Natural disaster, earthquakes, tornadoes, wildfires, etc.

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Unused housing at closed military bases in the region should be reopened for the evacuees...

Gustav gathering strength all the way to the US
Sunday 31st August, 2008 - New Orleans has started mandatory evacuations to prevent a repeat of the disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina. The new hurricane, Gustav, has been labelled "the mother of all storms" by New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin.

Mr Nagin has told a press conference: "You need to be scared, you need to be concerned and you need to get your butts moving out of New Orleans right now. This is the storm of the century. There's not another one that anyone can think about that is as powerful and we really don't know how strong it's going to get.We want everybody. We want 100 per cent evacuation. If you decide to stay, you are on your own."

Bumper-to-bumper traffic has been causing roads to clog as motorists flee the city. New Orleans has also been busing out people who don't have access to private vehicles. The category four hurricane is barrelling toward the Gulf of Mexico after leaving more than 80 people dead and thousands displaced in Caribbean nations.

Gustav is forecast to plow headlong into the US Gulf Coast on Monday packing torrential rains, winds of 242 kilometre per hour and potentially catastrophic storm surges. Energy companies, whose 4,000 platforms in the Gulf produce a quarter of US crude oil and 15 per cent of its natural gas, braced for Gustav by evacuating personnel and shutting down three-quarters of their oil production.

More Gustav gathering strength all the way to the US

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Gustav to test lessons of Katrina
August 31, 2008: The oil industry girds for a potentially devastating hurricane in the the Gulf of Mexico - the home of 25% of U.S. production.

As officials started evacuating New Orleans, the oil industry shut down rigs and pulled back personnel as Hurricane Gustav bore down on the Gulf coast on Sunday. A lot is at stake as the industry faces potentially its worst storm since Hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated crude and gas facilities in 2005. The Gulf of Mexico is home to 4,000 drilling platforms and 33,000 miles of pipeline, which send 1.3 million barrels a day to the Gulf Coast's 56 refineries.

About 1.3 million barrels a day are produced in the Gulf - 25% of the oil produced in the United States, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The region also accounts for more than 10% of the country's natural gas production. Gustav, a Category 3 storm after raking through Cuba on Saturday, is expected to strengthen as it gets closer to the U.S. coast. Forecasters predict it will touch land as early Monday.

The hurricane's path may steer right through the heart of the region's biggest concentration of oil and gasoline producers. Its impact on crude oil prices, which settled on Friday at $115.46 a barrel, could be tested as soon as Sunday. The New York Mercantile Exchange will hold a special trading session starting at 2:30 p.m. ET.

Much offshore oil production has already been shut down and experts say it could get worse. It could damage gasoline refineries, which could send the price of oil and gas back up near record highs. "Production will be shut down in the path of the storm," said Cathy Landry, a spokeswoman for the American Petroleum Institute. "Not every rig will be in the storm's path, but the oil companies tend to be very cautious."

Production at risk

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Another quake hits China...

China Quake Destroys 180,000 Homes
Sunday, Aug. 31, 2008 — Chinese rescue teams carrying tents, quilts and sacks of rice rushed Sunday to reach survivors of an earthquake that killed at least 27 people, turned tens of thousands of homes into rubble and cracked reservoirs.

The 6.1-magnitude quake struck Sichuan province on Saturday along the same fault line as the May 12 earthquake that killed nearly 70,000. Dozens of evacuees were assembled on a primary school field in Panzhihua, footage from state broadcaster China Central Television showed. Wrapped in quilts, the evacuees, including children and the elderly, lay on plastic sheets and mats on the ground.

Saturday's quake killed 22 people in Sichuan and five in the neighboring province of Yunnan, the official Xinhua News Agency said, citing the Ministry of Civil Affairs. The quake damaged major bridges and cracked three reservoirs, the agency said. Another 362 people were injured and three were missing after the earthquake hit 31 miles southeast of Panzhihua city in the southwestern corner of Sichuan on Saturday afternoon, the report said.

About 40,000 people were evacuated and relief efforts were under way, despite being hampered by heavy rains and the region's rugged terrain, Xinhua said. It said 6,200 tents, 3,500 quilts and 55,000 pounds of rice were sent to the quake zone. Since the 7.9-magnitude temblor on May 12, the region has been hit by scores of aftershocks.

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Rescuers appeal for tents after deadly China quake
1 Sept.`08 - Rescuers appealed for temporary housing and tents Monday after a weekend earthquake in southwest China killed at least 36 people, injured hundreds and left tens of thousands of homes in ruins.

