food" and "water" scrawled on it.

Elsewhere, residents who could not wait to be rescued waded through the water, carrying their children and anything else they could manage on their shoulders or heads.

Two men converted a car roof top into a makeshift raft, and hauled themselves by rope across what was once a road but now a river. Elsewhere, dog and chicken carcasses floated in the water as rescuers in rubber boats struggled to navigate around mountains of debris.

The devastation extended across vast areas of Manila after the heaviest rain in more than 40 years sent torrents of water up to six metres high streaming across the city on Saturday. The storm, which destroyed both shanty towns and upmarket suburbs, left at least 86 people dead and displaced more than 330,000, according to the government.

Banking executive Rachelle Solis was still in shock on Sunday after she and her two children, aged six and eight, were almost swept away.

Solis, 35, had taken the children to a daycare centre near the family home in a riverside northern Manila suburb. In

a matter of minutes the water rose by about a metre and she decided to fetch her children.

Once there, Solis was forced to take her children across the torrent of water to reach higher ground. Their only way across was via a rope someone had set up above the waters across the road. "We had no choice but to brave the flood. We couldn't wait for rescuers," Solis told AFP.

"We thought we were going to die. My children kept crying. The current was so strong and we were nearly swept away... there was debris smashing into our bodies. I kept thinking this couldn't happen to me, not in Manila."

Meanwhile, rescuers pushed on with efforts to reach those who remained stranded.

President Gloria Arroyo had ordered all rescue work to be completed by nightfall on Sunday, but as daylight faded many areas of the city remained under water and countless people were left to fend for themselves.

"Rescuers are not reaching the people inside the deeper areas," said Michael Ignas, 37, a tricycle driver in eastern Manila's Pasig city which was particularly hard hit.

Ignas said he had survived the flooding by seeking refuge on the second floor of a building. As he spoke, the water remained neck-deep in nearby areas.

For Red Cross volunteer Dave Barnuevo, the rescue work was proving almost impossibly difficult. "I've never seen flooding this devastating in Manila," Barnuevo told AFP, as he led a small team of rescuers scouring Provident, a sprawling riverside community in Marikina city, east of Manila.

"The water is taking a long time to go down. The water is muddy and thick, and we have had to push our rubber boats in neck-deep waters in some areas."
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Killer tsunami strikes South Pacific islands

Calgary HeraldSeptember 30, 2009

A view of the Sinalei resort, south of Apia, capital of Western Samoa, after it was struck by a tsunami.
Photograph by: Reuters, Calgary Herald

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A tsunami smashed into the Pacific island nations of American and Western Samoa on Tuesday, killing possibly more than 100 people, flattening villages and injuring hundreds.

A Pacific-wide tsunami warning was issued after a huge 8.0-magnitude undersea quake off American Samoa, with reports of a small tsunami reaching New Zealand. A tsunami advisory was also issued for Japan's east coast and the U. S. West Coast early today.

The tsunami caused waves of 1.5 metres above sea level off American Samoa, said the Pacific Western Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii. There were unconfirmed reports of waves taller than four metres.

---

For breaking news on the tsunami, see calgaryherald.comShortly after local radio tsunami warnings were issued in American and Western Samoa, waves started crashing into the capital of American Samoa, Pago Pago, and villages and resorts on the southern coasts of the tiny island nations, witnesses said.

"It's believed as of now, there could be a number close to 100 deaths," said Ausegalia Mulipola, assistant chief executive of Western Samoa's disaster management office.

"They are still continuing the searches for any missing bodies in the area," Mulipola told Reuters, adding the southern side of the country's main island Upolu was the worst hit.

"There have been reports of villages where most of the houses have been run over by the sea," he said.

"Some areas have been flattened and the tsunami had brought a lot of sand onshore, so there have been reports the sand has covered some of the bodies. So we need specialized machines to search for bodies that are buried under the sand."

In American Samoa, a U. S. territory, the death toll was officially 14, but could rise, said officials.

A series of five waves hit Pago Pago, swamping the harbourside business centre and temporarily closing the airport.

Yachtsman Wayne Hodgins, who was in Pago Pago harbour, said he had heard of people being swept away.

