Natural disaster, earthquakes, tornadoes, wildfires, etc.

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Flood costin' a bunch o' money...

Water still rising as damage tops $1.5 billion
Tues., June. 17, 2008 - Officials say the cost would have been higher if not for 1993 buy-outs

As the rising Mississippi River on Tuesday flooded thousands of acres of Iowa farmland, preliminary estimates put the damage at more than $1.5 billion, a figure that is expected to rise as the high water moves downstream. Still, officials said the cost would have been even higher if the federal government had not purchased low-lying land after the 1993 deluge, which caused $12 billion in damage.

Since then, the government bought out more than 9,000 homeowners, turning much of the land into parks and undeveloped areas that can be allowed to flood with less risk. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has moved or flood-proofed about 30,000 properties. The effort required whole communities to be moved, such as Rhineland, Mo., and Valmeyer, Ill.

In Iowa, FEMA spent $1.6 million to buy out residents of Elkport, population 80, and then knock down the village's remaining buildings. Some residents moved to Garber, Elkport's twin city across the Turkey River, but others abandoned the area. “There's nothing there in Elkport anymore,” said Helen Jennings of Garber. “They built new houses in different places.” Some of those who stayed are paying a price.

More Water still rising as damage tops $1.5 billion - Midwest flooding - MSNBC.com

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Congress to the rescue...

Congress to Add to $1.8B Flood Aid
Wednesday, Jun. 18, 2008 (WASHINGTON) — Congress is moving quickly to rush emergency disaster to the flood-ravaged Midwest as it tries to put the finishing touches on a long-stalled Iraq war funding bill.

Lawmakers on Capitol Hill negotiated privately Wednesday over how much money to add to President Bush's informal $1.8 billion request for flood relief. Bush requested funding for the government's main disaster relief fund, as well as help for farmers and small businesses. A dozen senators in both parties were pressing to add money for levee repair and help for displaced homeowners, among other pressing needs. House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-Wis., was cobbling together a bulked-up flood relief package Wednesday afternoon.

Democrats are also seeking to iron out sticking points on the war funding bill, which has been delayed for months amid internal Democratic Party wrangling. Key battles are over how much non-war-related legislation and spending to add to Bush's war request and whether to abide by rules requiring such add-ons — especially a huge increase in GI Bill college benefits for veterans — to be "paid for" instead of added to the U.S. debt.

In addition to the emergency flood aid, Democrats hope to use the Iraq funding bill as an engine to advance a 13-week extension of unemployment payments for people whose benefits have run out, as well as the GI bill benefits. The GI Bill benefits, originally slated to cost $52 billion over 10 years, would be $10 billion more generous over the same period to meet a Pentagon request to permit service members to transfer them to their spouses or children. Republicans, meanwhile, seem anxious to reach an agreement to extend unemployment benefits rather than go to the mat to defend a Bush veto.

A senior GOP aide confirmed that Obey spoke Wednesday with Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, in hopes of resolving major problems. Throughout weeks of behind-the-scenes talks, House Democrats such as Obey have pressed to send Bush a war funding bill he can sign rather than have a veto override vote that would force anti-war Democrats seeking to defeat Bush on issues such as extending unemployment benefits to also cast a vote for war money. The underlying legislation would provide about $165 billion for the Pentagon to carry the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan into next year, along with foreign aid, funding for Louisiana levees and minor changes to the current-year budget such as additional money for the Census.

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Water sweeping into farm country as more US levees break
Wednesday 18th June, 2008 - At least twelve more levees have been breached in the US Midwest, destroying farmland and adding to billion-dollar losses.

Volunteers and aid workers have been shifting and piling sandbags onto the Mississippi levees to try to protect more homes and pastures. Thousands of hectares of prime crop land is being threatened in Iowa.

Across the river in Illinois, National Guard troops have been busy on sandbag duty to save towns on the expectation of another river crest.

The floods are the worst in the Midwest in 15 years, forcing tens of thousands of people from their homes. It is believed the cost of the disaster has already blown out to about $20 billion.

Water sweeping into farm country as more US levees break

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Farms under water going under financially too...

