Wednesday 17 October 2012

Pakistan floods kill 455, affect five million

ISLAMABAD: Monsoon floods in Pakistan have killed 455 people over the past five weeks and affected more than five million, according to the latest figures from the government's disaster relief agency.

Pakistan suffered devastating floods in the past two years, including the worst in its history in 2010 when catastrophic inundations across the country killed almost 1,800 people and affected 21 million.

As in the previous two years, most of those hit by the latest floods were in Sindh province, where the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) said more than three million have been affected, with 890,000 in Punjab and nearly a million in Baluchistan.

More than 260,000 people around the country have sought shelter in relief camps since early September, though this figure is down from the 290,000 reported by NDMA two and a half weeks ago.

The data published by NDMA on Monday said more than 1.1 million acres (450,000 hectares) of crops were affected by the floods.

Wednesday 17 October 2012

http://www.geo.tv/GeoDetail.aspx?ID=71843

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Poland summons Russian ambassador over plane crash victims' photos

Poland's Foreign Ministry summoned the Russian ambassador to Warsaw on Wednesday to protest against the release of photographs showing mangled bodies from a 2010 plane crash that killed the Polish president and 95 others.

Several Russian websites published photographs depicting what appeared to be the body of President Lech Kaczynski and partial remains of others who died when a government plane crashed in heavy fog in western Russia.

"Deputy Minister (Jerzy) Pomianowski told the Russian ambassador that Poland expects the Russian authorities to take firm measures, promptly launch an inquiry into the matter, and punish those responsible for the leaked images," the foreign ministry said in a statement released after the meeting with envoy Alexander Alexeev.

The appearance of the photographs is another embarrassment for Russian and Polish authorities after prosecutors in Warsaw last month said at least two families received and buried the wrong bodies.

That revelation has raised questions about how many other bodies were wrongly identified after the crash - an event which traumatised the nation and still complicates relations with Poland's neighbour Russia.

The foreign ministry said it acknowledged that Russia, which oversaw the investigation of the catastrophe and the identification of the victims, took steps to block some Russian websites that posted the photographs.

Reuters was able to access one of the websites with links to seven photographs, showing the site of the crash with scattered bodies, remains on a plastic canvas and the body of what appeared to be President Kaczynski on a metal gurney and a black coffin.

Russia's federal Investigative Committee, which answers only to President Vladimir Putin, said in a statement on Wednesday it was looking into the case and seeking to establish who was behind the publication. It added it was also aiming to withdraw the pictures from media.

Russian investigators have blamed the crew of the Polish government Tu-154 for the crash, while a Polish report pointed the finger at Russian ground controllers for allowing the jet to land in heavy fog at a small airport near Smolensk.

Wednesday 17 October 2012

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/10/17/uk-poland-russia-idUKBRE89G0SG20121017

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A Sticky Tragedy: The Boston Molasses Disaster

On January 15th, 1919, in what was probably the most bizarre disaster in United States' history, a storage tank burst on Boston's waterfront releasing two million gallons of molasses in a 15 ft-high, 160 ft-wide wave that raced through the city's north end at 35mph destroying everything it touched.

The wave killed young Pasquale Iantosca, smashing a railroad car into the ten-year-old. It pinned Walter Merrithew, a railroad clerk on the Commercial Street wharf, against the wall of a freight shed, his feet 3 ft off the floor. He hung there as he watched a horse drowning nearby. The wave broke steel girders of the Boston Elevated Railway, almost swept a train off its tracks, knocked buildings off their foundations, and toppled electrical poles, the wires hissing and sparking as they fell into the brown flood. The Boston Globe reported that people 'were picked up and hurled many feet'. Rivets popping from the tank scourged the neighbourhood like machine gun bullets, and a small boat was found slammed through a wooden fence like an artillery shell. By the time it passed, the wave had killed 21 people, injured 150, and caused damage worth $100 million in today's money. All caused by molasses.

At the time, molasses was a standard sweetener in the United States, used in cooking and in fermentation to make ethanol, which in turn could be made into a liquor used as an ingrethent in munitions manufacture, an aspect of the business that had been booming during the First World War.

