Wednesday 10 October 2012

Lessons learned: Post-accident crisis management is almost non-existent in Nepal

The Sita Air crash near the airport on 28 September happened exactly one year after the Buddha Air crash at Kot Danda, and barely six months after an Agni Air plane hit a mountainside in Jomsom.

In the past six years alone, 114 people have been killed in airline accidents in Nepal, making our aviation safety record as bad as countries that are notoriously dangerous for flying like the Democratic Republic of Congo and Nigeria. The reasons are ineffective regulation, lack of a maintenance culture, poor crew training, and lax enforcement of procedures for bad weather flying.

Nepal's rugged terrain makes it one of the most challenging places to fly in the world, but monsoon clouds, inadequate navigation facilities, and the poor condition of airports make it even more treacherous. In addition, aviation in Nepal is governed by the same culture of carelessness, fatalism, and poor discipline that we see exhibited on the roads and highways every day.

We never learnt our lessons from past accidents and the recommendations of the inquiry reports after previous disasters were never implemented, so it is likely that the tragic deaths of those who perished last Friday on the soggy banks of the Manohara River will also have been in vain.

Four hours later, police had cordoned off the area but in the process tampered with the evidence air crash investigators would need.

More than 90 per cent of the crashes in Nepal have been caused by pilot error, usually by flying into a mountain in poor visibility. However, the Sita Air crash seems to have been the first known fatal crash caused by a bird strike in Nepal.

Post-accident crisis management has been almost non-existent in Nepal. After the Buddha Air crash last year, thousands of gawkers flocked to the impact site trampling on evidence, picking up souvenirs, and obstructing rescue and police vehicles. Eye-witnesses saw police themselves pocketing valuables from the bodies and the wreckage.

To be sure, Kot Danda villagers who were first on the scene helped pull out a wounded passenger from the plane and rushed him to hospital, where he died. But the lack of crowd control after an accident hampered rescue. People were at the scene of the Sita Air crash last week within minutes, and had they tried to get the passengers out they could have been killed as well because the plane caught fire and exploded.

However, thousands of people had gathered to look at the plane on fire, some wading across the river to get closer. The sheer mass of onlookers obstructed fire and rescue vehicles, and the first police on the scene did not cordon off the area with the standard 50-m no-go radius. Traffic police should have been keeping the road clear for rescue vehicles, but became onlookers themselves. Fire trucks had to project foam on the burning plane from 50m away. The head of the Civil Aviation Authority was busy giving live tv interviews, with the burning wreckage serving as backdrop, instead of coordinating rescue and protecting the integrity of the crash site for investigators.

The disaster of the plane crash was followed by the disaster of ineffective crisis management. This calls for a serious review of police, fire and rescue training, and putting a clear chain of command in place. During the Buddha Air crash, the army had a ground team that coordinated effectively with rescue helicopters to clear a helipad at the edge of the forest. Body bags, gloves, and stretchers were all ready. If someone has to take charge of rescue, the army seems to be best equipped to do so.

The Sita Air crash also brings up the problem of bird activity on and above the runway. Kathmandu airport is now surrounded by garbage-filled urban sprawl, the nearby Manohara and Bagmati rivers are dumping grounds for animal carcasses. The airport management is supposed to have bird control officers, where were they on Friday morning?

There was serious mismanagement of a crisis situation last week, it showed there has been virtually no training and simulation for response that is rapid, coordinated, and multi-tasked. If this is what happens after the crash of a small plane, imagine the chaos and confusion after a bigger disaster, or a mega earthquake in Kathmandu.

Wednesday 10 October 2012

http://www.nepalitimes.com/issue/2012/10/10/Nation/19696#.UHVJIT3cz3U

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Japanese workers begin search for tsunami bodies in Okawa 19 months later

Okawa, an area to the south of the Kitakami river, which flooded despite extensive embankments, was left beneath the level of the sea due to the massive surface movements caused by the March 11, 2011 earthquake.

It has taken engineers 19 months to build new protective dykes and pump the seawater out of an area covering 106 hectares.

In total, 15,870 people have been confirmed dead in north-east Japan, while a further 2,814 are still listed as missing. Of the missing, 23 were swept away from this district of the city of Ishinomaki, including four children and one teacher from the school.

The remains of 74 pupils at the school have been identified.

Teams made up of police officers, employees of the city board of education and other volunteers began the search on Monday, sifting through the mud and debris with hand tools while heavy machinery excavated larger sections.

"We will search without overlooking a single bone fragment and return the bodies to their families as soon as possible," Akihiko Sato, a local police officer, told Kyodo News.

Officials said the search will continue until March next year, which will see the second anniversary of the disaster.

On Saturday, the Emperor and Empress are scheduled to visit residents of a village that sits astride the 12.4 miles exclusion zone around the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

The Imperial couple will meet residents of the village of Kawauchi who are living in temporary housing units and see progress in efforts to decontaminate the area of radiation.

Of the village's 3,000 original residents, around 500 have returned after being evacuated shortly after the Fukushima reactors released huge amounts of radiation into the surrounding countryside.

Wednesday 10 October 2012

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/9597740/Japanese-workers-begin-search-for-tsunami-bodies-in-Okawa-19-months-later.html

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Northeast Nigeria hospital overwhelmed by dead bodies

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria - Nigerian officials dumped dozens of corpses in front of a hospital in northeast Nigeria after soldiers opened fire and killed more than 30 civilians. The hospital, overwhelmed by the scale of the violence, had to turn away the dead as its morgue had no more room.

The killings Monday come as besieged, underpaid and enraged soldiers remain targets of guerrilla attacks by the extremist Islamist sect, Boko Haram, which holds this city in the grip of bloody violence.