"There was a couple and a young boy, they were clinging to the light standard. The water came and went very, very quickly, but it was absolutely ferocious," Hodgins told American media.

American Samoa tourism chief David Vaeafe said water levels rose about three minutes after the tsunami warning, with small villages around the capital devastated.

"Access to Pago Pago has been closed. Water had come up to the first floor. The radio station was evacuated, a lot of damage, structural damage to the steel and brick structure," Vaeafe told Australia's Sky Television from Pago Pago.

There were reports of looting in Pago Pago as people flocked into supermarkets to stockpile supplies. Fishing boats not thrown onto reefs by the tsunamis moved out to open sea for safety.

Hundreds of people, including tourists, fled coastal homes and resorts to higher ground in both nations.

The Indian Ocean tsunami on Dec. 26, 2004, killed about 230,000 people across 11 countries.

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Rescuers race against time after killer quake

Search for survivors as thousands feared dead in Indonesia

By John Nedy, ReutersOctober 1, 2009

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People stand near a collapsed shopping mall after a major earthquake hit Padang, on Indonesia's Sumatra island, on Wednesday.
Photograph by: Muhammad Fitrah, Singgalang Newspaper, Reuters, Reuters

Thousands may have died in an earthquake that struck the city of Padang on Indonesia's Sumatra island, a minister said early today, with officials saying many victims remained buried under toppled buildings.

The 7.6-magnitude quake hit Padang on Wednesday afternoon, knocking over hundreds of buildings, but with communications patchy it was hard to determine the extent of the destruction and loss of life.

Heavy rain was also hampering rescue efforts and officials said power had been severed in the city.

Television footage showed people being pulled from the rubble.

A second magnitude 6.8 quake hit another part of Sumatra this morning, causing fresh panic, according to TV reports.

The second quake's epicentre-- inland and further to the southeast --was 154 kilometres northwest of Bengkulu, the U. S. Geological Survey said.

The area could not immediately be contacted.

Health Minister Siti Fadillah Supari told reporters at an airport in Jakarta -- before leaving for the stricken area--that the number of victims "could be more (than hundreds or thousands). I think it's more than thousands, if we look at how widespread the damage is . . . but we don't really know yet."

The death toll exceeded 450 this morning in the city of 900,000.

About 500 houses had collapsed, officials in the area said.

"The number of people who died in West Sumatra is 464 and they are from six districts," the government official in charge of handling death toll data, Tugyo Bisri, told Agence France-Presse.

Australian businesswoman Jane Liddon told Australian radio from Padang said the city centre was devastated.

"The big buildings are down. The concrete buildings are all down, the hospitals, the main markets, down and burned. A lot of people died in there. A lot of places are burning.

"Most of the damage is in the town centre in the big buildings. The little houses, there are a few damaged, but nothing dramatic."

TV footage showed piles of debris, collapsed houses and multi-storey buildings, with scores of crushed cars, after the earthquake, which caused widespread panic.

The main hospital had collapsed, roads were cut off by landslides and Metro Television said the roof of Padang airport had caved in.

The disaster is the latest in a spate of natural and man-made calamities to hit Indonesia, a sprawling archipelago of 226 million people.

Welfare Minister Aburizal Bakrie said on Wednesday damage could be similar to that caused by a 2006 quake in the central Java city of Yogyakarta that killed 5,000 people and damaged 150,000 homes.

The quake was felt around the region.

Highrise buildings rattled in Singapore, 440 kilometres to the northeast. Office buildings also shook in Malaysia's capital, Kuala Lumpur.

Padang, capital of Indonesia's West Sumatra province, sits on one of the world's most active fault lines along the "Ring of Fire" where the Indo-Australia plate grinds against the Eurasia plate to create regular tremors and sometimes quakes.

A 9.15 magnitude quake, its epicentre 600 km northwest of Padang, caused the 2004 tsunami that killed 230,000 people around in Indonesia and other countries across the Indian Ocean.

*****

Indonesian disaster leaves whole villages buried
Thousands still trapped in quake zone
Agence France-Presse
October 4, 2009 8:12 AM

Whole villages in Indonesia's quake zone were found obliterated by landslides Saturday, as rescuers searched desperately for up to 4,000 people believed to be still trapped in rubble.