The temblor Saturday in Sichuan province, which the U.S. Geological Survey measured at magnitude 5.7, struck along the same fault line as a May 12 earthquake that killed nearly 70,000. "We need temporary houses ... we need more than 10,000 tents," said Zhang Hai, head of the foreign liaison office of the Communist Party propaganda department in Panzhihua city. "This is a mountainous place and so we can't build temporary houses everywhere." The beginning of the school year, which was supposed to be Monday, was postponed for a week because authorities were inspecting damage in classrooms, he said. "We still can't bring all kids back to their previous classrooms," Zhang said.

China is still basking in the glory of hosting an extravagant and widely viewed Olympic Games that International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge called "truly exceptional." But the earthquake underscores the country's need to turn its attention back to pressing domestic issues such as high inflation, pollution, and now disaster relief. The quake killed five people in Panzhihua and surrounding rural areas, and the death toll also included 25 victims in Sichuan province's Huili county, local officials said. Authorities in the Chuxiong Yi Autonomous Prefecture in neighboring Yunnan province reported six deaths. "We are trying to maintain order and make sure that there's enough supply. The disaster relief office has sent 17 medical teams made up of over 200 people," said Song Ming, an official in the propaganda department of Liangshan prefecture, which includes Huili county.

Saturday's quake killed 33 people, state broadcaster China Central Television said on its noon newscast. The temblor destroyed 258,000 homes, damaged major bridges and cracked three reservoirs, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. Local officials told The Associated Press they did not have any information on the reservoirs or whether the damage might place people in danger. Xinhua said 467 people were injured by the earthquake, which struck 20 miles southeast of Panzhihua city in the southwestern corner of Sichuan. A 5.6-magnitude aftershock struck just one minute later, the USGS said. About 152,000 people were evacuated in Sichuan province and relief efforts were under way, despite being hampered by heavy rains and the region's rugged terrain, Xinhua said. It said 6,200 tents, 3,500 quilts and 55,000 pounds of rice had been sent to the quake zone. Since the 7.9-magnitude May 12 temblor, the region has been hit by scores of aftershocks.

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Granny says is `cause its the end times, Jesus comin' back...

Why Disasters Are Getting Worse
Wednesday, Sep. 03, 2008 - In the space of two weeks, Hurricane Gustav has caused an estimated $3 billion in losses in the U.S. and killed about 110 people in the U.S. and the Caribbean, catastrophic floods in northern India have left a million people homeless, and a 6.2-magnitude earthquake has rocked China's southwest, smashing more than 400,000 homes.

If it seems like disasters are getting more common, it's because they are. But some disasters seem to be affecting us in worse ways — and not for the reasons you may think. Floods and storms have led to most of the excess damage. The number of flood and storm disasters has gone up 7.4% every year in recent decades, according to the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters. (Between 2000 and 2007, the growth was even faster, with an average annual rate of increase of 8.4%.) Of the total 197 million people affected by disasters in 2007, 164 million were affected by floods.

It is tempting to look at the lineup of storms in the Atlantic Ocean (Hanna, Ike, Josephine) and, in the name of everything green, blame climate change for this state of affairs. But there is another inconvenient truth out there: We are getting more vulnerable to weather mostly because of where we live, not just how we live. In recent decades, people around the world have moved en masse to big cities near water. The population of Miami-Dade County in Florida was about 150,000 in the 1930s, a decade fraught with severe hurricanes. Since then, the population of Miami-Dade County has rocketed 1,600%, to 2,400,000. So the same-intensity hurricane today wreaks all sorts of havoc that wouldn't have occurred had human beings not migrated. (To see how your own coastal county has changed in population, check out this cool graphing tool from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.)

If climate change is having an effect on the intensities of storms, it's not obvious in the historical weather data. And whatever effect it is having is much, much smaller than the effect of development along coastlines. In fact, if you look at all storms from 1900 to 2005 and imagine today's populations on the coasts, as Roger Pielke Jr., and his colleagues did in a 2008 Natural Hazards Review paper, you would see that the worst hurricane would have actually happened in 1926. If it happened today, the Great Miami storm would have caused from $140 billion to $157 billion in damages. (Hurricane Katrina, the costliest storm in U.S. history, caused $100 billion in losses.) "There has been no trend in the number or intensity of storms at landfall since 1900," says Pielke, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado. "The storms themselves haven't changed."

