Tag: Floods

Aug 14 2015

“Godzilla” El Nino Coming This Winter

According to NOAA, the El Nino that is developing in the Pacific Ocean is fast becoming the most powerful on record bringing with it record temperatures and sever weather conditions:

El Nino could be among strongest on record, raising risk of floods

By Erin McClam, MSNBC

The phenomenon known as El Niño is brewing in the Pacific Ocean – and it could be one of the strongest on record, raising the risk of floods and mudslides this winter in Southern California, forecasters said Thursday.

It won’t produce enough rain to end the historic drought in California, they said.

Still, it could rival the most powerful El Niño since records were first kept in 1950, experts from the government’s Climate Prediction Center said. That was during the winter of 1997-98, when Southern California was drenched with twice its normal rainfall.

El Niño, an occasional warming of the Pacific waters around the equator, can change weather patterns around the world. In the United States, it usually means heavier than normal winter rain in California and much of the South and East.

It also generally suppresses hurricane activity in the Atlantic Ocean – and this has been an extremely quiet Atlantic hurricane season. There have been three tropical storms and not a single hurricane.

This year’s ocean warming could make for what some climatologists are calling a Super El Niño. One went so far as to tell the Los Angeles Times that it “has the potential of being the Godzilla El Niño.” And a NOAA blogger cheekily suggested naming it Bruce Lee.

Scientists have already recorded unusual warmth in the zone of Pacific Ocean in question, and it could reach 2 degrees Celsius above normal. That has only happened three times in 65 years – in 1997-98, 1982-83 and 1972-73.

Apr 30 2011

Le Déluge

Cross Posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Severe storms have swept across the Midwest and Southern United States that have killed over 300 people as massive tornadoes swept through the region. It isn’t just tornadoes that are causing the devastation but the heavy rains have caused flooding that is wiping out entire towns as levees along the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers fail.

Mississippi River Floods 2011: Deep South Braces For Surge Of Water Not Seen Since 1927

NEW ORLEANS — A surge of water not seen since the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 is forecast in coming days to test the enormous levees lining the Mississippi River on its course through the Deep South, adding another element of danger to a region already raked by deadly tornadoes and thunderstorms.

Mississippi’s and Louisiana’s governors issued flood warnings Thursday and declared states of emergency. Authorities along the swollen waterway in both states are warning nearby residents to brace for the possibility of any flooding. River boat casinos in Mississippi are closing and levee managers are readying sand bags and supplies – and the manpower to build the defenses – to fight the rising river along hundreds of levees in both states where the river crosses en route to the Gulf of Mexico.

Sep 21 2010

The Nation of Refugees

Haiti, September 22, 2010…

With 1.3 million displaced people in 1,300 camps, homelessness is the new normal here.

Some of the residents of those 1300 tent-cities have been writing letters to humanitarian organizations through letter-boxes set up by the International Organization for Migration.

I don’t have work, my tarp is torn, the rain panics me, my house was crushed, I don’t have money to feed my family, I would really love it if you would help me,” wrote Marie Jean Jean.

“M te konn renmen lapli,“ says a child in a tent. “I used to love the rain.” But now…

Rain means that the floor on which he sleeps turns to mud. Rain now means sometimes standing up all night long in fear of floods.

Pakistan, September 22, 2010

The outside world cannot foot the entire bill for Pakistan’s recovery from devastating floods and the Pakistani government must do more, US special envoy Richard Holbrooke said on Monday.

The day after world donors raised aid pledges to almost two billion dollars, Holbrooke said the eventual cost of the monsoon disaster could run into the “tens of billions of dollars.”

The same article mentions that now 12 million people in Pakistan need “emergency food aid.”

About 105,000 kids younger than 5 are at risk of dying from severe acute malnutrition over the next six months, UNICEF estimates.

“You’re seeing children who were probably very close to the brink of being malnourished, and the emergency has just pushed them over the edge,” says Erin Boyd, a UNICEF emergency nutritionist working in southern Pakistan. “There’s just not the capacity to treat this level of severe acute malnutrition.”

So many children were already on the brink of severe malnutrition before the floods, and I guess their parents always hoped for a better tomorrow, but now what can they really hope for?

A jobless father of five who lost his house in Pakistan’s floods killed himself by setting himself on fire in front of the prime minister’s house, relatives and officials said.

Mohammad Akram, 30, doused himself before scores of people in front of Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani’s family residence in the eastern city of Multan Sunday. Mohammad Asif, Akram’s brother, said he had been looking for a job for several months.

“We had a mud-brick house which was washed away by the floods and now we are homeless.”