At 529 Commercial Street in North Boston, the 2.3 million gallon Purity Distilling Co. storage tank was filled to capacity with molasses awaiting transfer to the company's distillery in Cambridge. The weather was mild for January, a relief from the cold snap that had been biting the area for several days. The 50 ft-high tank, which was 90 ft in diameter, dominated the neighbourhood where Commercial Street and the elevated railway tracks made 90-degree turns as they approached the harbour, a congested area densely populated with Italian immigrants and interspersed with pockets of Irish people, who would come to dominate the city. Eighteenth-century American patriot Paul Revere 's house and the home of colonial governor Thomas Hutchinson were in the neighbourhood, along with an area of blacksmith shops, a slaughterhouse, modest homes and the trolley company's freight sheds.

The tank itself was just over three years old. It was constructed of large curved steel plates, seven vertical rows of them overlapping horizontally and held together with rows of rivets, the whole set into a concrete base. Its construction had cost United States Industrial Alcohol (USIA), Purity's parent company, $30,000. It was perfectly located for USIA, just 200 ft from the harbour and ships that brought molasses from Cuba, and near the railroad tracks that would move the molasses from storage.

Yet the five-storey storage facility was never properly tested - by filling it with water - because a shipload of molasses was due only days after the completion of the tank in December 1915. From the beginning leaks had appeared. Streaks of molasses ran down the sides of the tank, and people living nearby filled up cans for home use. Children would scrape the leaks onto sticks to make molasses suckers. Neighbours and workmen had also reported ominous rumbling noises inside the structure.

With the war over, USIA needed to find other markets than the munitions industry. It found a solution in the looming possibility of Prohibition, which was to ban all sales of alcohol in the United States after a one-year grace period. Hoping to cash in on pre-Prohibition demand, USIA retooled its Cambridge plant for grain alcohol and produced as much as it could. On January 15th, 1919, the tank held 2.3 million gallons of molasses weighing an estimated 26 million pounds, almost one-and-a half times as much weight as the equivalent volume of seawater.

It was around 12.30pm, lunchtime for many workers, when the tank broke. Buildings of the nearby Northend Paving Yard were instantly reduced to kindling as the molasses cascaded out. The threestorey Engine 31 Fire House was torn from its foundations, trapping three firefighters who fought to keep their heads above the rising tide. A piece of the tank was blown into the elevated railway tracks, breaking girders and almost forcing a northbound train off its tracks. Seeing a brown mass surging towards him, Royal Albert Leeman, a brakeman for the Boston Elevated, stopped his train and ran up the tracks to stop a second train.

The entire waterfront area was levelled and rails from the overhead railway dangled like Christmas tinsel.

First on the scene were 116 sailors from the lightship USS Nantucket that was docked nearby. They were soon joined by Boston police, Red Cross workers and army personnel. When Suffolk County medical examiner George Magrath arrived, several bodies had already been pulled from the molasses. He said they looked 'as though covered in heavy oil skins ... eyes and ears, mouths and noses filled'. A makeshift hospital was set up at Haymarket Relief Station about half a mile from the waterfront, and volunteers removed molasses from victims' noses and mouths so they could breathe. Those already on duty were soon covered from head to foot with brown syrup and blood,' the Boston Post reported. 'The whole hospital reeked of molasses. It was on the floors, on the walls, the nurses were covered with it, even in their hair.' At the destroyed city stables, police shot injured horses trapped in the molasses.

The rescue continued for days. Bodies were often so covered by a brown glaze that they could not be seen. The body of truck driver Flamino Gallerini was taken from the water underneath the railroad freight houses eleven days after the tank burst, and almost four months after that a final body, that of Cesare Nicolo, was pulled from the water under the Commercial Wharf.

The clean-up eventually took some 87,000 man hours. Fire department pumps groaned as they removed thousands of gallons of molasses from cellars. Workers used chisels, brooms and saws to break up the hardening gunk. The harbour water, used to flush the streets clean, was brown until the summer. Meanwhile, rescue workers, sightseers and residents carried the gooey brown residue on their clothes and boots to other parts of the city, making streetcar seats, trolley platforms and public phones sticky. The whole city smelled of molasses.