US Farm Belt Faces Economic Disaster From Floods
20 June 2008 - Surging water is moving down the Mississippi river devastating towns and farmland along the way. The river has topped close to a dozen levees flooding towns in Iowa, Illinois and Missouri and residents farther downstream are bracing for the surge as it heads their way.

Residents are returning to their homes in some parts of Iowa and farmers are trying to determine if they can salvage fields that were flooded soon after being planted. President Bush toured the disaster area Friday as did presidential candidates, Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican candidate, and Senator Barack Obama, the likely Democratic candidate. But even as citizens began the clean up process in Iowa, assisted by the National Guard and relief agencies, people farther downstream were fleeing the raging water.

In Foley, Missouri, John Watson spoke to reporters from the roof of his home. "There is nothing you can do, just sit there and watch it come at you. Get everything out you can," he said. But the people whose homes have been flooded are not the only ones likely to feel pain from this disaster. A lot of valuable farmland has been flooded destroying crops of corn, wheat and soybeans that had been planted in recent weeks. This is the heart of the U.S. grain-producing region and the losses in the flood zone will surely cause higher food prices worldwide.

Corn hit a record price of $8 a bushel earlier this week and some analysts believe it will move higher once the full extent of the damage to farmland is known. Losses in Iowa alone are estimated at $2.7 billion. For farmers in the northern part of the flood zone it may be too late to replant since there are not enough days left in the growing season to bring a crop to harvest. But even many farmers who would like to replant there is pessimism. Many of them say the ground is too soggy for them to enter the fields with tractors and other equipment.

But even after fields are totally drained farmers will face the problem of silt and contaminated material that washed over their land with the floodwaters. It may take years for some areas to recover completely. The floods have also disrupted other economic activity in the area. Tourism has fallen even in areas unaffected by flooding because people are avoiding travel to the Mississippi river area in general. Barge traffic on the Mississippi has been slowed as well. Officials say this year's floods will likely surpass the devastation of the 1993 floods in the region, which resulted in losses of over $20 billion.

VOA News - US Farm Belt Faces Economic Disaster From Floods

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Is holding up the delivery of gasoline to our area, price goin' up...

Flooding strands 100-plus barges on Mississippi
Saturday, June 21,`08 - The flooding in the Midwest has brought freight traffic on the upper Mississippi to a standstill, stranding more than 100 barges loaded with grain, cement, scrap metal, fertilizer and other products while shippers wait for the water to drop on the Big Muddy.

"We're basically experiencing total shutdown," said Larry Daily, president of Alter Barge Line Inc. of Bettendorf, Iowa. While the bottleneck is costing him and other barge operators tens of thousands of dollars in lost revenue per day, June is a slow shipping period on the river compared with the late-summer harvest, the shutdown is expected to last only a few weeks, and it involves primarily non-perishable goods. So no major damage to the economy is expected.

Among the freight being held up: corn and soybeans headed downstream for New Orleans, where grain is loaded onto ships for export. Construction supplies and petroleum products headed upstream on the Mississippi are not getting through either. Because of the high water, the Army Corps of Engineers has closed 13 locks along the upper Mississippi since June 12. As of Friday, nine locks remained closed, a roughly 215-mile stretch between Illinois City, Ill., and Winfield, Mo., northwest of St. Louis.

The situation along the Mississippi in Missouri was improving Friday as government forecasters predicted crests sharply below 1993's record levels. Several communities up and down the Mississippi were still under inundated, however, including Lincoln County, Mo., where 300 to 350 homes were flooded after the water flowed over or through the levees. In Old Monroe, 45 miles north of St. Louis, retired steelworker Bob Scott watched as the river puddled at the edge of his front yard. But he said he thought the river had stopped rising and his home might come through the flood unscathed.

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Humans contributing to mid-west flooding...

Human link seen in severity of floodings
Saturday, June 21, 2008 -- Natural disasters like floods are normally blamed on nature, but some experts believe humans are at least partly responsible for this month's massive flooding in Iowa and elsewhere in the U.S. farm belt.

