tagged w/ Landslides
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Magnitude-6.9 quake kills 21 in India and Nepal
By the CNN Wire Staff
September 19, 2011 2:28 a.m. EDT
PHOTO: A man looks out a collapsed house just southeast of Kathmandu, Nepal, on Monday.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
14 people die in India and seven more lose their lives in Nepal, the officials say
300 civilians, 22 tourists are rescued near India's border with Tibet, an official says
The quakes set off landslides that, with heavy rains, are hampering rescue efforts
A wall of the British Embassy in Kathmandu collapsed due to the quake, killing three
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New Delhi (CNN) -- The death toll from a magnitude 6.9 earthquake -- and its aftershocks -- along the border of India and Nepal climbed to 21 Monday, officials said.
Fourteen deaths were reported in India with seven others in Nepal, according to each nation's Home Ministry. More than 90 have been injured in India.
The quake struck the northern Indian state of Sikkim, where seven people died, causing damage in West Bengal, Bihar, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh and Meghalaya. Five deaths were reported in West Bengal and two others in Bihar.
The dead include three in Nepal's capital of Kathmandu, who died when a wall of the British embassy collapsed, according to Kedar Rijal, Kathmandu police chief. They included an 8-year-old girl, her father and a third person.
The British Foreign Office confirmed a "compound perimeter wall" of the embassy collapsed, adding that its ambassador has met with the community and offered condolences.
Police said in a statement that two more people died in the Nepalese town of Dhara, about 217 miles east of Kathmandu. About a dozen people were injured when they jumped from their houses during the quake, police said.
The locations of the other two fatalities were not immediately available.
Communications to stricken areas are "much better now," Sikkim's chief secretary Karma Gyatso said Monday, adding cell phone connections have also improved in the northern Indian state. He added that rescuers have reached most of the hardest-hit areas, with more emergency crews set to be deployed over the course of the day.
Already, 300 civilians had been rescued in one such effort near Sikkim's border with China, said Indo-Tibetan Border Police spokesman Deepak Kumar Pandey. Some 22 tourists -- all of them Indians -- were also rescued in the same area.
The deaths, damage and recovery efforts came after a total of three quakes struck the region in rapid succession in a mountainous region.
The U.S. Geological Survey initially put the largest quake at 6.8 magnitude, later upgrading it to a 6.9, and the other two at magnitudes 4.8 and 4.6. All three occurred within an hour and 15 minutes, the U.S. agency said. The India Meteorological Department said the quakes were 6.8 magnitude, 5.7 magnitude and 5.3 magnitude.
The quakes set off landslides, which -- along with heavy rains -- were blocking roads and hampering rescue efforts, Pandey said. He expressed fears that the toll, as far as deaths and damage, could be more than is now known, anticipating more will be known once the sun rises Monday.
Authorities have reported power outages and downed phone lines in Sikkim.
Emergency crews were dispatched from different locations to the region, India's home ministry said in an alert to reporters. At least four fighter jets were carrying rescue officers to a neighboring region, where they travel by road to Gangtok, Sikkim's capital, according to the alert.
As for outside help, World Vision announced Sunday that it "has put its emergency response team in India on standby" to provide relief as requested. The nonprofit organization reported that the quake cut off phone communication and electricity in parts of Sikkim and West Bengal provinces.
"The whole earth was shaking and it lasted for two minutes," Paul Mathai from World Vision, who was 130 kilometers (80 miles) from the epicenter, said in a statement from the organization. "We were panicked, but all of us are safe."
That quake's epicenter was about 42 miles from the city of Gangtok and 169 miles east of Kathmandu, according to the geological survey.
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CNN's Harmeet Singh, Manesh Shrestha and Bharati Naik contributed to this report.
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Magnitude-6.9 quake kills 21 in India and Nepal
By the CNN Wire Staff... more
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Floods, fires, melting ice and feverish heat: From smoke-choked Moscow to water-soaked Pakistan and the High Arctic, the planet seems to be having a midsummer breakdown. It's not just a portent of things to come, scientists say, but a sign of troubling climate change already under way.
The weather-related cataclysms of July and August fit patterns predicted by climate scientists, the Geneva-based World Meteorological Organization says — although those scientists always shy from tying individual disasters directly to global warming.
The experts now see an urgent need for better ways to forecast extreme events like Russia's heat wave and wildfires and the record deluge devastating Pakistan. They'll discuss such tools in meetings this month and next in Europe and America, under United Nations, U.S. and British government sponsorship.
"There is no time to waste," because societies must be equipped to deal with global warming, says British government climatologist Peter Stott.
He said modelers of climate systems are "very keen" to develop supercomputer modeling that would enable more detailed linking of cause and effect as a warming world shifts jet streams and other atmospheric currents. Those changes can wreak weather havoc.
The U.N.'s network of climate scientists — the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — has long predicted that rising global temperatures would produce more frequent and intense heat waves, and more intense rainfalls. In its latest assessment, in 2007, the Nobel Prize-winning panel went beyond that. It said these trends "have already been observed," in an increase in heat waves since 1950, for example.