In February, a month after the disaster, the Chief Judge of Boston Municipal Court, Wilfred Bolster, made public the results of his investigation into the tragedy and blamed the tank itself, saying evidence indicated it was 'wholly insufficient in point of structural strength to handle its load'. He also held USIA to be guilty of manslaughter. District Attorney Joseph Pellatier then presented evidence to a grand jury, which decided the tank had been built without a sufficient inspection of its plans and construction by the city. But the jury stopped short of charging the company with manslaughter.

Also in February 1919, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, CM. Stoffard, examined pieces of the shattered tank and stated that its shell had been too thin and was held together with too few rivets.

By August 1920, 119 separate lawsuits had been filed against USIA. At a preliminary hearing, the company's lawyers and various plaintiffs crammed into Boston's courthouse. In response to the complexity of the case and the number of lawyers and plaintiffs involved, Superior Court Judge Loranus Eaton Hitchcock consolidated the suits with one lead attorney for each side and appointed an 'auditor' to hear evidence and issue a report as to liability and damages. The cases could then move on to actual jury trials, he said, but it was hoped the auditor's conclusions would streamline that process.

Hugh W. Ogden, a Boston attorney who had reached the rank of colonel during the First World War, was appointed auditor. He had served as judge advocate of the 42nd Infantry Division, and had been awarded the Distinguished Service Medal. After the war he had served with the Army of Occupation in Germany as a legal adviser.

During the hearing before Ogden, which began on August 9th, 1920, USIA maintained the failure of the tank had been due to sabotage, probably by Italian anarchists, who were known to be active in the country and in Boston at the time. They claimed a telephone threat against the tank had even been received a year earlier, leaflets threatening violence had been found posted in the neighbourhood only days before the disaster, and a bomb had been discovered at another USIA facility in 1916.

The plaintiffs argued that the tank was the problem. They showed the material used to build it was thinner than that specified and that the man in charge of construction, Arthur P. Jell, had spent his career as a financial officer. He could not read the plans and had sought no engineering advice. The plaintiffs also showed the tank's construction had been rushed and it had not been properly tested.

By the time the hearing was over three years later, Ogden had listened to 921 witnesses. The transcript ran to almost 25,000 pages and lawyers had presented 1,584 exhibits. Ogden was to study the material for another year before issuing his conclusions. It was the longest and most expensive civil suit in Massachusetts's history.

Ogden gave his 51-page verdict on April 28th, 1925 and held the company liable for the disaster. He ruled that USIA's attorneys had given no evidence to support their theory about anarchists. Yet evidence had been supplied of the inferior material and construction of the tank. Ogden wrote: 'The general impression of the erection and maintenance of the tank is that of an urgent job ... I believe and find that the high primary stresses, the low factor of safety, and the secondary stresses, in combination, were responsible for the failure of the tank.'

Ogden recommended around $300,000 in damages, equivalent to around $30 million today, with about $6,000 going to the families of those killed, $25,000 to the City of Boston, and $42,000 to the Boston Elevated Railway Company. Faced with the negative ruling, lawyers for USIA quickly agreed an out-of-court settlement with slightly higher awards for the families of those killed and injured.

As a result of the tragedy, Boston city authorities began requiring that plans for all construction projects be signed off by an engineer or architect and filed with the city's building department, a practice that soon spread throughout America.

The tank was never rebuilt. The site where it stood is now a public park with bocce (Italian boules) courts and Little League baseball fields, slides and swings. All that remains of that terrible day 90 years ago is a small plaque at the entrance of the recreational complex. Yet local residents insist a faint smell lingers to this day. They say that on warm summer days the air is still tinged with the sweet, cloying scent of molasses.

Wednesday 17 October 2012

http://www.historytoday.com/chuck-lyons/sticky-tragedy-boston-molasses-disaster

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Latin American immigrant deaths soar from desert heat near Tucson

TUCSON — Dr. Bruce Parks unzips a white body bag on a steel gurney and gingerly lifts out a human skull and mandible, turning them over in his hands and examining the few teeth still in their sockets.

The body bag, coated with dust, also contains a broken pelvis, a femur and a few smaller bones found in the desert in June, along with a pair of white sneakers.

“These are people who are probably not going to be identified,” said Dr. Parks, the chief medical examiner for Pima County. There are eight other body bags crowded on the gurney.

