Tuesday 14 January 2014

Survivors mark second anniversary of Costa Concordia disaster


Bells and horns rang out on the Italian Island of Giglio on Monday evening to mark the exact moment when the Costa Concordia sank two years ago.

Survivors and relatives of the ship’s victims had gathered to commemorate the disaster with a candle-lit procession.

In all, 32 people died in the tragedy when the cruise liner hit rocks off the Tuscan coast and capsized.

The Concordia’s captain Francesco Schettino is still on trial accused of manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning ship.

Earlier during the day survivors marked the two year anniversary by laying a wreath into the sea next to the wrecked vessel.

Recently hauled upright in a special salvage operation, the Concordia is due to be towed away later this year.

Tuesday 14 January 2014

http://www.euronews.com/2014/01/13/survivors-mark-second-anniversary-of-costa-concordia-disaster/

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Sniffer dogs sought to find bodies in Tacloban City


The task force on cadaver collection has requested the US government to send K-9 detection dogs to this city as authorities continued to struggle in retrieving the dead more than two months after the onslaught of typhoon Yolanda (international name: Haiyan).

The request, which was endorsed by the Regional Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council, was sent to the US Embassy in Manila on Monday.

Sr. Supt. Pablito Cordeta, task force head and Bureau of Fire Protection (BFP) regional director, said 11 more decomposing bodies were retrieved in Tacloban from Jan. 8 to 11, bringing the death toll in this city alone to 2,540.

The Eastern Visayas Regional Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council has recorded 5,803 casualties as of Jan. 13 in the region. Some 1,729 remain missing. “Presently, we just depend on visuals in our retrieval operation. We badly need the expertise of sniffing dogs especially that they are the same teams that responded to the World Trade Center bombing in the US,” Mr. Cordeta said.

Humanitarian workers from Holland, South Korea and New York had brought trained dogs with them, but they all left Tacloban on Nov. 30.

“With the help of sniffing dogs, we’re able to recover about a thousand bodies in a week. The cadaver collection has slowed down when they left. We are hoping the US government will favorably respond to our request,” Mr. Cordeta added.

The team has been focusing their retrieval operation in the coastal villages of the city, where debris from the Nov. 8 typhoon is still being cleared. After a body is retrieved, the Philippine National Police (PNP) Scene of the Crime Operatives (SOCO) examines it for documentation before transporting it to a mass grave site in Suhi village, where it is examined by the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI). The task force is composed of 20 members from the BFP and PNP.

Tuesday 14 January 2014

http://www.bworldonline.com/content.php?section=Nation&title=Sniffer-dogs-sought-to-find-bodies-in-Tacloban-City&id=81985

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At least 200 drown in South Sudan ferry accident while fleeing fighting


At least 200 South Sudanese civilians have drowned in a ferry accident on the White Nile river while fleeing fighting in the city of Malakal, an army spokesman said.

"The reports we have are of between 200 to 300 people, including women and children. The boat was overloaded," army spokesman Philip Aguer said. "They all drowned. They were fleeing the fighting that broke out again in Malakal."

The disaster is one of the worst single incidents to have been reported from the war-torn country, which has been wracked by conflict for a month following a clash between rival army units loyal to either President Salva Kiir or his former vice-president Riek Machar.

According to the United Nations, 400,000 civilians have fled their homes over the past month, many of them escaping a wave of ethnic violence. Up to 10,000 people are believed to have been killed in the fighting, aid sources and analysts say.

The army spokesman meanwhile reported that battles were raging in several areas of the country, signalling that the government's recapture of Bentiu, another key oil city in the north, had failed to deal a knock-out blow to the rebels.

Heavy fighting was reported in Malakal, state capital of oil-producing Upper Nile state, as rebel forces staged a fresh attack to seize the town, which has already changed hands twice since the conflict began.

"There is fighting anew in and around Malakal," United Nations aid chief for South Sudan Toby Lanzer said, adding that the UN peacekeeping base had been swamped with almost double the number of people seeking shelter, rising from 10,000 to 19,000.

An AFP photographer who was in Malakal on Sunday said that the town was calm but that the remaining residents were huddled in the town centre, too scared to return to their looted homes.

The army reported heavy fighting south of Bor, as the government sought to retake the town from rebels.

Tuesday 14 January 2014

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/bodies-litter-south-sudan-oil-town-talks-resume-21512645

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'Yolanda' death toll rises to 6,201


The official death toll from super typhoon "Yolanda" (international name Haiyan) is now at 6,201, the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC) said.

In its latest update today, January 14, the NDRRMC said 11 more were confirmed dead in the worst-hit city of Tacloban in Leyte.

Majority of the fatalities were from Eastern Visayas at 5,803 (5,308 in Leyte; 265 in Eastern Samar; 224 in Samar; and 6 in Biliran).

In Tacloban, 2,542 bodies remain unidentified. The NDRRMC said 1,785 people remain missing while 28,626 others were injured when Yolanda struck the country last November 8, 2013.

Tuesday 14 January 2014

http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/nation/regions/01/14/14/yolanda-death-toll-rises-6201

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The Comfort of Closure: Restoring family links


Everyday, Antonio Claridad, 72, checks the lists and goes through the names, one by one. Today might be the day that he will get word about his cousin, Reming Natulya.

“They said she died,” said Claridad in Tagalog, adding that Natulya and her family lived some 200 meters away from the shoreline of San Jose, a coastal village in Tacloban. San Jose was one of those towns totally destroyed by Super Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan).

