Negative Blogs

Typhoon Megi cleared the Philippines’ main island and headed toward China on Tuesday, and authorities said initial estimates showed around 105,000 tons of the region’s unmilled rice crop had been damaged.

The agriculture department’s early assessment that around 10 percent of the Cagayan valley’s annual crop had been damaged was well below a worst-case scenario of more than 230,000 tons. The area accounts for about 12 percent of national production.

Megi, known locally as Juan, was a category 5 super typhoon with winds in excess of 250 kph (155 mph) when it slammed into the east coast of north Luzon shortly before noon on Monday.

The national disaster agency put the death toll at seven, a low tally for such a strong typhoon in the country. Fuller assessments of the damage were expected on Tuesday, although the typhoon had cut power and communications in many areas.

After clearing the Philippines, Megi is expected to regain some strength over the South China Sea. Tropical Storm Risk’s (www.tropicalstormrisk.com) projections show the storm is expected to turn away from Vietnam toward China, with the center passing between Hainan island and Hong Kong.

Angelito Banayo, administrator of the National Food Authority (NFA) told Reuters on Monday the government’s worst case scenario was Megi could damage 232,169 tons of unmilled rice crop in the north with only 30 percent of it able to be harvested.

The Philippines is the world’s biggest rice importer and damage from the typhoon could see it buy more than had been expected for 2011, which could push up international prices.

By reuters.com

The roof flies off a house as super typhoon Megi, known locally as Juan, hits Ilagan City, Isabela province, northern Philippines, October 18, 2010.

Rescue workers searched Wednesday for six elderly people missing at Kolontar, one of three villages in southwest Hungary that was hit Monday by a wave of toxic red sludge from an alumina plant reservoir that burst.

Wearing chemical protection suits, the workers used metal sticks to poke through muck three-feet deep (1 meter) for the presumed victims, reported MTI, Hungary’s official news agency.

At least 116 people were injured, eight of them seriously, when the mishap occurred Monday afternoon, the agency said. Most of them were flown to hospitals in the capital, Budapest.

The reservoir has been repaired and the flow from the pool has halted.

But the material that flowed out of the reservoir continued to pose a threat. On Wednesday, more than 500 National Disaster Management Authority staffers and soldiers and employees of Hungarian Aluminum Production and Trade Company (MAL), the company that owns the alumina plant’s reservoir, were trying to halt the advance of the sludge before it reaches the Danube River’s tributaries, said Jeno Lasztovicza, head of the defense committee, according to MTI.

The sludge had already reached the Marcal River, which flows into the River Raba, which empties into the Danube. It was expected to show up in the Danube as soon as this weekend, said Imre Szakacs, head of Gyor-Moson-Sopron County’s defense authority, MTI said.

Emergency workers were pouring plaster and fertilizers into the Marcal River in hopes that it would bind with the sludge and counter its alkalinity before it reached the Danube, the continent’s second-longest river, some 70 km (43 miles) north, reported MTI.

But the material will have been neutralized by the time it reaches the Raba, Interior Minister Sandor Pinter told reporters.

Untreated, the sludge contains heavy metals, which cause burns and eye irritation, he said.

Four people — two children ages 1 and 3, an elderly woman and a 35-year-old man whose SUV overturned in the sludge — have been confirmed dead in the environmental disaster, which occurred 160 km (99 miles) west of Budapest, near the town of Ajka.

Residents were advised not to eat produce from gardens that were covered when the dam burst, releasing at least 1 million cubic meters of thick red mud.

It was not clear when residents evacuated from affected areas in the villages of Kolontar, Devecser and Somlovasarhely would be able to return home, nor were the long-term consequences clear.

A state of emergency has been declared in three counties, the State Secretariat of Governmental Communications said.

In a statement on its website, MAL said it “offers its honest condolences to the relatives of all of the victims who lost their lives in the catastrophe.”

By cnn.com

An aerial view of the red mud covered streets and rescue workers in Kolontar, southwest of Budapest.after a dike of a reservoir containing red mud of an alumina factory in nearby Ajka broke, and over one million cubic meters of the poisonous chemical sludge inundated three villages. The toxic flood has killed a yet unknown number of people with some people still missing.An aerial view of the red mud covered streets and rescue workers in Kolontar, southwest of Budapest.after a dike of a reservoir containing red mud of an alumina factory in nearby Ajka broke, and over one million cubic meters of the poisonous chemical sludge inundated three villages. The toxic flood has killed a yet unknown number of people with some people still missing.