The Pima County morgue is running out of space as the number of Latin American immigrants found dead in the deserts around Tucson has soared this year during a heat wave.

The rise in deaths comes as Arizona is embroiled in a bitter legal battle over a new law intended to discourage illegal immigrants from settling here by making it a state crime for them to live or seek work.

But the law has not kept the immigrants from trying to cross hundreds of miles of desert on foot in record-breaking heat. The bodies of 57 border crossers have been brought in during July so far, putting it on track to be the worst month for such deaths in the last five years.

Since the first of the year, more than 150 people suspected of being illegal immigrants have been found dead, well above the 107 discovered during the same period in each of the last two years. The sudden spike in deaths has overwhelmed investigators and pathologists at the Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office. Two weeks ago, Dr. Parks was forced to bring in a refrigerated truck to store the remains of two dozen people because the building’s two units were full.

“We can store about 200 full-sized individuals, but we have over 300 people here now, and most of those are border crossers,” Dr. Parks said. “We keep hoping we have seen the worst of this, of these migration deaths. Yet we still see a lot of remains.”

The increase in deaths has happened despite many signs that the number of immigrants crossing the border illegally has dropped in recent years. The number of people caught trying to sneak across the frontier without a visa has fallen in each of the last five years and stands at about half of the record 616,000 arrested in 2000.

Not only has the economic downturn in the United States eliminated many of the jobs that used to lure immigrants, human rights groups say, but also the federal government has stepped up efforts to stop the underground railroad of migrants, building mammoth fences in several border towns and flooding the region with hundreds of new Border Patrol agents equipped with high-tech surveillance tools.

These tougher enforcement measures have pushed smugglers and illegal immigrants to take their chances on isolated trails through the deserts and mountains of southern Arizona, where they must sometimes walk for three or four days before reaching a road.

“As we gain more control, the smugglers are taking people out to even more remote areas,” said Omar Candelaria, the special operations supervisor for the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector. “They have further to walk and they are less prepared for the journey, and they don’t make it.”

Mr. Candelaria said the surge in discoveries of bodies this year might also owe something to increased patrols. He noted that some of the remains found this year belong to people who died in previous years. But Dr. Parks said that could not account for the entire increase this year. Indeed, the majority of bodies brought in during July, Dr. Parks said, were dead less than a week.

Human rights groups say it is the government’s sustained crackdown on human smuggling that has led to more deaths.

“The more that you militarize the border, the more you push the migrant flows into more isolated and desolate areas, and people hurt or injured are just left behind,” said Kat Rodriguez, a spokeswoman for the Coalición de Derechos Humanos in Tucson.

At the medical examiner’s office in Tucson, Dr. Park’s team of five investigators, six pathologists and one forensic anthropologist face an enormous backlog of more than 150 unidentified remains, with one case going back as far as 1993.

Every day, they labor to match remains with descriptions provided by people who have called their office to report a missing relative, or with reports collected by human rights groups and by Mexican authorities.

Since 2000, Dr. Park’s office has handled more than 1,700 border-crossing cases, and officials here have managed to confirm the identities of about 1,050 of the remains.

Investigators sift through the things the dead carried for clues — Mexican voter registration cards, telephone numbers scrawled on scraps of paper, jewelry, rosaries, family photographs. Often there is precious little to go on.

“We had one gentleman who came in as bones, but around his wrist there was a bracelet from a Mexican Hospital that had his picture,” said David Valenzuela, one of the investigators.

If no documents are found, the task becomes harder. Many of the deceased immigrants were too poor to have visited doctors or dentists on a regular basis, so dental or medical records may not exist. Sometimes, a family photograph of the deceased smiling widely is all investigators have to document dental work.

On a recent morning, Bruce Anderson, the forensic anthropologist in the office, was examining the skeleton of an adolescent boy, whose age was somewhere between 14 and 17. His mummified remains were found on the Tohono O’odham Indian Reservation west of Tucson on July 15. The only lead to his identity was a missing front tooth and the neighboring teeth crowded together in the space.

Dr. Anderson called the Coalición de Derechos Humanos, who had a report of a 13-year-old who had been reported missing this year after crossing the border near Sonoyta, Mexico.