Human re-engineering of landscapes came into question as rivers overran their banks and more than 20 levees along the Mississippi River failed, inundating thousands of acres of prime farmland and displacing nearly 40,000 people. Iowa's natural grassy wetlands have been replaced by highly efficient industrial agriculture, a machine that churns out more corn and soybeans than any other U.S. state. However this change has also compromised the ecosystem's ability to absorb large volumes of rain.

Several areas of the state have received more that three times normal rainfall since the beginning of the month. "Pre-settlement, most of Iowa was under water, a shallow wetland type of system. That landscape has been altered for production purposes so the hydrology of the area has changed radically in the last century-and-a-half," said Kevin Baskins, spokesman with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. Farms have installed underground drainage systems and rerouted streams and creeks to protect crops, speeding the rate of water run-off to rivers, he said.

The shallow root systems of corn and soybeans planted annually throughout much of the state do little to slow the speed of water run-off, prompting calls for more farmland to be converted back to native grasslands. Baskins said: "With civilization, there come trade-offs. There are cases like this when you realize that the river is much more powerful than we humans are and there are some places that we have to give back to nature."

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Floodwaters breed hidden dangers
Fri., June. 20, 2008 - West Nile, E. coli among deadly concerns in swamped Midwest

Now that the waters are beginning to recede after this month’s devastating floods in the Midwest, state and federal officials are warning of a widespread secondary risk from dangerous bacteria and disease-bearing mosquitoes. Officials of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and state health officials across the Midwest said they expected this season’s mosquito population to be especially big, nurtured by hot summer temperatures and large pools of standing water that make an ideal breeding ground. “We know we have mosquitoes right now in the state that are testing positive for the West Nile virus,” Indiana State Health Commissioner Judy Monroe said.

Indiana health officials have already found two mosquitoes infected with West Nile in Marion County, and they said they expected to see more, because smaller counties with smaller budgets haven’t had the manpower to go looking for them yet. “The places that they’re going to have trouble with most likely is when the waters actually recede and the water gets trapped in grassy areas, in grassy fields, when it’s not actually flowing,” said Justin Manning, supervisor of rodent control for the Vanderburgh County Health Department.

Chuck Cipperley, director of environmental services for the Siouxland District Health Department in Iowa, said the Sioux City area was covered in mosquito-friendly pools of water. “We have had a lot of water, and there is a lot of breeding ground all around us,” Cipperley said. It’s bad news for mother like Tricia Massart of Elm Grove, Wis., whose children had been waiting for summer to start. “The summer here is so short, and everyone just waits for summer to come, and they want to get outside and enjoy it,” Massart said. “I think if the mosquitoes try to ruin it, that would be very unfortunate.”

E. coli, tetanus feared

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Is it just me or does anybody else see what's wrong with this logic?...

Twin fires raging along California's central coast
5 July,`08 - A pair of out-of-control wildfires roared along California's central coast Friday, chewing through opposite ends of a parched forest and threatening a total of more than 4,500 homes.

While flames from the stubborn fire in the northern flank of the Los Padres National Forest inched closer to Big Sur's historic vacation retreats, firefighters farther south braced for the return of evening winds that a day earlier caused a wildfire in Santa Barbara County to double in size and race dangerously close to hundreds of homes. Residents of more than 5,000 homes in and around the city of Goleta were ordered to evacuate, joining about 1,700 people who were told to leave Big Sur days earlier.

Driven by wind gusts as high as 40 mph, the Santa Barbara County fire was so fierce early Friday that firefighters at one point took shelter in one of about 70 homes that crews were trying to defend, said Capt. Eli Iskow of the county fire department. "The fire is expanding and presenting some very complex challenges because of the terrain and the fact that it hasn't burned in over 50 years," Iskow said. "And it's close to all the valuables like homes and people." Iskow said firefighting resources were stretched thin and officials have brought in crews from as far away as the Midwest.

"We've got people on the lines who've never been to California before," he said. Wind was less of a problem in Big Sur, which remained eerily empty under a thick blanket of fog and smoke at the start of the long holiday weekend. No more properties were lost since Thursday, but the density of the parched terrain allowed the 13-day-old wildfire to keep advancing on the storied tourist town, where flames made their way toward the scenic Pacific Coast Highway and sent forest creatures running toward the Pacific Ocean for cover.