The last time he saw her was sometime last September during the feast of San Isidro. “Her daughter who lives in Los Angeles is the one asking me to keep looking for her. She heard somehow that her mother was among the dead. She wants to come home to bury her mother.”

“Kung patay na nga si Reming,” he said slowly, looking away. “Tanggap na namin. Gusto lang sana naming malaman.” (If Reming is dead, we can accept that. We just want to know.)

Looking for the missing

Everyday, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) Restoring Family Links delegate Elaine Chan and the Philippine Red Cross (PRC) team go through tracing requests and head off to the field and visit the communities in the Yolanda-affected areas that are the last known address of the missing. Their leads are name, age, birthday and last known address of the missing person.

“When we reach the village, the first person we usually look for is the barangay captain (community chief). He can tell us if he knows the family members or people who might know the missing,” said Chan.

They use basic rudimentary methods which still work best in the field – shouting announcements over a megaphone, knocking from door-to-door, and asking those who have survived if they know anything about the person missing.

Leads may turn up, bits of information may lead them to another place, another village; perhaps, another step closer to reuniting the missing with their families. When they get lucky, the teams are able to locate the missing person or a family member and then try to immediately call the enquirer.

Restoring family links

The ICRC’s work to restore family links goes back to 1870, when it obtained lists of French prisoners held by German forces, and could then reassure the families. Since then, tracing people separated by conflict and disaster has become a major part of the ICRC’s protection work. It involves the international Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement in a global network.

Through the years, SMS messaging, social media and applications like Google’s Person Finder have provided a platform for quick feedback and mass transmission of information to people.

“People can file a missing person report on our restoring family links website,” explained Chan. The website offers two primary services: registration and search.

You can register people with whom you have lost contact, register your own name so that other people can see that you are alive (I’m alive list) and search through the list of missing persons and people who have reported that they are alive. Copies of these lists are also posted in public buildings, evacuation centers and radio stations in the affected areas as Internet connection is still an issue.

First Responder Radio, which set up emergency communications in Tacloban, reads portions of the list during live broadcast. At the PRC Welfare Desk, stationed outside public buildings (usually the city or municipal hall), a missing persons report may also be filed.

“Sometimes, a search turns out successful. A missing family member is found and with the contact number provided by the one who initiated the search, we connect them through a satellite phone.”

When a search turns up with nothing, the Tracing Team will check records in the evacuation centers, and check injury and death lists in hospitals.

Yolanda’s challenge

Typhoon Yolanda was a particularly challenging case because of the large number of queries that came in from all over the world. At the onset of the typhoon, the PRC website received more than 35,000 requests and inquiries.

Later, some survivors left by air onboard C130s, logging only their names in record books. Without a minimum of identification details like full name, age, date of birth and last known address, the Red Cross Teams cannot proceed with tracing.

Now, two months after Yolanda, with communication and mobile networks partially restored, some people have already been reunited with their families, some have found their dead and buried them.

The ICRC and the PRC have on record some 350 active missing persons cases. However, the reality remains that because of the nature of the disaster and the challenges related to the management of dead bodies – a typhoon where bodies were washed away – finding and identifying all the dead bodies will not be possible.

Without a body to positively identify, the person is considered still missing. “If we cannot identify the dead bodies, we also cannot locate the missing person,” PRC social services officer Beverly Kalingag said.

Two months after, the search goes on for the Red Cross Tracing Team and others like Claridad.

Many like Claridad continue to hope against the odds that their relatives are merely lost but still alive, others simply want a body to bury. They long to say good-bye and lay their loved ones to rest. Everyday they look, everyday they try to quell the nagging hope, the anguish of wondering what if, and hope to finally attain the comfort of closure.

Tuesday 14 January 2014

http://www.rappler.com/move-ph/issues/disasters/recovery/47857-comfort-closure-restoring-links

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Death toll from Philippine landslides, floods up to 22


Twenty-two people have been killed and nearly 200,000 others evacuated as floods and landslides hit a southern Philippine region still recovering from a deadly 2012 typhoon, the government said Tuesday.

Torrential rain struck the eastern section of Mindanao island at the weekend, unleashing a fresh round of misery for survivors of Typhoon Bopha, civil defence officials said.

"Major rivers overflowed, causing people to drown in areas still recovering from Typhoon Pablo," local civil defence operations officer Franz Irag told AFP, using the local designation for Typhoon Bopha, which struck the region in December 2012.

"Many of the victims had not managed to rebuild and were staying in temporary shelters when they were hit by fresh flooding," Irag said.

Weekend floods and landslides killed eight people in Davao Oriental province and five in Compostela Valley, Irag said.

Additionally, six were buried in a landslide on the small southern island of Dinagat while three other people drowned in nearby areas, John Lenwayan, a civil defence official for the region, told AFP by telephone.

The bad weather also forced more than 194,000 people to flee their homes, Irag and Lenwayan said.

The two officials said the rains started abating on Monday and some of those who took refuge in government-run shelters were returning to their homes.

The Mindanao floods occurred amid an international rehabilitation effort for areas destroyed by Super Typhoon Haiyan in November last year.

Haiyan left at least 7,986 people dead or missing across the central Philippines, according to a running government tally. Bodies are still being recovered from under the rubble.

An average of 20 typhoons and storms kill hundreds of people across the Philippines every year, but the last three years have been exceptional in the ferocity of some of these disasters.

Bopha, which struck the region in December 2012, left 1,900 people dead or missing on Mindanao by government count.

Tropical Storm Washi also unleashed floods that killed 1,080 people in December 2011

Tuesday 14 January 2014

http://www.thesundaily.my/news/930009

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