Negative Blogs

President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono visited the tsunami-hit islands

Hopes are fading for more than 300 people still registered missing after Monday’s tsunami in Indonesia, as the death toll climbs to 394.

Disaster official Ade Edward says the 3m (10ft) surge is likely to have carried many of the missing out to sea, or buried them in the sand.

The first major aid ships reached the worst-hit Mentawai Islands on Thursday.

The government has pledged millions of dollars for the relief effort, but activists say more needs to be done.

Aid agencies said people on the islands still urgently needed to food and shelter, three days after a 7.7-magnitude undersea earthquake triggered the tsunami.

Indonesia is also struggling with the devastation caused by this week’s eruption of Mount Merapi in central Java, which killed more than 30 people.

As the scale of the tsunami disaster became clear on Thursday, Mr Edward painted a bleak picture of the chances of finding more survivors.

“Of those missing people we think two-thirds of them are probably dead, either swept out to sea or buried in the sand,” he told the AFP news agency.

“When we flew over the area yesterday we saw many bodies. Heads and legs were sticking out of the sand, some of them were in the trees.”

He estimated that a further 200 people may have been killed.

Indonesia’s state-run news agency Antara reported that 468 houses had been completely destroyed by the wave.

Village chief Tasmin Saogo told the BBC’s Indonesian service that the islanders have begun to bury their dead.

“In the village of Sadegugung, there aren’t any body bags. In the end we just lifted them and we buried 95 people today,” he said.

“There are still may bodies lying about, underneath coconut trees and in other places.”

Meanwhile, the party of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has been trying to defuse a growing political row over comments made by one of its senior members

In comments translated on the Jakarta Globe website, House of Representatives Speaker Marzuki Ali suggested relocating people living next the sea, adding: “Anyone who is afraid of waves shouldn’t live near seashore.”

Rival politicians criticised his statement as insensitive, and the party has apologised.

Earlier, Mr Yudhoyono cut short a trip to Vietnam to oversee the rescue effort, flying in a helicopter loaded with food and other basic necessities to the remote and inaccessible islands.

Indonesian officials said locals had been given no indication of the coming wave, as a high-tech tsunami warning system installed in the wake of 2004’s giant Indian Ocean tsunami was not working.

The vast Indonesian archipelago sits on the Pacific Ring of Fire, one of the world’s most active areas for earthquakes and volcanoes.

More than 1,000 people were killed by an earthquake off Sumatra in September 2009.

In December 2004, a 9.1-magnitude quake off the coast of Aceh triggered a tsunami in the Indian Ocean that killed a quarter of a million people in 13 countries including Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Thailand.

By bbc.co.uk

Survivors have been moved into temporary shelters

The decision by thousands of workers to flee their buildings when a 5.0 magnitude earthquake struck Quebec on Wednesday put them in more danger than if they had found a safe place inside, according to a disaster expert.

The tremor hit at 1:41 p.m. ET south of Echo Lake, Que., 60 kilometres north of Ottawa near the Ontario border and was felt across southern and eastern Ontario and western Quebec, as well as in some U.S. states.

The quake caused the acting mayor of Gracefield, Que., a small town about 50 kilometres from the quake’s epicentre, to ask for emergency assistance after a number of buildings were damaged.

In Ottawa and Gatineau, the quake sent thousands of workers streaming out of office towers and onto the streets, where they awaited word as to whether it was safe to return.

But Prof. Paul Kovacs of the University of Western Ontario said the city workers did the wrong thing.

“Parts of the outside of the building are the most likely to fall and hit you,” said Kovacs, the executive director of the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction.

“If you move inside of a building or outside of a building during an earthquake that is one of the most dangerous things to do,” Kovacs said.

Images from the past year of Haiti and Chile, where buildings collapsed after more powerful quakes struck, might have led many people to flee. But Kovacs said while people should leave a building if they feel it is poorly constructed or unsafe, most of Ottawa’s buildings are designed to handle quakes.

Janet Drysdale, a seismologist with the Geological Survey of Canada, said if people do leave a building, they should also move a safe distance away, which many people did not do on Wednesday in Ottawa’s downtown core.

Both Kovacs and Drysdale said the safe thing to do in a secure building is get under a secure desk, cover your head to protect it and wait for the quake to end.

Schools in Ottawa’s two biggest school boards and all but one federal building in the National Capital Region were open Thursday morning after passing inspections in the aftermath of Wednesday’s earthquake.

Structural engineers inspected 19 schools with the Ottawa Carleton District School Board, and similar checks were also made at the Ottawa Catholic School Board.

All schools were deemed safe.

Public Works has reopened every federal building in the National Capital Region except for Place du Portage’s Phase 3 building, which is still undergoing structural inspections.

But Thursday is Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day, a provincial holiday in Quebec, so few employees are expected to need to go into the building.

The impact of the quake was felt more north of Ottawa, particularly in Gracefield. Seven buildings — including the town’s 98-year-old church — were damaged, town officials said.

“Right now we have the church that has been affected very badly,” said the acting mayor of Gracefield, Claude Blais, adding that the church was a popular tourist attraction in the town.

A section of Highway 307 near Bowman, Que., north of Ottawa, collapsed into a river as a result of the quake, shutting down that route.

In Montreal, some people felt the rumble — but some didn’t even realize the city had been hit by an earthquake. The tremors, which lasted about 30 seconds, rattled buildings in Toronto and Ottawa, as well as government offices across the Ottawa River in Gatineau, Que.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the two largest quakes in western Quebec occurred in 1935 at magnitude 6.1 and in 1732 at magnitude 6.2. The latter caused significant damage in Montreal.