The charity immediately contacted the boy’s family to see if he had lost a permanent tooth. Dr. Anderson was still waiting for a reply.

The process takes time, and remains keep piling up. On Monday, Mr. Anderson faced a backlog of 14 new skeletons, in addition to the 40 active cases he is investigating, he said. “One person can’t keep up with this load,” he said.

The pathologists are also under strain. One day last week, Dr. Cynthia Porterfield did five autopsies, on remains of border crossers who died in the desert.

Dr. Porterfield was able to identify one: Jesse Palma Valenzuela, 30, who died on July 12. Three of his travel companions had tried to carry his body back to Mexico but became tired and abandoned him, wrapped in a blanket and positioned off the ground in a tree to keep animals from eating him. Then they crossed back into Mexico and notified the Border Patrol.

Agents discovered Mr. Valenzuela’s body on July 17, right where his friends said it would be, about two-and-a-half miles east of Lukeville, Ariz., not far from the border. Though decomposed, he was still recognizable.

“He’s got quite a few tattoos,” Dr. Porterfield said. “It is how the family ID’d him.”

Wednesday 17 October 2012

http://www.sanfranciscosentinel.com/?p=82521

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Arizona county's grim lost and found

TUCSON — She probably never imagined things would go so wrong — that she'd end up here, on a scuffed metal gurney in a coroner's office far from home.

Still, at age 22, she was old enough to know the dangers of stealing across the U.S. border from Mexico onto a lethal desert landscape, where she would have to take crazy chances amid the heat, cold and rattlesnakes to avoid capture by la migra, the U.S. Border Patrol.

Her body was found in early 2009 near a service road, a two-day walk from the border. She had died of exposure: Her system simply shut down in the high desert's frigid winter temperatures.

Within days, workers at the Pima County Medical Examiner's Office conducted an inventory of the left-behind fragments of her short life. Inside her backpack were family photos, a Spanish-English dictionary, lip gloss, four pens, pink-and-white socks and an ID from Oaxaca that described her as a preschool teacher.

Robin Reineke, a cultural anthropology graduate student at the University of Arizona, studies such possessions like pieces of a puzzle. Most important, she said, the belongings can help determine the crosser's identity. They also tell the story of a very human decision — what personal effects to take on a possibly fatal expedition.

In the young teacher's case, Reineke likened her to a teenager heading off to college, carrying the expectations of her entire family.

"Her possessions reminded me of exactly what I would carry to college," said the 30-year-old Reineke, coordinator of Pima County's Missing Migrant Project. "She probably picked out her favorite things because she wanted to look good. Her items, all of them, just screamed of hope."

Paid by federal and private grants, Reineke is helping to chronicle what is a mass human exodus across Arizona's remote Sonoran Desert, an unforgiving environment that delivers an almost daily whiff of death.

"People find the bodies under trees, near rocks, in the brush and in the open," said Gregory Hess, Pima County's chief medical examiner. "Often people die very close to the road they were trying to reach."

Since 2001, more than 2,035 bodies of illegal border crossers have been discovered in the desert south of Tucson. The highest toll comes during summer, when temperatures soar past 120 degrees and as many as 60 bodies a month are pulled from the sagebrush and sand. Some remains have been there for just days; others are scattered skeletons.

Dying of hyperthermia is excruciating: Victims become confused and delusional, Hess said. Border crossers might insist to companions they can't go on. Some tear off their clothing before collapsing. Often, the only items found are those they carried in their pockets.

Over 700 bodies remain unidentified. Reineke and others rummage through the possessions to try to match the dead with 1,300 missing persons reports that arrive from across Central America and Mexico through local consulate offices, from families and human rights groups.

In a row of orange lockers near Pima County's autopsy room, officials keep plastic sleeves labeled "Personal Effects" and a stark designation: "Doe, John" or "Doe, Jane."

Each sleeve reveals a story to the practiced eye: religious relics such as tattered rosaries and laminated cards bearing the names of patron saints, some that suggest a region where the person lived; photographs of wives, children and grandparents left behind; slips of papers carrying the names and numbers of people on the other side, such as a relative in Los Angeles, in one case identified only as "mi mama."