Sep 03 2010

$17 Million for Flood Victims, $26 Billion for War

Agence France Presse, September 3, 2010…

Although the initially slow pace of aid had improved since a visit by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in mid-August, the UN said it has “almost stalled” since the beginning of last week, rising from 274 million dollars to 291 million dollars – about two thirds of funding needs.

That’s a total of $17 million in about two weeks, from the whole world, for at least 8,000,000 Pakistanis with no food at all and nothing but dirty water to drink.

And in the same two weeks the United States has spent about $26 billion on “defense,” $13 billion per week, out of a military budget of $663 billion for 2010.

 

Aug 23 2010

The Week in Editorial Cartoons, Part I – BP’s Soup Recipe

Crossposted at Daily Kos and The Stars Hollow Gazette

John Sherffius

John Sherffius, Comics.com (Boulder Daily Camera)

Note: Due to a deluge of editorial cartoons over the past week or so, I’m going to, time permitting, post Part II of this weekly diary in the next few days.  In addition to some of the issues covered in this edition, I’ll include more cartoons on the floods in Pakistan, the withdrawal of combat U.S. forces in Iraq, and Rupert Murdoch’s $1 million contribution to the GOP.

Feb 01 2010

Peru: The Devastation Continues, The US Traditional Media Ignore It

peru floodDevastation in Peru continues.  Today’s La Republica reports the bad news:

Intense Rains Leave More than 100,000 Affected

The prolonged rainfall that fell on the southeastern Andes Sunday night left over 100 thousand people affected, with particular intensity in the Cusco region, regional authorities reported.

The regional president of Cusco, Hugo Gonzales, told the AP that on Sunday the rains had left “more than 60 thousand people affected, seven thousand homes destroyed, 17 thousand hectares of crops affected and so far 14 bridges that may collapse from being in poor condition.

Gonzales said that “losses translate into almost $ 250 million dollars and that tourism, the largest employer in the region is losing almost a million dollars a day, which is aggravated by the isolation of Machu Picchu from tourists.

(translation by me)

The report from Puno, to the Southeast, is particularly disturbing:

the rains left “more than 22 thousand farmers affected, 23 million acres of crops worthless, and 25 thousand dead cattle including llamas and vicunas.”

But if you’re not going to read Peruvian newspapers on line, you won’t know much about this disaster.  If you’re in the US, just try a Google news search for “Peru floods” and see what it turns up.  Right now the top story is from Brunei.  And that’s one of the very few entries from today.  The rest concern rescuing tourists at the end of last week, some first person tourist stories about being rescued, and the thinnest of reports from Saturday and Sunday.

Long story short, the traditional US media just aren’t reporting about this disaster.  And they are apparently not going to.  That makes it harder to get contributions and other aid from the US for Peru’s relief.  And it also continues the extremely distorted way the US traditional media cover events in this hemisphere.

If we want to end this embargo on news, if we want others in the US to know what’s going on in Peru, the only thing I can think of is writing essays like this one and this one and this one.  And if you, dear reader, would consider doing the same, writing an essay, we might be able eventually to overcome the enforced silence and bring US attention to the devastation in Peru.  And to other events in this hemisphere.

Finally, I urge readers to make donations to Doctors Without Borders and the Red Cross.

——————

simulposted at The Dream Antilles and daily Kos and Wild Wild Left

Jan 31 2010

Peru: The World Needs To Notice This Disaster

Yesterday, I put up an essay about a natural disaster in Peru.  I wrote about the devastation caused by the rain: flooding, mudslides, loss of homes, loss of crops, deaths, displacement of families.  And I urged that readers make donations to Doctors Without Borders and the Red Cross.

Today on reflection I think I underestimated the situation in Peru.  Today I found two videos that capture conditions in the Sacred Valley of Peru so you can see them yourself.  Conditions are even worse than I thought.  Please watch these videos.  And please help me to bring the severity of this disaster to awareness in the U.S.  Peruvians need our help.

The first video:    

Nov 03 2007

Mexico under water: “Katrina on a larger scale”

Eighty percent of the Mexican state of Tabasco is under water, as is a significant portion of Chiapas, and there’s more rain on the way. 

President Calderon has compared the disaster to Katrina — but on a larger scale.  With over one million displaced, his oil industry crippled, his entire air force sent to the region and disease soon to follow, his claim may be valid, even though, by all evidence, his response to the crisis has been the opposite of Washington’s Katrina debacle.

Here’s The Environmentalist’s post on the floods, which includes a video sent from the region and information provided by colleagues working to track the storms’ paths.

More below the jump…