A huge mudslide first thought to have buried hundreds of people has left only 11 missing and there are no confirmed dead, authorities said Tuesday night, backing off earlier predictions of a major catastrophe in Mexico’s rain-soaked southern state of Oaxaca.

Federal Interior Minister Francisco Blake and Oaxaca Governor Ulises Ruiz both confirmed the drastically reduced toll from the slide that hit the town of Santa Maria de Tlahuitoltepec early Tuesday.

“So far no one is confirmed dead, only 11 missing who we hope … will be found,” Mr. Ruiz told The Associated Press.

Initial reports from Santa Maria de Tlahuitoltepec, a rural mountain town 600 kilometres southeast of Mexico City, said a hillside collapsed on hundreds of sleeping residents after several days of heavy rains in the aftermath of a hurricane and tropical storm that hit Mexico and Central America.

Civil protection authorities first reported seven people killed and at least 100 missing, but Mr. Ruiz later reported casualties as four dead and 12 missing.

Jose Alfredo Garcia, spokesman for the Interior Department, told the AP that the initial reports were based on the number of homes hit by the mudslide, but at the time no federal or state officials had reached the site to check the estimates.

Communications with the town were difficult after the pre-dawn slide. Soldiers and civil protection and Red Cross workers couldn’t reach the area for nearly 10 hours because mud and rocks blocked roads and a bridge was damaged, while bad weather prevented helicopters from being used.

President Felipe Calderon reported on his Twitter account Tuesday afternoon that an army commander and 30 soldiers had reached the town by foot and that there was a lot of damage, but “perhaps not of the magnitude initially reported.”

Donato Vargas, an official in Santa Maria de Tlahuitoltepec reached by a satellite telephone, had said as many as 300 homes were believed to buried, and residents who made it out early in the morning said they had no success digging out neighbours.

“We have been using a backhoe but there is a lot of mud. We can’t even see the homes, we can’t hear shouts, we can’t hear anything,” Mr. Vargas said.

Mr. Vargas said the slide dragged houses packed with sleeping families some 400 metres down the hillside along with cars, livestock and light poles.

“We were all sleeping and all I heard was a loud noise and when I left the house I saw that the hill had fallen,” Mr. Vargas said. “We were left without electricity, without telephone and we couldn’t help them. There was no way to move the mud.”

One person was reported killed in a mudslide in another Oaxaca community, Villa Hidalgo, and 30 people were killed Monday in a slide in Colombia. Heavy rains, including some delivered by the remnants of Hurricane Karl and then Tropical Storm Matthew, also have produced deadly floods in southern Mexico and Central America.

Oaxaca Civil Protection operations co-ordinator Luis Marin said the state had seen three days straight of intense rain. The state government warned residents south of the city of Oaxaca of flooding from overflowing rivers and opened shelters in other parts of the state.

Santa Maria de Tlahuitoltepec, which had 9,000 residents in 2005 according to Mexican census data, is a community high in the Sierra Norte mountains known for maintaining its indigenous culture, especially its music. Residents speak the native language, Mixe, and its youth orchestra plays throughout Mexico.

Mr. Vargas said a second hill threatened to give way in another part of town.

“We are in a serious risk situation,” he said. “In all of our neighbourhoods there are houses and roads cracked and about to fall.”

Huge swaths of riverside communities in southern Mexico were still under water Tuesday – flooding exacerbated by the passage of Karl and Matthew. Before Tuesday’s landslides, at least 15 deaths in Mexico were blamed on the hurricane.

In Honduras, authorities said four people, including a child, drowned in rivers and creeks swollen by Tropical Storm Matthew. The National Emergencies Commission said Tuesday that three adults died in the town of El Oregano and a 10-year-old child in the Caribbean coast town of La Lima.

In Colombia, about 30 people were killed Monday by a landslide northwest of Bogota, the capital. Many were changing from one bus to another because a mountain road was blocked, but the residents of five houses also were buried, rescue officials said.

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos visited the scene Tuesday between the towns of Giraldo and Canasgordas in Antioquia state, northwest of Bogota. “The situation is very difficult,” he told reporters as rescue teams with sniffer dogs probed tons of earth.

Witnesses described a roar as first rocks and then earth swept over the road Monday afternoon. Amateur video shows the slide bearing down and scouring away the houses.

Heavy rains in recent weeks across Colombia have triggered flooding that has claimed at least 74 lives.