The full extent of the damage from Wednesday's 7.6-magnitude earthquake emerged as attention turned to the hundreds of villages in the hills outside Padang, a devastated city of one million at the centre of rescue efforts.

AFP journalists travelling from the coastal city on Sumatra island to the surrounding mountains encountered dozens of crumbled houses on the steep roads, and then four villages buried entirely by landslides.

Search and rescue officers from the local government said that up to 400 people could have perished in the four hillside villages alone, including a wedding party of 30.

"The difficulty in this rescue operation is that the houses are buried under the soil as much as four metres deep," the officer named Topan told AFP. "So far we have been using our hands to dig."

One body was seen lying in a stream nearby, but he said he expected many more would be found. The 100-strong rescue team was unable to bring in heavy machinery because of the broken, narrow roads.

Another official said about 600 people were missing in landslides north of Padang. "We've only found three dead," said local health ministry crisis centre chief Jasmarizal.

Bob McKerrow, head of the Indonesia delegation of the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Society, said aerial photos showed the huge extent of the damage in the mountainous outlying regions.

He said hundreds of villages were in the disaster zone, and that the few he had visited had all reported deaths and serious injuries.

"Typically in every village, there's an old woman with a broken back, with a gash on her arm and she's not moving. That's why we're sending in helicopters with medical teams," he said.

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India floods leave millions homeless
Worst floods in decades kill 250 people
ReutersOctober 6, 2009

Floodwaters triggered by torrential rains have swamped millions of hectares of cropland in southern India.
Photograph by: Reuters, Reuters

About 2.5 million people crammed into temporary relief shelters after floods triggered by torrential rains tore down their homes in southern India over the last week and killed some 250 people, officials said on Monday.

Most of the deaths were reported from Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh state where rivers topped or breached their embankments. Some deaths occurred in the western Maharashtra state.

The flooding, described by officials as worst in many decades in south India, swamped millions of hectares of cropland, including sugarcane plantations, prompting worries of a fall in sugar output in Karnataka, the country's third-biggest producer.

Officials and relief agencies said more than five million people had been affected by the flooding and were now sheltered in over 1,200 temporary camps. They included about 2.5 million people from Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh who lost their homes.

"These are the worst floods in 100 years," said Dharmana Prasada Rao, Andhra Pradesh's minister for revenue and relief.

Sonia Gandhi, the head of India's ruling Congress party, and federal Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram inspected the devastation.

Relief officials used helicopters and boats to drop off rations and plastic sheets to hundreds of marooned villagers in the two states.

While rains had subsided in Karnataka, overflowing rivers and dams in Andhra Pradesh threatened to inundate Vijayawada, a city about a million people and an important trading centre.

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Deadly typhoon batters Japan

Agence France-Presse
October 8, 2009

A powerful typhoon slammed into Japan's main island early today, killing at least three people as violent winds damaged homes, uprooted trees and prompted fears of landslides.

Typhoon Melor, packing gusts of up to 198 kilometres an hour, was cutting a path across densely populated central Japan--the first tropical storm to make landfall since 2007, the weather agency said.

It brought heavy rain and strong winds that ripped roofs off houses, damaged walls and toppled trees, blocking roads and railways in central Japan.

The typhoon weakened slightly as it churned across the main island of Honshu, but "is still very dangerous," said Takeo Tanaka, a weather forecaster from the Meteorological Agency.

"Winds are violent and rain is torrential. You should also be on guard against mudslides," he said.

The agency warned that extensive areas in Japan, including Tokyo and the western industrial hub of Osaka, were at high risk of landslides as the typhoon moved along the archipelago.

Television footage showed trucks blown over and cars abandoned in the middle of flooded roads.

At least 22 people were injured by strong wind or heavy rain across the nation and thousands of people were moved to shelters, public broadcaster NHK reported.

Airlines cancelled some 330 flights, mostly on domestic routes, while railway services--including bullet trains --were temporarily suspended.

Japan has built extensive defences against floods and landslides, including storm surge barriers in coastal areas.

But typhoons can still be deadly.

Western Japan was battered in October 2004 by typhoon Tokage, which killed 95 people.