Still, climatologists generally refrain from blaming warming for this drought or that flood, since so many other factors also affect the day's weather.
Stott and NASA's Gavin Schmidt at the Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York, said it's better to think in terms of odds: Warming might double the chances for a heat wave, for example. "That is exactly what's happening," Schmidt said, "a lot more warm extremes and less cold extremes."
The WMO did point out, however, that this summer's events fit the international scientists' projections of "more frequent and more intense extreme weather events due to global warming."
In fact, in key cases they're a perfect fit:
RUSSIA
It's been the hottest summer ever recorded in Russia with Moscow temperatures topping 100 degrees Fahrenheit (37.8 degrees C) for the first time. The drought there has sparked hundreds of wildfires in forests and dried peat bogs, blanketing western Russia with a toxic smog. Moscow's death rate has doubled to 700 people a day. The drought reduced the wheat harvest by more than one-third.
The 2007 IPCC report predicted a doubling of disastrous droughts in Russia this century and cited studies foreseeing catastrophic fires during dry years. It also said Russia would suffer large crop losses.
PAKISTAN
The heaviest monsoon rains on record — 12 inches (300 millimeters) in one 36-hour period — have sent rivers rampaging over huge swaths of countryside. It's left 14 million Pakistanis homeless or otherwise affected, and killed 1,500. The government calls it the worst natural disaster in the nation's history.
A warmer atmosphere can hold — and discharge — more water. The 2007 IPCC report said rains have grown heavier for 40 years over north Pakistan and predicted greater flooding this century in south Asia's monsoon region.
CHINA
China is witnessing its worst floods in decades, the WMO says, particularly in the northwest province of Gansu. There, floods and landslides last weekend killed at least 1,117 people and left more than 600 missing, feared swept away or buried beneath mud and debris.
The IPCC reported in 2007 that rains had increased in northwest China by up to 33 percent since 1961, and floods nationwide had increased sevenfold since the 1950s. It predicted still more frequent flooding this century.
ARCTIC
Researchers last week spotted a 100-square-mile (260-square-kilometer) chunk of ice calved off from the great Petermann Glacier in Greenland's far northwest. It was the most massive ice island to break away in the Arctic in a half-century of observation.
The huge iceberg appeared just five months after an international scientific team published a report saying ice loss from the Greenland ice sheet is expanding up its northwest coast from the south.
Changes in the ice sheet "are happening fast, and we are definitely losing more ice mass than we had anticipated," said one of the scientists, NASA's Isabella Velicogna.
In the Arctic Ocean itself, the summer melt of the vast ice cap has reached unprecedented proportions. Satellite data show the ocean area covered by ice last month was the second-lowest ever recorded for July.
The melting of land ice into the oceans is causing about 60 percent of the accelerating rise in sea levels worldwide, with thermal expansion from warming waters causing the rest. The WMO'S World Climate Research Program says seas are rising by 1.34 inches (34 millimeters) per decade, about twice the 20th century's average.
Worldwide temperature readings, meanwhile, show that this January-June was the hottest first half of a year in 150 years of global climate record keeping. Meteorologists say 17 nations have recorded all-time-high temperatures in 2010, more than in any other year.
Scientists blame the warming on carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases pouring into the atmosphere from power plants, cars and trucks, furnaces and other fossil fuel-burning industrial and residential sources.
Experts are growing ever more vocal in urging sharp cutbacks in emissions, to protect the climate that has nurtured modern civilization.
"Reducing emissions is something everyone is capable of," Nanjing-based climatologist Tao Li told an academic journal in China, now the world's No. 1 emitter, ahead of the U.S.
But not everyone is willing to act.
The U.S. remains the only major industrialized nation not to have legislated caps on carbon emissions, after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid last week withdrew climate legislation in the face of resistance from Republicans and some Democrats.
The U.S. inaction, dating back to the 1990s, is a key reason global talks have bogged down for a pact to succeed the expiring Kyoto Protocol. That is the relatively weak accord on emissions cuts adhered to by all other industrialized states.
Governments around the world, especially in poorer nations that will be hard-hit, are scrambling to find ways and money to adapt to shifts in climate and rising seas.
The meetings of climatologists in the coming weeks in Paris, Britain and Colorado will be one step toward adaptation, seeking ways to identify trends in extreme events and better means of forecasting them.Floods, fires, melting ice and feverish heat: From smoke-choked Moscow to water-soaked... more
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The death toll has risen to 112 as a result of flash floods and landslides in a town in northern India, a police official said.At least 375 people were being treated for injuries at hospitals in the city of Leh, said Officer Farooq Ahmad. Twenty-five soldiers in the Indian Army are missing, said Army Lt. Col. J.S.Brar.
LINK : http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/08/06/india.flood/index.html?hpt=T2#fbid=bOt3fX2Yirw&wom=falseThe death toll has risen to 112 as a result of flash floods and landslides in a town... more
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Flooding and landslides in northeastern China left have more than 100 people dead or missing, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported Sunday, citing provincial officials.Jilin Province has been experiencing a week of heavy rainfall that has caused 37,000 houses to collapse and damaged an additional 125,000, according to Xinhua.