By theglobeandmail.com

People carry the body of a landslide victim as another body lies in the bed of a home that collapsed in Santa Maria de Tlahuitoltepec in Oaxaca state, Mexico, Wednesday Sept. 29, 2010. A hillside collapsed on the town in the rain-soaked southern state of Oaxaca.

Tropical Storm Matthew made landfall over Nicaragua Friday afternoon and pushed through to Honduras, bringing with it a threat of heavy rain, flash floods and mudslides.

The weather system was centered about 80 miles (130 kilometers) west of the Nicaraguan town of Cabo Gracis a Dios Friday evening and was heading west at 15 mph (24 kph). Its maximum sustained winds had quickened slightly to 50 mph (85 kph), according to the Miami, Florida-based National Hurricane Center.

The governments of Nicaragua and Honduras dropped a hurricane watch they had issued earlier for parts of their countries. Tropical storm warnings remained in effect, as did a tropical storm watch for the coast of Belize, the Hurricane Center said.

The weather system could dump between 6 and 10 inches of rain over portions of Nicaragua and Honduras, with up to 15 inches falling in isolated areas, forecasters said. Both those countries are mountainous and have in the past suffered from treacherous rain-triggered mudslides.

“Torrential rains will be the biggest threat for the next few days,” the Hurricane Center said.

Track-prediction maps indicate that Matthew, the 13th named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, will continue westward over the next 48 hours or so, taking it across Honduras and into Belize and Guatemala.

Forecasters say the storm could weaken and become a broad area of low pressure by Sunday.

It could regain strength once it moves back over warm Gulf of Mexico waters and head north toward the United States.

Meanwhile, Tropical Storm Lisa strengthened into a Category 1 hurricane, the center said, becoming the seventh hurricane of the season.

As of 7 p.m. ET, the center of Lisa was about 385 miles (615 kilometers) northwest of the Cape Verde Islands and was heading north in the Atlantic Ocean. The storm’s maximum sustained winds had quickened to 75 mph (120 kph).

There were no watches or warnings in effect associated with Lisa. The storm could continue to strengthen in the coming day, the Hurricane Center said, before weakening by late Saturday as it heads out over cooler Atlantic waters.

By the CNN Wire Staff

Tropical Storm Matthew could linger for days over Central America with torrential rains.

Residents boarded up windows, farmers hurriedly harvested vegetables and tourists vacated hotels in eastern Taiwan on Saturday as the island braced for its first typhoon this season.

China and Taiwan warned that Typhoon Fanapi was strengthening before its expected landfall on Sunday on Taiwan’s eastern coast.

Taiwan issued an alert that heavy rains and mudslides were possible and warned ships to expect dangerous sea conditions. The government ordered fishing boats to return to their docks.

Interior Minister Chiang Yi—hua said authorities would evacuate villagers later Saturday from mountainous regions prone to landslides.

Authorities released water from a reservoir to allow more room for the expected torrential rains to gather, Mr. Chiang said.

Taiwan’s Central Weather Bureau said the typhoon was expected to pack winds of between 96 and 110 miles per hour (155 and 177 kph) at landfall.

Officials said tourists vacated hotels in Hualien in eastern Taiwan where Fanapi was expected to land, while residents boarded up windows and piled sandbags at their doors.

In Keelung city in northern Taiwan, fishermen watched the overcast sky after docking their boats.

China’s National Meteorological Centre said Fanapi could be the strongest the country has seen this season. It was expected to hit China’s eastern provinces of Guangdong and Fujian on Sunday night or Monday morning.

Fanapi would be the 11th typhoon to hit China this year. Seasonal flooding in China has been the worst in a decade.

Flooding from Typhoon Morakot killed 700 people in August last year in Taiwan’s worst storm in half a century.

By thehindu.com

Chinese fishermen hurry to unload their catch from a fishing boat in the winds of approaching Typhoon Fanapi in Keelung, northern Taiwan, on Saturday.

Low-lying areas along Veracruz, already waterlogged from weeks of rain, were evacuated as the storm came ashore, shutting down the busy seaport. It weakened as it moved inland.

Hurricane Karl pounded Mexico’s Gulf coast with 115-mile-per-hour winds and torrential rains Friday, swamping the already waterlogged port of Veracruz and prompting flood alerts across central Mexico.

The storm, which soaked the Yucatan Peninsula this week before strengthening into a Category 3 hurricane over the Gulf of Mexico, came ashore about nine miles north of Veracruz.

By late afternoon, there were no reports of injuries or severe damage. Televised images showed pounding surf, felled trees, toppled billboards and streets turned into muddy rivers.