More Twin fires raging along California's central coast - Yahoo! News

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Huge landowner gets a closed-door deal
5 July `08 - Feds' closed-door deal could ease development; New Forest Service rules could let largest private owner convert land

The Bush administration is preparing to ease the way for the nation's largest private landowner to convert hundreds of thousands of acres of mountain forestland to residential subdivisions. The deal was struck behind closed doors between Mark E. Rey, the former timber lobbyist who oversees the U.S. Forest Service, and Plum Creek Timber Co., a former logging company turned real estate investment trust that is building homes. Plum Creek owns more than 8 million acres nationwide, including 1.2 million acres in the mountains of western Montana, where local officials were stunned and outraged at the deal.

"We have 40 years of Forest Service history that has been reversed in the last three months," said Pat O'Herren, an official in Missoula County, which is threatening to sue the Forest Service for forgoing environmental assessments and other procedures that would have given the public a voice in the matter. The deal, which Rey said he expects to formalize next month, threatens to dramatically accelerate trends already transforming the region. Plum Creek's shift from logging to real estate reflects a broader shift in the Western economy, from one long grounded in the industrial-scale extraction of natural resources to one based on accommodating the new residents who have made the region the fastest-growing in the nation.

Environmentalists, to their surprise, found that timber and mining were easier on the countryside. "Now that Plum Creek is getting out of the timber business, we're kind of missing the loggers," said Ray Rasker, executive director of Headwaters Economics, a nonprofit that studies land management in the West. "A clear-cut will grow back, but a subdivision of trophy homes, that's going to be that way forever. "It's kind of the ugly face of the new economy."

More Big landowner gets closed-door deal - Washington Post - MSNBC.com

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China cracks down on grieving parents...

China Shushes Parent Protesters About Earthquake
Jul. 8, 2008 - China Tries To Use Threats, Money, Promises Of Justice To Silence Quake Protests

Angry parents whose children were crushed to death in schools that collapsed in China's mighty earthquake are no longer being allowed to march, wave banners and vent their rage in public. Officials are now using a variety of tactics _ threats, money, promises of justice, police muscle _ to intimidate, appease or hush up the grieving mothers and fathers who believe that nearly 7,000 classrooms crumbled so easily because corrupt and incompetent officials didn't build them properly.

Two months after the quake, seething anger runs through the town of Wufu, with its green rice fields and concrete farm houses. Wufu became a hotbed of quake protests after the town's Fuxin No. 2 Primary School caved in, killing 127 students. "Police from Deyang came to our town and warned us not to gather," said Pi Kaijian, a 43-year-old farmer who wore pointy Italian-style loafers and polyester pants rolled up past his calves as he endured the afternoon heat in the courtyard of his house.

"The police met with our parent leaders and said if we gathered, it would be a criminal act and we'd be arrested," said the farmer, whose 11-year-old son died in the school. In the weeks after the quake, parents in Wufu vented their rage over buildings they say were shoddily constructed by grabbing pictures of their dead children and marching to the government headquarters in Deyang, the nearest big city.

Such protests were tolerated for a time after the 7.9-magnitude quake, but then came the police warnings to stay off the streets. After winning global praise for acting like an open society and allowing the parents to protest after the disaster, China is reverting to the tactics of a communist police state ready to crush any dissent.

More China Shushes Parent Protesters About Earthquake, China Tries To Use Threats, Money, Promises Of Justice To Silence Quake Protests - CBS News

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Granny says, "Dat's right - rapture gonna come an' all dem lefty libs gonna get left behind"...

Record natural disaster deaths
July 09, 2008 - NATURAL disasters killed at least 150,000 people in the first half of this year, more than in the whole of 2004 when south-east Asia was struck by a tsunami, a top insurer said today.

The figures came from German re-insurance group Munich Re which warned that the pattern this year fitted a trend of worsening weather-driven catastrophes, and the company called for increased efforts to fight climate change. Specialists at the German group recorded about 400 natural catastrophes in the first half of 2008, with overall losses so far estimated at $US50 billion ($52.48 billion). In 2007, a total of 960 disasters caused about $US82 billion in damage, of which $US30 billion was covered by insurance.