What's changed is what we've put in storms' way. Crowding together in coastal cities puts us at risk on a few levels. First, it is harder for us to evacuate before a storm because of gridlock. And in much of the developing world, people don't get the kinds of early warnings that Americans get. So large migrant populations — usually living in flimsy housing — get flooded out year after year. That helps explain why Asia has repeatedly been the hardest hit area by disasters in recent years. Secondly, even if we get everyone to safety, we still have more stuff in harm's way than ever before. So each big hurricane costs more than the big one before it, even controlling for inflation.

But the most insidious effect of building condos and industry along water is that we are systematically stripping coasts of the protection that used to cushion the blow of extreme weather. Three years after Katrina, southern Louisiana is still losing a football field's worth of wetlands every 38 minutes.

More Why Disasters Are Getting Worse - TIME

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Rescuers Can't Get Aid to Starving Haitian City...

Soaked Haitian City Desperate for Aid
September 4, 2008 - Aid groups fail to deliver aid to flooded Haitian city; tens of thousands without food, water; Tropical Storm Hanna killed 137 and drowned Gonaives in muddy water.

The convoy rumbled out of the U.N. base toward a flooded, starving and seething city Thursday, carrying some of the first food aid since Tropical Storm Hanna killed 137 Haitians and drowned Gonaives in muddy water three days ago. Hungry children at three orphanages were waiting for the canvas-topped trucks, loaded with warm pots of rice and beans and towing giant tanks of drinking water. The trucks didn't make it. The convoy crept over mud-caked, semi-paved roads past closed stores, overturned buses and women wading in water up to their knees with plastic tubs on their heads.

After about 45 minutes, the half-dozen trucks ground to a halt. U.N. peacekeepers wearing camouflage fatigues and bulletproof vests jumped out while others stood guard with assault rifles. Before them, a huge gouge marred the road. The floods had split the asphalt, and water ran through the 10-foot-wide (3-meter-wide) gap. The convoy turned around. And the children — like tens of thousands more in this increasingly desperate city — went another day without food. Later, Argentine U.N. troops stopped to dish out cooked rice from their own food supplies to a small crowd of hungry orphans. "I haven't eaten since Monday," 12-year-old Srita Omiscar said as she waited in line with about 50 others.

Just a few blocks away, a woman's corpse in a floral dress floated in a submerged intersection. At least 137 people died when Hanna struck Haiti, 102 of them in Ganaives and its surroundings, officials said Thursday. Some 250,000 people are affected in the Gonaives region, including 70,000 in 150 shelters across the city, according to an international official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information. Argentine Capt. Sergio Hoj estimated that half of Gonaives' houses remained flooded Thursday.

More ABC News: Rescuers Can't Get Aid to Starving Haitian City

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Ike deals Haiti a second deadly punch...

Ike's floods kill 58, add insult to Haiti's misery
Sun Sep 7, `08 - Haitians took to their roofs to escape rising floodwaters for the second time in a week on Sunday as squalls from Hurricane Ike killed 58 people and collapsed a bridge that cut the last land route into the starving city of Gonaives.

All but one of Sunday's victims came in the Cabaret area north of Port-au-Prince, according to civil defense director Maria-Alta Jean Baptiste. She said another three bodies were found in Gonaives, victims of an earlier storm. They pushed Haiti's death toll to at least 319 from four storms that have hit the country in less than a month. Witnesses in Cabaret said floodwaters rushed into homes in the middle of the night, crushing walls and reaching chest-high levels before receding Sunday morning and leaving everything caked in mud.

In the Always Funeral Home, 21 mud-crusted bodies were piled in a small room, unclaimed. Two of them were pregnant, one still clutching a small girl to her chest. "We took refuge in one room and waited there all night and prayed," said Sister Marie Denise, who was trapped by waist-high waters in the house she shares with four nuns. They evacuated to the nearby school they run after the waters receded. "We don't know if one of our girls is among the dead," she said of her students.

The rain had stopped by late afternoon, but authorities feared flooding could continue as water collecting in the mountains continued to run downhill. Much of Gonaives remained inaccessible even to United Nations peacekeepers in trucks because of rising waters and strong currents. As the peacekeepers delivered aid to the parts of Gonaives they could still reach, scores of young men splashed alongside, begging for help. One called out with a bullhorn: "Hey, hey, my friend. Give me some water." Food and fuel prices both skyrocketed, with gasoline reaching 500 Haitian gourdes (US$13) a gallon.