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Philippine landslides kill more than 120
Reuters
October 10, 2009

A week of relentless rains in the Philippines have put dozens of towns under water, with more than 120 people drowned.
Photograph by: Erik De Castro, Reuters, Reuters


Rescue workers dug out more than 120 bodies from under tonnes of mud and debris in northern Philippines on Friday as dozens of landslides buried villages after a week of relentless rains, officials said.

Scores of towns and villages in the lowlands were flooded as overflowing dams opened their sluice gates to release water. At least 122 were killed by landslides and 13 others have previously been killed by the rains, which started one week ago.

"As of this moment, we have already retrieved 122 bodies," Olive Luces, regional disaster head for the mountain regions, told television. Most of the deaths were in the vegetable-growing Benguet province, and in neighbouring Mountain Province.

"We really have no idea how many people were buried when the landslides happened because it was almost midnight and everybody was asleep," said Loreto Espineli, police chief of Benguet. "Our recovery efforts are slowed down by mud, heavy rains and lack of power."

The rains were brought by Typhoon Parma, which first hit the Philippines last Saturday and has since hovered around the northern part of the main island of Luzon, although it has weakened into a tropical depression.

Besides setting off landslides in the mountains, the rain has swollen rivers and reservoirs, forcing dams to release water and flooding areas downstream. Television images showed towns and farmland in the plains transformed into vast lakes, dotted with trees and buildings.

About 60 to 80 per cent of the coastal province of Pangasinan has been flooded and 30,000 people evacuated, said Lt.-Col. Ernesto Torres at the NDCC.

"Many of the roads are impassable, under six to eight feet of water and hundreds are marooned on the roofs of their towns," said Butch Velasco, a disaster official in Pangasinan. "The water level has reached the second storey of their homes."

Thousands spent the night on rooftops or scrambling to higher ground. Provincial Governor Amado Espino told local radio rain and strong currents were hampering rescue efforts.

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Typhoon hammers storm-weary Philippines

Mirinae leaves 11 people dead, worsens flooding

Agence France-PresseNovember 1, 2009
A man and his children wade through a flooded street triggered by typhoon Mirinae in Santa Cruz town.
Photograph by: Ted Aljibe, AFP-Getty Images,

Agence France-Presse

Typhoon Mirinae smashed through the Philippines overnight, killing 11 people and worsening floods in areas that were struggling to recover from recent deadly storms, officials said Saturday.

The typhoon, packing winds of up to 185 km/h, was the third major storm to hit the Philippines' main island of Luzon in just five weeks, with the previous two claiming more than 1,100 lives.

In Manila, areas that have been flooded since tropical storm Ketsana struck in late September were hit with more heavy rain, while residents in other districts were forced onto their roofs to escape rising waters.

"We need help because the waters have risen. We need rubber boats and choppers," Ariel Magcales, the mayor of Santa Cruz town on Manila's outskirts, said in a radio interview.

"Some people are on the roofs of their houses."

Military and police rescue boats worked to save people who were trapped by a flash flood, officials said.

One man was found dead and his one-year-old baby was missing after they were washed away while trying to cross an overflowing creek in a rural area on the outskirts of Manila, the military said. Three people were reported dead and five others were missing in Laguna province just south of Manila, the local disaster monitoring office said. Seven people died in the Bicol region, south of Manila, mostly from flash floods, local disaster monitoring officials said.

Another man was missing from a Manila slum district after his hut was washed away, while two others were missing in Batangas province south of Manila after their car fell into a river when a bridge collapsed, said civil defence spokesman Ernesto Torres.

Tropical storm Ketsana, which struck on Sept. 26, caused massive flooding in Manila.

Even before Mirinae hit, outlying districts that are home to more than a million people were expected to remain flooded into the new year, raising concern among health experts of an outbreak of deadly disease.

Navy and coast guard boats had been sent to Santa Cruz to rescue people, according to Torres, who said Defence Secretary Gilberto Teodoro was heading to the area to check on the extent of flooding and damage.

"The waters were really high. It was like a flash flood. It was waist deep in our area, but in other areas it went as high as the rooftops," said traffic director Marlon Albay.

The highway to the town was covered by knee-high waters, preventing smaller vehicles from reaching it and prompting the military to send huge trucks to help residents, according to an AFP photographer. Hundreds of residents in these areas were seen wading through the dirty waters.