In Burma, the cyclone Nargis killed 138,000 people in early May, and in mid-May an earthquake left 69,200 dead or missing in China, the company said in a statement. Munich Re board member Torsten Jeworrek said that "risk awareness and measures designed to afford protection against such catastrophes in highly exposed regions must be given high priority''. In China's Sichuan Province for example, that meant "adapting'' building regulations, he said.

The first half of this year has been marked by "a large number of weather-related natural catastrophes'', the statement said. "To this extent, the year is following the long-term trend towards more weather catastrophes, which is influenced by climate change,'' Mr Jeworrek said.

"In the US, there have never been so many tornadoes recorded in the first six months of a year'', the statement said. Billions of dollars in damage was also caused by "heavy rain and hail and subsequent flooding in Iowa and other Midwest states.'' For Peter Hoeppe, head of the insurer's Geo Risks Research unit said the battle against climate change called for ambitious measures.

Record natural disaster deaths | NEWS.com.au Business

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Screw the junta...

House Votes To Squeeze Myanmar Junta
WASHINGTON, July 15, 2008 - Unanimous House Vote Supports Economic Sanctions Against Corrupt Ruling Regime

The House of Representatives voted Tuesday to punish Myanmar's brutal ruling regime "where it hurts - in the wallet," by freezing assets of political and military leaders there and banning the importation of rubies from that country into the U.S. The unanimous vote sent the bill back to the Senate, which voted last year to also bar timber from Myanmar, also known as Burma.

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard Berman said the legislation would put financial pressure on a corrupt regime that failed to adequately help its citizens recover from a cyclone and famously put down democracy demonstrations by Buddhist monks last year. "The legislation before the House today hits the regime where it hurts - in the wallet," Berman, a Democrat, told the House. "By blocking the import of Burmese gems into the United States and expanding financial sanctions, the legislation will take hundreds of millions of dollars out of the pockets of the regime each year."

He said the 11,000-store Jewelers of America supports a ban on Burmese gem imports. Retailers like Tiffany's and Bulgari have also voluntarily made the ban their policy, Berman said. The bill also gives Chevron incentives to divest its natural gas program in Myanmar. It aims to bring more pressure against the junta to restore democratic civilian government in Myanmar. U.S. officials say Myanmar has been evading earlier gem-targeting sanctions by laundering the stones in other countries before they are shipped to the United States.

President Bush is eager to sign the bill, which will extend and harden sanctions Congress first passed in 2003. President Bush's wife, Laura, has emerged in recent months as a strong proponent of democratization in the Southeast Asian country. Myanmar has been under military rule since 1962. The current junta took power in 1988 after crushing pro-democracy demonstrations at a cost of an estimated 3,000 lives. Its soldiers similarly cracked down on Buddhist monks during the so-called Saffron Revolution in September. Human rights observers put the death toll among demonstrators in the hundreds.

House Votes To Squeeze Myanmar Junta, Unanimous House Vote Supports Economic Sanctions Against Corrupt Ruling Regime - CBS News

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Possible quake warning...

A New Clue in Predicting Earthquakes
Friday, Jul. 11, 2008 - An accidental discovery has brought seismologists one step closer to being able to predict earthquakes.

As part of an unrelated effort to measure underground changes caused by shifts in barometric pressure, a team of researchers found that increases in subterranean pressure preceded earthquakes along California's San Andreas Fault by as much as 10 hours. If follow-up tests advance the findings, seismologists may eventually be able to provide a few hours' notice for people to find safe haven prior to quakes. As the horrific images from China demonstrate, the effort is well worth the alternative. "Predicting earthquakes is the final goal for seismologists," says Fenglin Niu, the research team's lead author and a Rice University seismologist. "This is a start."

Reporting in the July 10 edition of the journal Nature, researchers used a high-tech equivalent of a stereo speaker lowered into a bore hole near Parkfield, Calif., a half-mile deep and five yards from a measuring device. For two months beginning in late 2005, researchers transmitted pulse signals three times per second, from the speaker to the measuring device, calculating travel time between the two stations. Surprised scientists learned the seismic waves slowed dramatically on only two occasions: two hours prior to a magnitude-1 temblor, and a startling 10 hours before a magnitude-3 quake.