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Hurricane relief money for Haiti...

UN seeks $108 mn for hurricane-battered Haiti
Wednesday 10th September, 2008 - The UN has asked the international community to finance massive humanitarian efforts in Haiti, where 328 people have died and 800,000 became homeless from a series of natural disasters.

The UN humanitarian office made an appeal for $108 million to cover essential relief demands in Haiti for six months. The island nation has been battered by consecutive tropical storms and hurricanes in the past three weeks, which flooded residential areas, farms and destroyed crops, the UN said.

Haiti was first hit by Troical Storm Fay in mid-August, followed by Hurricanes Gustav, Hanna and Ike. Haiti is one of the world's poorest nations, with 53 percent of people live on less than $1 a day. Food prices have spiralled upwards by more than 40 percent since the beginning of the year.

'I hope donors will respond generously to help the survivors of these devastating storms, which have affected vast areas of the country, and the population already struggling with effects of poverty and price rises,' said John Holmes, head of the UN humanitarian department. 'As the long-term economic impact is bound to be grave, support for the recovery effort would be crucial,' Holmes said.

UN seeks $108 mn for hurricane-battered Haiti

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Red Cross tapped out...

Hurricanes Drain Red Cross Relief Fund
Thursday, September 11, 2008 - The wave of storms battering the U.S. has plunged the American Red Cross deep into debt as it rushes to prepare for Hurricane Ike, prompting a searching look at how to stabilize its finances.

Gail McGovern, who became the embattled charity's president in June, said even a request for federal funding is under consideration as the Red Cross seeks to become less dependent on spontaneous donations that arrive only in the wake of huge disasters. "We are going to explore every avenue we can to ensure we have a healthy Red Cross," McGovern said in an interview Thursday as her organization deployed 1,000 out-of-state volunteers to Texas to await menacing Ike.

"We're brainstorming absolutely anything," she said. "We're looking at the possibility of appropriations, whatever - because we want to be able to serve the American public." As of last week, when Ike was still a distant threat, the Red Cross said it has raised only $5 million to cover costs from Hurricane Gustav that will total at least $40 million, possibly more than $70 million. It has borrowed money to meet those bills, and now is incurring more expenses as it shifts response teams to Texas and readies its shelters.

"The beautiful thing about the American Red Cross is we are going to be there when people need us," McGovern said. "As the disaster relief fund depletes, we will borrow money if we need to, to be there." McGovern said Red Cross officials were calling Gustav a "silent disaster" because it entailed sizable costs for sheltering displaced people, yet did not trigger the flood of donations that often follows more deadly and destructive storms.

With Ike, McGovern said, the Red Cross wants to be ready even though it has no idea how damaging or costly the storm will be. It launched a new fundraising appeal Monday, and will get a plug this weekend when the NFL encourages donations with on-air and in-stadium announcements during its games.

More CNSNews.com - Hurricanes Drain Red Cross Relief Fund

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Storms hit Haiti hard...

'One million homeless' in Haiti
Saturday, 13 September 2008 - As many as one million people may be homeless in hurricane-battered Haiti, the country's prime minister says.

Ms Pierre-Louis, who has called on the international community to more assistance, said part of the city of Gonaives might have to be moved. She said the whole country has been devastated by four storms which struck in just over three weeks. The problem was too great for Haiti to deal with on its own, she added.

RECENT MAJOR STORMS

* Hurricane Ike: September
* Tropical Storm Hanna: September
* Hurricane Gustav: August, September
* Tropical Storm Fay: August

"We need major support and it is time for the world to understand that," she said. "We've suffered too much in this country." Strong winds and torrential rains over the past month have battered Haiti's already fragile infrastructure and left more than 550 people dead.

Ms Pierre-Louis told the BBC that part of the city of Gonaives, which was almost completely destroyed by the hurricanes, may now have to be built elsewhere. She also admitted that unless victims of the storms receive more help, rising discontent could force her from office.

BBC NEWS | Americas | 'One million homeless' in Haiti

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Storm relief food stolen...

Thieves steal storm victims' food
October 01, 2008 - FOOD donated for Haitian storm victims was stolen and put up for sale, according to authorities who seized three storehouses full of illegally diverted food aid.

In the western city of Carrefour, Mayor Yvon Jerome said authorities acted after residents complained about the sale of donated rice. "A lot of people were buying the rice because it was much cheaper compared to prices on the regular market," Mr Jerome told Reuters. "You can read on the bag 'Donated by Taiwan' and on some other bags we read 'US Rice.'" The storehouses full of stolen food were placed under seal and the food will be redistributed to the needy, said Mr Jerome, who called the diversion of desperately needed aid an outrage against humanity.