The agency said earthquakes cause significant damage in the region about once a decade. Smaller earthquakes are felt three or four times a year.

BY CBCNews

A cleanup crew surveys the damage to a church in Gracefield, Que., after the earthquake Wednesday. (Adrian Wyld/Canadian Press).

SHANGHAI—Rescuers used shovels, pry bars and their bare hands to dig through the rubble of collapsed homes and schools as they raced to find survivors of a severe earthquake that authorities said killed about 400 people and injured roughly 10,000 in a remote, predominantly Tibetan community in western China.

The quake hit shortly before 8 a.m. Wednesday, jolting mountainous Yushu prefecture, part of the Chinese province of Qinghai on the Tibetan plateau, and flattening most of the town of Jiegu, one of the area’s main population centers. About 97% of the people in Yushu are ethnically Tibetan. Many earn their living raising yaks, sheep and horses.

As darkness fell and temperatures dipped below freezing in Jiegu, hundreds of soldiers, troops from the paramilitary People’s Armed Police and other emergency workers searched the wreckage looking for signs of life. Injured townspeople were being treated at improvised medical centers in the town’s central square and at a horse-racing track, officials said.

“We are short of equipment,” said Guoyang Zhaxi, a 42-year-old resident helping to free survivors. “So the speed of the rescue efforts is very slow.” He said nearly all houses in the town—many of which used traditional wood-and-earth construction—had been destroyed. “We need to hurry up or the people who are buried will have no hope,” he said.

Chinese seismologists said the quake had a magnitude of 7.1. The U.S. Geologic Survey said the magnitude was 6.9. A series of aftershocks continued throughout the day. Specialized search and rescue teams as well as hundreds of soldiers were being sent to Yushu from elsewhere in China to assist in the hunt for survivors.

Rescuers said their first priority was schools, where there could be large concentrations of casualties. Zhuohuaxia, a spokesman for Yushu prefecture, told the official Xinhua news agency that “many students are buried.” Xinhua reported that at least 30 people were trapped when a dormitory building at the Yushu Ethnic Normal School collapsed.

Wednesday’s quake in Qinghai also toppled dormitories and other buildings of the Yushu Primary School, where five students were killed, a teacher at the school told Xinhua. “Some pupils ran out of the dorms alive, and those who had not escaped in time were buried,” said the teacher, identified only by the surname Chang.

One of the most politically sensitive legacies of the massive 2008 earthquake that devastated large parts of southwestern China’s Sichuan province was disputes between parents and the government over the deaths of thousands of students killed when their schools collapsed on them.

Officials said a year ago that 5,335 students were among the 86,633 dead and missing from the 2008 quake. If accurate, that figure would mean school children didn’t suffer disproportionately in the disaster, despite evidence of shoddy school construction that drew the ire of grieving parents. The government took stern measures to silence protests.

Tibet activist groups say that Yushu prefecture and Jiegu town were the scenes of protest activities by Tibetan students and others in 2008, when a wave of unrest swept through Tibetan areas of China. In March that year, bloody riots erupted in Lhasa, and widespread demonstrations by Tibetans led to a crackdown by security forces.

Many Tibetans chafe at what they say are government restrictions on their civil liberties and religious practices, and complain that they have missed out on the country’s economic boom. The rural per capita net income in Yushu is about $340 a year, less than half the national average.

Ethnic Tibetan residents of Yushu reached by phone Wednesday said relations between them and China’s majority Han Chinese, and between locals and the government, weren’t strained. Residents said Tibetans and soldiers and armed police from local garrisons worked side-by-side to save lives.

Guoyang Zhaxi said he and employees of his trading and real-estate company had pulled 30 people from the rubble alive, four of whom, including an infant, later died, he said. He said soldiers and police labored to move heavy steel-reinforced concrete slabs to reach survivors trapped below.

A soldier surnamed Li, interviewed by China National Radio, said many people remained trapped in fallen buildings and could be heard calling for help. Local officials said they needed heavy excavating equipment to reach more victims and medical supplies to treat the injured.

Survivors pitched tents and prepared to sleep outside. Relief officials said they would be bringing in thousands of tents, as well as quilts and warm clothes. Temperatures are expected to fall well below freezing overnight. Meteorologists said there was a chance of snow in the area on Friday.

By GORDON FAIRCLOUGH

A Chinese official says 80 per cent of the buildings have collapsed in the worst-hit town of Jiegu.

More than two months after the earthquake that devastated Haiti, at least 30 survivors who were waved onto planes by Marines in the chaotic aftermath are prisoners of the United States immigration system, locked up since their arrival in detention centers in Florida.

In Haiti, some were pulled from the rubble, their legal advocates say. Some lost parents, siblings or children. Many were seeking food, safety or medical care at the Port-au-Prince airport when terrifying aftershocks prompted hasty evacuations by military transports, with no time for immigration processing. None have criminal histories.

But when they landed in the United States without visas, they were taken into custody by immigration authorities and held for deportation, even though deportations to Haiti have been suspended indefinitely since the earthquake. Legal advocates who stumbled on the survivors in February at the Broward County Transitional Center, a privately operated immigration jail in Pompano Beach, Fla., have tried for weeks to persuade government officials to release them to citizen relatives who are eager to take them in, letters and affidavits show.