The storm came as tourists flocked to the port city during the Independence Day holiday weekend in Mexico. Within a few hours, the hurricane had weakened to Category 1 as it moved inland.

Mexican officials evacuated thousands of residents from low-lying areas and shut the Veracruz seaport, one of Mexico’s busiest. Flights were suspended to the city’s airport, and the main federal highway was closed as a precaution.

Officials urged residents to stay indoors as Karl churned toward the country’s interior. More than half a dozen states and the densely populated metropolitan area that includes the capital, Mexico City, were on alert for intense rains and possible flooding.

President Felipe Calderon warned that Veracruz could get as much as 8 inches of rain, and heavy downpours inland could cause flooding and mudslides over the weekend.

Soaking rains were the last thing coastal Veracruz state needed. More than 100,000 residents already had evacuated their flooded homes because of weeks of rains that overwhelmed rivers and swamped dozens of low-lying towns.

Veracruz Gov. Fidel Herrera warned residents early Friday that Karl could be the worst storm to hit the state since he took office in 2004.

Civil-protection officials were bracing across Mexico’s broad midsection, from coastal Tamaulipas to landlocked Puebla and Morelos, south of Mexico City. Because it is surrounded by mountains and has spotty infrastructure, the capital is prone to widespread flooding and power failures even during normal rainstorms.

Karl was a tropical storm when it crossed the Yucatan Peninsula this week, flooding 25,000 homes in the state of Quintana Roo, home to the beach resort of Cancun. In the neighboring state of Campeche, 11 communities were declared disaster zones.

By Ken Ellingwood

Waves buffet Maracaibo beach in Nautla, in the state of Veracruz. Hurricane Karl, a Category 3, made landfall on the Gulf coast at the start of the busy Independence Day holiday weekend.

Tropical Storm Karl hit Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula on Wednesday and could reach hurricane strength once it enters the Gulf of Mexico, potentially threatening major Mexican oil installations.

Mexican state-run oil giant Pemex had not curtailed any operations but said it would monitor Karl’s progress as it approached operations in the Bay of Campeche, where the bulk of Mexico’s 2.55 million barrels per day of oil is produced.

Karl lost strength as it moved inland and had maximum sustained winds of 40 mph at 7 p.m. local time, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.

By early evening, it was 50 miles southeast of Campeche on the west coast of the Yucatan peninsula and was expected to weaken to a tropical depression before it entered the Gulf of Mexico.

Karl is then forecast to regain strength as it crosses the southern Gulf of Mexico before making landfall again on Saturday near the Mexican port of Tuxpan, where Pemex unloads much of the gasoline it imports. “Karl could become a hurricane by Friday,” the center said in a statement.

Hundreds of mostly Mayan villagers were evacuated as Karl dumped rain and brought strong winds to the Yucatan, civil protection authorities said.

The storm also knocked out power to tens of thousands of people throughout the mainly rural area. Majahual, home to a large cruise ship port, bore the brunt of the storm as it made landfall, but no serious damage was reported.

CANCUN SPARED

Cancun, a top beach destination for U.S. and European tourists, was untouched by the storm, which was also likely to pass far south of U.S. oil and natural gas platforms in the northern part of the Gulf of Mexico.

Two hurricanes, Igor and Julia, also raced across the Atlantic Ocean but posed no immediate threat to land or energy interests along their projected tracks.

Igor, described by the Miami-based hurricane center as “large and powerful,” was 1,015 miles southeast of Bermuda with 135-mph (210-kph) winds, making it a dangerous Category 4 storm on the Saffir-Simpson scale.

Julia weakened to a Category 3 storm, with 125-mph (205- kph) winds, 665 miles west-northwest of the Cape Verde Islands and was moving northwest.

The 2010 hurricane season has been more active than average, with 11 named storms so far, including four major hurricanes, but damage has been relatively limited as several storms have fizzled out in the Atlantic Ocean.

The rapid early strengthening of many storms this year near the coast of Africa has pushed them on northwest tracks away from vulnerable areas. But with two months left in the hurricane season it is too early to say there will not be another dangerous storm, hurricane expert Rick Knabb with The Weather Channel told Reuters.

“We need to wait until the season is over, before we can make a judgment on the forecasts,” Knabb said.

By Isela Serrano

A fallen palm tree is seen on a street in Chetumal as Tropical Storm Karl hits Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, September 15, 2010.

Three people died after Typhoon Kompasu hit central South Korea Thursday morning, the Yonhap News Agency reported.