"There are so many people starving and desperate for that food," he said. "And to see people that are better off trying to steal it goes against all sense of humanity and charity." Haiti was hit by four tropical storms and hurricanes - Fay, Gustav, Hanna and Ike - in about a month. The storms triggered flooding and mudslides that killed at least 800 people, including 534 in the hardest-hit northern town of Gonaives, which was almost entirely submerged.

The Haitian government, donor countries and humanitarian groups are struggling to feed hundreds of thousands of flood victims in dire need of help. Judicial authorities were looking for several suspects in connection with the depots in Carrefour, which neighbors the capital of Port-au-Prince, but it was unclear how widespread such thefts were. The World Food Program said the misery index is rising daily in Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas, and the situation will require a massive effort to help people stave off hunger and save lives.

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599...-23109,00.html

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Investigatin' Myanmar junta for war crimes...

Rights group to probe Burma war crimes
October 01, 2008 - AN independent US group is to carry out unprecedented studies to determine whether Burma's military rulers, accused of rampant human rights abuses, have committed international crimes.

The Centre for Constitutional Democracy at Indiana University's school of law said it would launch the research based on anecdotal human rights evidence of "severe mistreatment" of marginalised ethnic groups by the military junta. "At this stage of the project, I can't honestly say that there are international crimes," the centre's executive director, David Williams, told AFP by telephone. "What I can say is there may be, and part of our goal would be to gather the evidence and try to come out with some objective conclusions about whether there are or not," he said.

The centre's goal, he said, was to make focused research "in areas where perhaps it is most likely that international crimes were committed". Only the Hague-based International Criminal Court (ICC) can determine whether international crimes, such as war crimes and crimes against humanity, have been committed by any individual or group. So far, Professor Williams said, there has been no institutional focus on possible international crimes committed by Burma's junta, which imposed a bloody crackdown of pro-democracy protests in September last year that was condemned worldwide. The crackdown - according to United Nations figures - left 31 people dead and 74 others missing, and resulted in thousands of arrests.

The military rulers had also come under international fire and were called "heartless" by some humanitarian groups for initially not allowing foreign aid into the country when a cyclone left 138,000 people dead or missing in May. Burma also houses more than 2100 political prisoners, including democracy icon and Nobel peace prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, who has spent more than 12 of the last 18 years under house arrest. Prof Williams said that although the ICC had not initiated any study on the military junta's record so far, "ours might be a good place for them to get started". "It might help the various investigators know where to go and what allegations to examine and so forth," he said.

More Rights group to probe Burma war crimes | NEWS.com.au

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Haiti still needin' hurricane relief...

UN appeals for more than $60 million for Haiti
Mon Oct 27, `08 - The U.N. humanitarian chief appealed to donor countries Monday for more than $60 million to help Haiti recover from storms that killed hundreds of people and heavily damaged the Caribbean nation's agricultural base.

John Holmes said donors have contributed or pledged about 40 percent of the $107 million the U.N. is seeking to help Haiti over the next six months, but that is nowhere near enough to deal with the aftermath of the storms. Haiti was ravaged by four storms — Fay, Gustav, Hanna and Ike — in less than four weeks during August and September. Nearly 800 people were killed and much of the country's agriculture was destroyed, leaving many people hungry. World Bank officials estimate that total damage surpassed $1 billion. "I think (this) was one of the worst, if not the worst disaster they've had probably in the last hundred years," said Holmes.

Last week, Holmes visited Haiti — the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere even before the storms. He held talks with the country's leaders and visited the hardest-hit city of Gonaives, which he called "a pretty dramatic and grim site" with a large new storm-spawned lake on the outskirts. Some people have returned to the spot where their houses were, many are still struggling to deal with huge amounts of mud left behind by the floodwaters, and "over 30,000 people who are in shelters ... and in considerable need of help," he said.

Asked whether the current financial crisis was having an impact on donations, he said he did not believe the development and humanitarian budgets of the main donors have been affected — "at this stage anyway." "The question is whether it will do so in the future," Holmes said. "Our very strong plea is that it shouldn't because we believe these budgets need to be insulated from the effects of the financial crisis." "Otherwise, gaps between rich and poor in terms of individuals and countries will simply grow, and that's not going to be good for anybody," he said.

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