LINK : http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/08/01/china.flooding/index.html?hpt=T2#fbid=bOt3fX2YirwFlooding and landslides in northeastern China left have more than 100 people dead or... more
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Haiti’s steep mountains combined with its tropical rainfall pose a threat for landslides. The 7.0-magnitude earthquake that devastated the country on January 12, 2010, may have also triggered landslides and shifted earth so that landslides are more likely in the future. This true-color image highlights potential new landslides around the earthquake’s epicenter, which is just beyond the edge of the image. The landslides are bright streams of exposed earth that contrast with the dark green plants and tan soil around them. Some, but not all, of the potential landslides are labeled.
The image is from the Advanced Land Imager on NASA’s EO-1 satellite, and it was taken on January 15, 2010. The lower image, from the same sensor on the EO-1 satellite, was taken on September 14, 2008, about a week after Hurricane Ike dumped heavy rain on Haiti. Many of the landslides seen in the 2010 images are new since 2008, but some were evident in 2008.
The Water Center for Humid Tropics of Latin America and the Caribbean (SERVIR), a NASA-supported organization that provides satellite imagery and analysis to decision makers in Mesoamerica, including Haiti, compared the 2010 image shown here with other previously acquired imagery to identify regions where new slides may have occurred. The information has gone to national authorities and humanitarian response organizations.
Full earthquake maps are available from SERVIR.
References
NASA. (2010, January 18). Locating landslide risks in post-quake Haiti. Accessed January 18, 2010.
More images of this event in Natural Hazards
NASA Earth Observatory image by Jesse Allen, using EO-1 ALI data provided courtesy of the NASA EO-1 Team. Caption by Holli Riebeek.Haiti’s steep mountains combined with its tropical rainfall pose a threat for... more
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The number of fatalities at Sunday's landslides in Indonesia's South Sulawesi province rose to 14 with four others still missing, head of crisis center of Health Ministry Rustam Pakaya said on Tuesday.
The landslides, triggered by flash flood, wounded 13 villagers, destroyed 23 houses, Pakaya said.
The landslides forced 848 residents to flee their homes in some areas, he said.
"Fourteen people are dead and four others are missing. There has been one person evacuated alive by rescuers," he told Xinhua over phone.
Rescue team from Makasar, capital of the province, along with soldiers, police and villagers, are struggling with their hands to find the missing people in the debris, a rescuer at the province Suhardi Samad said.
"The rescue is only done in manual way, with bare hand, as the equipment could not be brought to the village as the road has been cut after the flash flood," he told Xinhua over phone from the province.
Metro TV footage showed that the rescuers struggling to find the four people in the debris of houses which have been flattened and buried by a huge amount of soil and mud.
Separately in West Nusa Tenggara, the number of fatality of the Monday morning earthquake rose to two after a person died hours after the quake, said Pakaya.
The number of injured from the 6.7 magnitude quake climbed to 178 people, six of them suffered from serious injury.
Indonesia has been frequently hit by landslide, flood and quake due to lack of forest covered areas and the position of the country on the vulnerable quake-hit zone.
Wet season always occurs from October to April.The number of fatalities at Sunday's landslides in Indonesia's South... more
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At least 124 people have been killed in El Salvador by flooding and landslides following days of heavy rain, the government says.At least 124 people have been killed in El Salvador by flooding and landslides... more
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Climate and Earth caused a series of disasters in different parts of the world in recent days. The Ketsana typhoon in the Philippines, the second to hit the area after the one in August, caused some 250 deaths, the earthquake that struck in the South Pacific Ocean Samoa caused 190 deaths. Much serious the toll of the Padang earthquake in Sumatra, Indonesia, more than 1,100 dead. Today the floods and landslides that have devastated the area of Messina in Italy have reached a toll of 20 dead and many wounded.Climate and Earth caused a series of disasters in different parts of the world in... more
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"A landslide in northern China buried a brick factory, killing 19 workers, local officials said Saturday.
Rescue workers found the workers' bodies at the site of a landslide that hit Friday morning near Luliang town, said a staffer at the Shanxi provincial government who refused to give his name as is customary.
The landslide occurred at 10:20 a.m. Friday on a mountain in Shang'an village, engulfing the nearby factory, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.
One worker was rescued Friday but the search effort was suspended overnight because of fears of a second landslide in the area.
More than 300 people and 20 earth-moving machines were used in the rescue effort at the site of the engulfed factory, Xinhua said.
A staffer surnamed Liu with Luliang's city government said rescuers were trying to investigate the cause of the landslide.""A landslide in northern China buried a brick factory, killing 19 workers, local... more
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"Is the mountain moving down, or are we moving up?"
Creepy! Why didn't they run, I would have ran. "Is the mountain moving down, or are we moving up?"
Creepy! Why... more
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