The research team theorizes that the immense amount of pressure building along the fault causes small cracks within the rock during the final hours before an earthquake, increasing rock density and slowing the transmission signals. "The more cracks you have, the slower the seismic velocity," says study co-author Paul Silver, a geophysicist with the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Still unknown is whether there is any significance to the fact that the magnitude-3 quake had a much longer pre-seismic signal than the lower-magnitude quake, or whether it was simply because its magnitude was larger and its epicenter closer to the sensors.

More A New Clue in Predicting Earthquakes - TIME

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Time runnin' out for Burma...

Myanmar cyclone "air bridge" to end next month
Thu Jul 24, 2008 - Aid agencies in cyclone-hit Myanmar will have to charter their own planes after the United Nations ends free flights between Yangon and Bangkok on Aug. 10, a senior U.N. official said on Thursday.

However, the five remaining helicopters ferrying supplies to remote areas in the hardest hit Irrawaddy Delta would continue to operate, U.N. humanitarian chief John Holmes said. He said the temporary nature of the air bridge -- established between the Thai capital and Myanmar's biggest city in the weeks after the May 2 disaster -- was understood by aid agencies. "It doesn't mean there will be no more aid flights," Holmes told reporters in Bangkok after a 3-day trip to assess aid operations in the former Burma. "NGOs have to take on the responsibility to transport the aid themselves," he added.

Recovery from a cyclone that left at least 138,000 dead or missing, will cost more than $1 billion, a report by the United Nations and southeast Asian nations said. The estimate, released on Monday at a meeting of foreign ministers of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), covers the most urgent needs such as food, agriculture and housing for the next three years. "It's a relief to confirm there is no mass starvation, or outbreaks of epidemics," Singaporean Foreign Minister George Yeo told a news briefing. "But there is a need for help -- we need money, we need assistance." He said the country would need everything from clean water and building works to boats, fishing nets and buffaloes.

The United Nations appealed earlier this month for more than $300 million in additional aid for the former Burma, on top of $178 million already provided by donors. Myanmar's secretive military government lifted restrictions on foreign aid workers after a visit in late May by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Without the Bangkok-Yangon flights, aid agencies will have to rely on sea routes for transport, and then travel by road to worst-affected areas.

"It's a more normal mode of operations instead of the emergency mode. It doesn't mean the relief needs are not there. It just means we can do it in a cheaper and more systematic way," Holmes said. Holmes visited affected communities in the delta as part of a helicopter tour of the region. He also travelled to the new capital, Naypyidaw for talks with the military government. "I was encouraged by the visit, by the progress that had been made, but obviously there is absolutely no room for complacency at this point in time," he said.

Myanmar cyclone "air bridge" to end next month | International | Reuters

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U.N. Security Council split on how to deal with Myanmar
Thu Jul 24, 2008 - The U.N. Security Council was split on Thursday over how to push Myanmar to improve human rights and adopt democratic reforms as a U.N. special envoy prepared for a key visit to the Asian nation.

After focusing on aid efforts in Myanmar since a May 2 cyclone left 138,000 dead or missing, the 15-member Security Council turned its attention back to pressuring the country's secretive military government on political reforms. The United States said it wanted "concrete results" from next month's visit to Myanmar by Ihbrahim Gambari, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's special envoy, and that "tougher measures" may be needed if that was not achieved.

"My message to the regime is to take advantage of Mr. Gambari's visit, turn a new page ... or face more pressure -- the choice is theirs in this regard," U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Zalmay Khalilzad told reporters. He said for Gambari's visit to be a success, Myanmar had to cooperate on a political roadmap, agree to time-bound talks on political transition ahead of 2010 elections, and release political prisoners including Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi.

Britain's U.N. Ambassador John Sawers said the Security Council needed to remain focused on the political problems of Myanmar, but acknowledged that reaching an agreement among members on how much pressure to apply would be difficult. "We're in a very difficult position in the sense that the Burmese government have not responded to the demands of the international community," he told reporters. "Things have gone backwards in Burma over the last six months or so."

More U.N. Security Council split on how to deal with Myanmar | International | Reuters