Other towns in Laguna reported flooding, along with areas in the Bicol region further to the south, Torres said. However, more than 115,000 people had been evacuated from vulnerable regions before the typhoon hit, which likely prevented more deaths, Torres said.
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kmaherali
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Post by kmaherali »

Landslide disaster at Attabad - Hunza
By Noor Muhammad ⋅ January 7, 2010 ⋅ Post a comment
Filed Under attabad, Gilgit - Baltistan, Hunza, hunza landslide, landslide

The worst happened on January 4 when the already cracked mountain located above a beautiful, tiny, hamlet called Attabad slid off and buried most of the village, along with the people who had chosen to live in it, its cattle, houses, fields and orchards. The land mass that slid off has completely blocked the Hunza River gorge. More than two kilometers of the gorge through which the river once flowed is now filled with sand and rocks over, turning the river into an expanding lake, posing great risk to the low-lying villages of Gojal Valley.

More than two and a half kilometers of the Karakuram Highway has been completely destroyed, disconnecting Gojal Valley from the rest of Hunza. This blockade has severe implications for life in Gojal valley, as the supply of food, medicines and other essentials is not likely to take place till complete opening of the road. The government will have to seriously work on air – supply of such essentials of life.

Attabad village had been declared high risk zone by the government and people had been asked to relocate to safer places. Many people had relocated to safer places but others did not, and so the tragic loss of life.

The government is partly responsible for the loss of human lives because while it warned the people to move to safer places, it did not plan an alternative living space for the one hundred and six families that lived in Attabad. Those who moved out of the village were forced to stay with their relatives in nearby towns. The government’s plan to build a tent village to relocate the people failed because Tapeline villages are highly unfeasible for places where the temperature drops down to negative 18 degrees on the Celsius scale.

Those who criticize the people for not leaving the village, despite of the eminent threat, ignore the fact that moving out of a settled place, abandoning the organic links with the soil, is not an ordinary phenomenon. Subsistence level farming supports life in most of the villages of Hunza valley and if the fields and orchards are left unattended, the resultis great economic loss. What the government and other related agencies did not do was to provide an alternative system of economic opportunities, along with alternative, dignified, living space. It is unfortunate, scaling at the level of criminal negligence that the state relied only on giving warnings, instead of taking concrete steps to relocate and rehabilitate.

Thirteen dead bodies recovered from the debris of Attabad were laid to rest in Aliabad, Hunza, the other day, in presence of thousands of mourners. This could have been averted. The children, women and men killed in the tragedy, and those still missing, could have been saved, had the state shown more interest than it did. But the governments of Pakistan, which rule this region, have better things to do, like milking its poor citizens through taxes, so that millions of dollars are generated for the world tours of its president, prime minister, ministers, their relatives and the higher ups of civil and military establishment.

The entire process of rehabilitation and relocation would have taken lesser amount than the amount spent by the state on broadcasting and printing congratulatory or mourning messages, through state funds, to glorify this or that individual. But then, states have their own priorities!

The role of government after the disaster struck is even more pathetic. State machinery came to “rescue” the buried people on third day of the disaster. They should, better, have called it a dead body search mission. What is left to be rescued? The best thing the choppers could do was to transport the commuters who were stranded on both sides of the road blockade to their destinations.

Choppers, throwing dust in the air, don’t give comfort and relief. They reinforce the feelings of loss, of an opportunity bygone due to negligence. If the state could use so much of its resources after the tragedy, why not did it work seriously to rehabilitate residents of the village, while there was still time?
It is pertinent to note that the issue of cracks appearing in the mountain above Attabad, due to seismic activity, had been surveyed, researched, documented and reported two and a half years ago.

However, the state’s work has not ended, in any way. Announcing a few hundred thousand rupees as “compensation” for life of the dead and missing is not going to solve the issues. Far from it.

The state would, in the long run, have to generate resources to develop and execute a complete rehabilitation plan for the twelve hundred registered, alive, affectees of the Attabad village disaster. Moreover, the loss of property needs to be compensated to enable the survivors to start living again!