Jonathan Hollingsworth also has pored over the material, for his new book of photographs titled "Left Behind: Life and Death Along the U.S. Border." He looked for the telltale signs of an individual's story, or narrative, like the ticket stub that read "buena suerte," or good luck; the wristwatch, its face so faded the numerals are indecipherable; the tube of Old Spice body spray. He was most fascinated by a tiny yellow pencil stub, the type almost no one would keep, saying it suggested the desperation and poverty of the person who carried it.

One file contained a red comb caked with dirt and a pen that had exploded in the heat, the leftovers of a migrant who — presumably delusional from exposure — hanged himself using his shoelaces.

"Each sleeve represents a life lost — one that ended in a really horrific way," he said. "They put a face on something that transcends politics or national identity."

For Reineke, the sleeves are crucial in identifying bodies often so mummified that fingerprints are impossible to obtain. Because the journey is illegal, ID cards are often forged. But some items bring matches, like a ring or dress a mother might recall buying her daughter as a gift. Others are cultural artifacts: A migrant from Guatemala, for example, might use a cheat sheet to study Mexican slang as a way to go undetected there. One body carried a paper with a sentence handwritten three times: "Soy de Tabasco" — I am from Tabasco.

Other possessions suggest loss. One man carried a small backpack bearing the "Cars" movie logo, rigged with elongated straps, suggesting he may have carried his child's bag as a memento. Inside, investigators found several crayons.

A wrinkled letter in another crosser's pocket was adorned by a child's version of a pony. "Dear Papa," it began. "Don't forget me. I'll miss you. I'll think of you every day." Another note drove home the personal price of the trek. "My Dear," it read in part. "I know I'll never see you again, but I'll cherish our memories together. I only want the best for you."

Wednesday 17 October 2012

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-migrant-possessions-20121017,0,1313119.story

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Russian medic rejects blame for Smolensk air disaster identity mix-ups

The Russian doctor in charge of identifications of victims of the 2010 Smolensk air disaster has said that his team cannot be held responsible for mix-ups in the burials of victims in Poland.

“I can only say that absolutely everyone received what they identified,” Dr Viktor Kolkutin told the Polish edition of Newsweek.

“What happened after the coffins departed from Moscow to Poland we do not know,” he said.

“We did not lead the coffins to the graves where they were laid to rest,” he said.

Dr Kolkutin's remarks come after exhumations and second autopsies proved last month that the late Solidarity activist Anna Walentynowicz was buried in the wrong grave (unofficially it has been confirmed that the coffin was confused with that of another victim, Teresa Walewska-Przyjalkowska.)

Dr Kolkutin stressed that the families of the victims were in “shock”, and implied that the Russian medics were not expecting relatives to linger long in the identification process.

“If we are talking about the identification process itself, no one expected heroic acts from the Poles,” he underlined.

However, Kolkutin said that relatives were accompanied by psychologists who made sure that documents were only signed when “they were completely sure that they had identified their loved ones.”

Following a second autopsy last month, Janusz Walentynowicz, son of Anna Walentynowicz, said that “the person on whom the autopsy was conducted today (19 September) is not the person I recognised in Moscow as my mother, it was someone completely different.”

Some 96 people died in the crash near Smolensk, taking in the entire delegation of President Lech Kaczynski.

Dr Kolkutin said that “over two thirds” of the victims were recognisable without great difficulty. In some instances, attempts were made to reconstruct faces, so as the “lessen the shock” felt by relatives.

The Military Prosecutor's Office in Warsaw has already confirmed that four other exhumations are due to take place, owing to possible mistakes, but that the names will remain confidential, owing to requests for privacy from the families concerned.

Anna Walentynowicz was one of the iconic figures of the Solidarity Movement. It was her firing from the former Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk – on account of her participation in an illegal trade union – that prompted the now legendary strike led by Lech Walesa in August 1980.

Wednesday 17 October 2012

http://www.thenews.pl/1/10/Artykul/115423,Russian-medic-rejects-blame-for-Smolensk-air-disaster-identity-mixups

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Conference Alert: Disaster Management Conference, Brisbane 2013

Australia & New Zealand Disaster and Emergency Management Conference, Brisbane, Mercure hotel 29-31 May 2013

The Australian & New Zealand Disaster and Emergency Management Conference will provide a forum to examine the issues surrounding natural and man-made hazards. It is a joint initiative of the Australian Institute of Emergency Services (Queensland Division) the Australian and New Zealand Mental Health Association Inc and the Association for Sustainability in Business Inc. Each association is a Non-Government, Not for Profit, member based organisation.