Kompasu also halted much of the metropolitan area’s subway service, toppled trees and caused widespread power outages, the agency said. Airlines canceled or diverted domestic and international flights.

According to Yonhap: A flying roof tile killed an 80-year-old man in Seosan, South Chungcheong province. A broken tree branch fatally struck a 37-year-old man in Bundang, on the southern outskirts of Seoul. And an electrical engineer was electrocuted while trying to restore electricity in Mokpo, 255 miles (410 kilometers) south of Seoul.

Kompasu also unleashed torrential rain and strong winds on North Korea Thursday, according to the state-run KCNA news agency. The typhoon was expected to further devastate crops in secretive North Korea, which has been gripped by food shortages.
As of late afternoon Thursday, Kompasu was carrying maximum winds of 55 miles per hour and had moved away from both Koreas.

By the CNN

People walk past booths damaged by Typhoon Kompasu in Seoul, South Korea, on Thursday.

Although Pakistan’s floodwaters are beginning to recede after the country’s month-long drenching, the heads of several U.N. agencies say aid still is in urgent need across the country. 

The heavy rains that were so common during the past month are occurring less frequently now in Islamabad, a sign that the monsoon season might be drawing to a close.

But U.N. officials say the end to the nightmare for an estimated 17.6 million people across Pakistan who are suffering because of flooding is nowhere in sight.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s special envoy for assistance to Pakistan, Jean-Maurice Ripert, spoke to reporters in Islamabad. He said that weeks into the disaster, Mr. Ban’s earlier assessment that the flooding was a “slow-motion tsunami” still is accurate.

“Indeed, four weeks after the onset of this disaster, we see the wave of this tsunami still rolling through Pakistan — destroying houses [and] lands, claiming lives on its way.  And it has yet to reach the ocean,” said Ripert.

Ripert said Pakistan has received assistance and pledges of more than $1 billion.  But he said that is far from enough.

Speaking alongside the U.N. special envoy, the executive directors of the United Nations Children’s Fund and the World Food Program appealed for more aid after touring flood-affected areas.

UNICEF’s Anthony Lake said he believes that no one could have foreseen the enormity of the challenge to deliver humanitarian aid, especially after already providing two million people with clean water and immunizing hundreds of thousands of children.

“If you had told me, say six weeks ago, I would have said that we would have already been on top of the situation.  But in fact, we are not.” said Lake.

Lake said that six million more women and children still need clean water and sanitation.

The World Food Program’s Josette Sheeran said her agency needs $90 million more to double the three million people who have received a month’s supply of food.

She also said they do not have enough helicopters to reach everyone in need.

“We still find many of the roads and bridges damaged and destroyed,” said Sheeran. “And so it is not necessarily making the operations easy in the areas where there is some receding or [making] planting possible.”

The receding waters have allowed some people to return to their homes.

But as flooding reaches more areas in the south, U.N. officials say their agencies, along with international donors, need to adapt their strategies to help.

By VOAnews

Pakistani displaced by flooding reach for food aid given by volunteers along main road near Marli, Sindh province, southern Pakistan, 31 Aug 2010

As flood waters rose in Pakistan’s Sindh province submerging more towns, the country’s authorities have evacuated over 150,000 people, worsening the national catastrophe.

A government spokesman said on Saturday that residents of the town of Shahdadkot are fleeing to higher ground as waters from the freshly swollen Indus river overflowed its banks, submerging dozens of more towns in the south, the Times of India reported.

Pakistani authorities are meanwhile struggling to shore up an embankment holding back a growing tide on the edge of the town.

As the latest surge approached, Jamil Soomro, a spokesman for the provincial government, said that it had, within the past 24 hours, evacuated more than 150,000 people from the interior parts of Sindh.

According to officials, the floodwaters nationwide are expected to recede in the coming days as the last river torrents empty into the Arabian Sea.

Already, 600,000 people are in various relief camps that were set up in Sindh province during this past month’s flooding.

Meanwhile, doctors say that requests in the country’s camps have been mounting for more medicine and updated equipment to treat the victims.

“In the camp the necessary things we need are medicine and equipment. If we have updated equipment, then we can treat the patients well,” said Gulzar Hussain, a doctor struggling to run a field hospital at a government technical college in Nowshera, 27 miles east of Peshawar in the country’s northwest.

By Presstv

Pakistan flood survivors sit on high ground as they wait for rescue at the flooded area in Tando Hafiz Shah on August 21.