Immediately, however, the state needs to find a permanent solution to the threat produced by the conversion of Hunza River into a huge lake. Gojal is a valley under the siege of nature, having being closed at one end by a devastating landslide and on the other side, Khunjrav, by seasonal snowfall. Prolonging the siege would mean multiplying suffering of the valley’s twenty two thousand residents. It would not be far from reality to demand that Gojal valley be declared a calamity hit area and governed accordingly.

Towards the end, let me wholeheartedly appreciate the residents of Hunza valley, organized as they always are, for springing into action on the first day and working selflessly on the disaster site, since then. They have rescued many people, shifted the injured to hospitals, secured valuables buried under the debris and are untiringly working along with the NDMA personnel and other volunteers. The neighboring communities have also played inspiring role in the aftermath of the tragedy by contributing their energies and resources to provide relief to the survivors and victims.

The role of FOCUS Humanitarian Assistance, an affiliated institution of AKDN, is also highly appreciable because it trained, organized and equipped groups of local people to work in the times of disaster, enabling them to work on their own in a more organized manner. This is despite of the fact that the onus of governance and community empowerment primarily rests with the state and not the non – governmental organizations.

The writer is chief blogger of Pamir Times (www.pamirtimes.net)

http://pakistandesk.com/?p=3631
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Post by kmaherali »

There is a related video linked at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/14/world ... ?th&emc=th

January 14, 2010
Haiti Lies in Ruins; Grim Search for Untold Dead
By SIMON ROMERO

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Survivors strained desperately on Wednesday against the chunks of concrete that buried this city along with thousands of its residents, rich and poor, from shantytowns to the presidential palace, in the devastating earthquake that struck late Tuesday afternoon.

Calling the death toll “unimaginable” as he surveyed the wreckage, Haiti’s president, René Préval, said he had no idea where he would sleep. Schools, hospitals and a prison collapsed. Sixteen United Nations peacekeepers were killed and at least 140 United Nations workers were missing, including the chief of its mission, Hédi Annabi. The city’s archbishop, Msgr. Joseph Serge Miot, was feared dead.

And the poor who define this nation squatted in the streets, some hurt and bloody, many more without food and water, close to piles of covered corpses and rubble. Limbs protruded from disintegrated concrete, muffled cries emanated from deep inside the wrecks of buildings — many of them poorly constructed in the first place — as Haiti struggled to grasp the unknown toll from its worst earthquake in more than 200 years.

In the midst of the chaos, no one was able to offer an estimate of the number of people who had been killed or injured, though there was widespread concern that there were likely to be thousands of casualties.

“Please save my baby!” Jeudy Francia, a woman in her 20s, shrieked outside the St.-Esprit Hospital in the city. Her child, a girl about 4 years old, writhed in pain in the hospital’s chaotic courtyard, near where a handful of corpses lay under white blankets. “There is no one, nothing, no medicines, no explanations for why my daughter is going to die.”

Governments and aid agencies from Beijing to Grand Rapids began marshaling supplies and staffs to send here, though the obstacles proved frustrating just one day after the powerful 7.0-magnitude earthquake hit. Power and phone service were out. Flights were severely limited at Port-au-Prince’s main airport, telecommunications were barely functioning, operations at the port were shut down and most of the medical facilities had been severely damaged, if not leveled.

A Red Cross field team of officials from several nations had to spend Wednesday night in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic to gather its staff before taking the six-hour drive in the morning across the border to the earthquake zone.

“We were on the plane here with a couple of different agencies, and they all are having similar challenges of access,” Colin Chaperon, a field director for the American Red Cross, said in a telephone interview. “There is a wealth of resources out there, and everybody has the good will to go in and support the Haitian Red Cross.”

The quake struck just before 5 p.m. on Tuesday about 10 miles southwest of Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, ravaging the infrastructure of Haiti’s fragile government and destroying some of its most important cultural symbols.

“Parliament has collapsed,” Mr. Préval told The Miami Herald. “The tax office has collapsed. Schools have collapsed. Hospitals have collapsed. There are a lot of schools that have a lot of dead people in them.”

He added: “All of the hospitals are packed with people. It is a catastrophe.”

President Obama promised that Haiti would have the “unwavering support” of the United States.