That anger among the enlisted men and officers stationed throughout Nigeria's northeast has seen civilians harassed, arrested, tortured and even killed — raising concerns that Monday's attack may just be the tip of killings committed by security forces, human rights activists warn.

"This is just the latest in a number of incidents in Maiduguri where soldiers have allegedly committed serious abuses, including extrajudicial killings of community members following Boko Harm attacks," said Eric Guttschuss, who studies Nigeria for Human Rights Watch.

A bombing Monday morning by suspected members of Boko Haram that a soldier said killed a lieutenant sparked the violent retaliation. The troops opened fire with assault rifles and heavy machine-guns mounted on armoured personnel carriers on a busy street in Maiduguri, near the local headquarters of the Nigerian Union of Journalists.

An Associated Press journalist saw more than 50 shops and homes burned in the attacks Monday, with the bodies of civilians lying alongside the streets. The dead carried no weapons, nor any sign they belonged to the sect or posed a threat to the soldiers.

Footage aired Tuesday afternoon by the state-run Nigerian Television Authority showed people trying to splash water on their burning homes after the attack, while others fearfully raised their hands above their heads as a government motorcade sped past.

On Tuesday, a worker at Maiduguri General Hospital told the AP that officials collected 32 corpses after the attack. The hospital turned away other bodies as its morgue was full, the worker said, with bodies of the dead on the floors for hours. The worker spoke on condition of anonymity, out of fear of angering soldiers.

The worker said the remaining bodies were taken to the nearby Umaru Shehu Ultra-Modern Hospital. Officials there declined to talk Tuesday to an AP journalist.

In statements Tuesday, military spokesman Lt. Col. Sagir Musa denied that soldiers killed civilians and blamed the resulting fires and damage that went on for blocks on the single bomb that targeted soldiers earlier that morning. He did not explain how the dozens of civilians were shot dead.

While widely considered to have one of the strongest militaries in Africa, Nigeria's armed forces have been accused of killing civilians in the past — including after abandoning military rule for an uneasy democracy. In 1999, ethnic Ijaw activists claimed more than 200 civilians were killed by the military in Odi in Bayelsa state. In 2001, soldiers burned down seven villages in Benue state and killed at least 150 civilians in the midst of ethnic violence there.

Another military raid in Nigeria's oil-rich Delta state against militants there killed 100 people, activists said, though soldiers blocked AP journalists from reaching the area at the time.

Lucy Freeman, who studies Nigeria for Amnesty International, said her advocacy group remained concerned about the killings Monday in Maiduguri and called for an independent investigation.

"To execute a person who is already in the custody of security forces or otherwise under their control ... (can) constitute a crime under international law for which those responsible must be brought to justice," Freeman said Tuesday.

The killing of civilians comes as Boko Haram continues its bloody guerrilla campaign against Nigeria's weak central government. The sect, whose name means "Western education is sacrilege" in the Hausa language of Nigeria's north, is blamed for killing more than 690 people in drive-by killings and bombings this year alone, according to an AP count. The sect has demanded the release of all its captive members and has called for strict Shariah law to be implemented across the entire country.

The sect has killed both Christians and Muslims in their attacks, as well as soldiers and security forces. Nigeria's military has claimed it has killed a number of the sect's senior leadership in recent days, including operational commanders and the sect's spokesman, who used the nom de guerre Abul Qaqa. However, the sect's leader, Abubakar Shekau, has eluded capture and continues to make Internet videos that taunt and threaten further violence against Nigerian government officials and security forces.

For now, activists worry that while Boko Haram remains a shadowy and hidden group, soldiers will take their rage out on civilians nearby. And as Nigeria's military continues to publish body counts following its operations, some fear those tallies may include innocent bystanders caught up in the violence simply by living nearby.

Meanwhile, the country's leaders remain apparently unable to halt the mounting casualties, including the killings of more than 20 university students recently in the nation's northeast.

Nigeria's leaders "barricade themselves behind tall, reinforced concrete fences and bulletproof cars. They move with a fearsome retinue of guards, soldiers and police," columnist Okey Ndibe wrote in Tuesday's edition of The Daily Sun newspaper. "They don't realize that their so-called security is a lie, a huge illusion. They don't reckon that the monster abroad in the land is growing stronger and fiercer by the day, and will soon lay siege on their doors."

Wednesday 10 October 2012

Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Northeast+Nigeria+hospital+overwhelmed+dead+bodies+after+soldiers/7362862/story.html#ixzz28t93jUpf

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Floods kill seven in Russia's Dagestan region

Heavy rains caused flooding that killed seven people in the southern Russian province of Dagestan on Wednesday, the Emergency Situations Ministry said.

About 320 homes in the Caspian Sea coastal city of Derbent close to the Caucasus Mountains were flooded and seven bodies were found, the ministry said.

As a result of heavy rainfall eight streets in the city filled with mud and a state of emergency was declared.

In total there were 1,120 people in the area of flooding, including 270 children, according to the Emergency Situations Ministry.

357 rescue workers and emergency personnel people and 60 rescue vehicles are involved in rescue operations. Two Emergency Situations Ministry aircraft have been dispatched to the scene.

A flash flood killed 171 people in August in the Caucasus in the Krasnodar region town of Krymsk, where residents said they had no warning of the danger.

President Vladimir Putin visited the area and several local officials were sacked and detained. In Derbent, warnings were issued from loudspeakers at mosques and mounted on cars dispatched around the city in the mostly Muslim province, Ekho Moskvy radio reported.

Wednesday 10 October 2012

http://www.dnaindia.com/world/report_floods-kill-seven-in-russia-s-dagestan-region_1751016

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