The program format will consist of keynote addresses, concurrent sessions and workshops.

The 2013 conference will be held over three days, 29th – 31st May in Brisbane at the Mercure Brisbane.

Website: http://anzdmc.com.au/

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16 killed in bus-truck collision in Madhya Pradesh

Sixteen people were killed and 24 others injured on Tuesday when their bus collided head-on with a truck near Naugaon Navodaya Vidyalaya, about 20 kms from Madhya Pradesh's Chhatarpur city.

The bus was on its way to Chhatarpur from Harpalpur when it dashed with a Naugaon-bound truck loaded with cement around 7 am, police said.

The accident claimed 12 lives on the spot while four others succumbed to injuries on way to a nearby hospital.

Chhattarpur Collector Rajesh Bahuguna and other officials reached the spot soon after the mishap.

13 persons, eight in serious condition, were admitted in the Chhatarpur district hospital while the remaining are undergoing treatment at Nougaon civil hospital, police said.

The district collector has announced an ex-gratia of Rs one lakh each to the deceased person and Rs 10,000 each to the injured passengers.

Two of the bodies are yet to be identified, police said.

Wednesday 17 October 2012

http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/16-killed-in-bustruck-collision-in-mp/article4001747.ece

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IFRC: World Disasters Report 2012

According to the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED), 336 natural disasters and 234 technological disasters were reported worldwide in 2011.The number of natural disasters is the lowest of the decade and is 15 per cent below its decade’s average.

The number of technological disasters (234) is the second lowest of the decade, after 2009, far below the numbers reported during the first five years of the decade. The number of deaths caused by natural disasters (31,105) is the fourth lowest of the decade, much lower than the peaks of 2004 (242,010 deaths), 2008 (235,272) and 2010 (297,730). The deadliest natural disaster was the earthquake and subsequent tsunami in Japan in March, which killed 19,846 people. The number of deaths is much lower than those caused by the Indian Ocean tsunami in December 2004 (226,408 deaths) and the earthquake of January 2010 in Haiti (222,570 deaths). Tropical Storm Washi (Sendong), which killed 1,439 people in December in the Philippines, is the second deadliest natural disaster of 2011.

The technological disaster that resulted in the highest number of deaths (203) was the sinking of a ferry in September in Tanzania. A total of 2,085 people died in 45 shipwrecks in 2011, accounting for 50 per cent of all deaths from transport accidents and almost one-third of all technological disasters. Among industrial accidents, an oil pipeline explosion caused 120 deaths in Kenya and the explosion of a fuel reserve led to the deaths of 100 people in Libya.

The number of people reported affected by natural disasters (209 million) is the fourth lowest of the decade, but is much higher than the minimum of 2006 (147 million). In 2011, almost 70 per cent of people reported affected were victims of floods. The most severe occurred in June and September in China (68 and 20 million, respectively). Fifteen other floods affected 1 to 9 million people for a total of 45 million. One hailstorm affected 22 million people in April in China and eight other storms, all in Asia, affected 1 to 3 million people for a total of 14 million. Seven droughts, of which five were in Africa, affected 1 to 4 million people for a total of 14 million. By comparison, the total number of people affected by earthquakes and tsunami (1.5 million) is the second lowest of the decade. The earthquake which affected the highest number of people (575,000) occurred in India in September. The earthquake and tsunami in Japan, in March, affected 369,000 people and the February earthquake in New Zealand affected 300,000 people.

Technological disasters affect, proportionally, very few people. Among the five technological disasters affecting the most people were four fires in slums. The two most severe occurred in the Philippines, affecting 20,000 and 10,000 people, and the two others in Kenya affecting 9,000 and 6,000 people. The explosion of an ammunition depot in Tanzania affected 1,500 people.

Wednesday 17 October 2012

Report downlaodable from: http://www.ifrc.org/PageFiles/99703/1216800-WDR%202012-EN-LR.pdf

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