Mr. Obama said that United States aid agencies were moving swiftly to get help to Haiti and that search-and-rescue teams were en route. He described the reports of destruction as “truly heart-wrenching,” made more cruel given Haiti’s long-troubled circumstances. Mr. Obama did not make a specific aid pledge, and administration officials said they were still trying to figure out what the nation needed. But he urged Americans to go to the White House’s Web site, www.whitehouse.gov, to find ways to donate money.

“This is a time when we are reminded of the common humanity that we all share,” Mr. Obama said, speaking in the morning in the White House diplomatic reception room with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. at his side.

Aid agencies said they would open their storehouses of food and water in Haiti, and the World Food Program was flying in nearly 100 tons of ready-to-eat meals and high-energy biscuits from El Salvador. The United Nations said it was freeing up $10 million in emergency relief money, the European Union pledged $4.4 million and groups like Doctors Without Borders were setting up clinics in tents and open-air triage centers to treat the injured.

Supplies began filtering in from the Dominican Republic as charter flights were restarted between Santo Domingo and Port-au-Prince.

Some aid groups with offices in Port-au-Prince were also busy searching for their own dead and missing.

Sixteen members of the United Nations peacekeeping force in Haiti were killed and as many as 100 other United Nations employees were missing after the collapse of the mission’s headquarters in the Christopher Hotel in the hills above Port-au-Prince.

Forty or more other United Nations employees were missing at a sprawling compound occupied by United Nations agencies. Ten additional employees had been in a villa nearby.

It was one of the deadliest single days for United Nations employees. The head of the group’s Haitian mission, Mr. Annabi, a Tunisian, and his deputy were among the missing, said Alain Le Roy, the United Nations peacekeeping chief.

Earlier Wednesday, the French foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, said in radio interviews that Mr. Annabi had been killed in the collapse.

The Brazilian Army, which has one of the largest peacekeeping presences in Haiti, said 11 of its soldiers had been killed in the quake and seven had been injured; seven more were unaccounted for.

During a driving tour of the capital on Wednesday, Bernice Robertson, an analyst with the International Crisis Group, said she saw at least 30 bodies, most covered with plastic bags or sheets. She also witnessed heroic recovery efforts. “There are people digging with their hands, searching for people in the rubble,” she said in a video interview via Skype. “There was unimaginable destruction.”

Paul McPhun, operations manager for Doctors Without Borders, described scenes of chaos.

When staff members tried to travel by car, “they were mobbed by crowds of people,” Mr. McPhun said. “They just want help, and anybody with a car is better off than they are.”

Contaminated drinking water is a longstanding and severe problem in Haiti, causing high rates of illness that put many people in the hospital. Providing sanitation and clean water is one of the top priorities for aid organizations.

More than 30 significant aftershocks of a 4.5 magnitude or higher rattled Haiti through Tuesday night and into early Wednesday, according to Amy Vaughan, a geophysicist with the United States Geological Survey. “We’ve seen a lot of shaking still happening,” she said.

Bob Poff, a Salvation Army official, described in a written account posted on the Salvation Army’s Web site how he had loaded injured victims — “older, scared, bleeding and terrified” — into the back of his truck and set off in search of help. In two hours, he managed to travel less than a mile, he said.

The account described how Mr. Poff and hundreds of neighbors spent Tuesday night outside in a playground. Every tremor sent ripples of fear through the survivors, providing “another reminder that we are not yet finished with this calamity,” he wrote.

He continued, “And when it comes, all of the people cry out and the children are terrified.”

Louise Ivers, the clinical director of the aid group Partners in Health, said in an e-mail message to her colleagues: “Port-au-Prince is devastated, lot of deaths. S O S. S O S ... Temporary field hospital by us at UNDP needs supplies, pain meds, bandages. Please help us.”

Photos from Haiti on Wednesday showed a hillside scraped nearly bare of its houses, which had tumbled into the ravine below.

Simon Romero reported from Port-au-Prince and Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Reporting was contributed by Marc Lacey and Elisabeth Malkin from Mexico City, Ginger Thompson and Brian Knowlton from Washington, Neil MacFarquhar, Denise Grady and Liz Robbins from New York, and Mery Galanternick from Rio de Janeiro.
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