Our Awful Situation

Archive for the ‘Natural Disasters’ Category

Corn hits record, soy rallies as floods expand

Posted by Charlie Kilo on June 13th, 2008

Food inflation will continue to skyrocket due to oil prices and flooding in the midwest:

Corn prices soared to record highs on Thursday as flooding damaged crop prospects in the U.S. Midwest, heightening concern over shrinking stocks and fueling the market’s relentless advance.  

Torrential rains have swept across the Midwest, the key growing region in the world’s top producer, resulting in floods which have destroyed homes, as well as thousands of acres of corn and soybeans.

“It’s the worst in recent memory, at a time when demand has never been higher,” said Gavin Maguire, analyst with Iowa Grain in Chicago.

“We have lower (corn) acres to begin with, and now we have to expect a lower yield because of the bad growing season. So it all spells tighter corn supplies down the road,” he said.

China’s quake aftershock — 5 million homeless

Posted by Charlie Kilo on June 10th, 2008

Beijing grapples with a post-emergency emergency of epic proportions:

At the relief operations center in China’s mountainous Qingchuan county, government workers are still in emergency mode nearly a month after the devastating May 12 earthquake. Powerful aftershocks, heavy rains and dangerous “quake lakes” keep them from devoting all their attention to their primary task: getting the county’s residents into tents.

But even as they work to provide temporary shelter, officials are looking ahead to an even more formidable problem: When the ground stops shaking and the dust settles, this county alone will have 250,000 people who will need new homes.

It is not just a question of rebuilding what was here. Some towns lost not only their buildings but also the land they were standing on and scarce cropland when landslides hit from both sides, said Xiang Zhichun a young public affairs worker.

“A lot of crops were buried, polluted and spoiled,” said Xiang. “After the earthquake there is not enough flat area to live.”

Qingchuan is but one corner of a disaster area roughly the size of Kentucky. And its population accounts for just a fraction of an estimated 5.5 million people left homeless by the earthquake. The number of homes needed may go even higher, suggest some analysts, based on Beijing’s announcement last week that some 15.5 million people have been “relocated” because of the quake — a number that the official Xinhua News Agency published without elaboration.

Burma death toll could reach 1 million

Posted by Charlie Kilo on May 12th, 2008

Will we ever know the real toll in Burma?

other aid groups warned of a growing catastrophe. “It’s really crucial that people get access to clean water sources and sanitation to avoid unnecessary deaths and suffering,” Sarah Ireland, Oxfam regional chief, said.

She said the death toll from the May 3 cyclone could go up to 100,000, a figure also suggested by other aid groups.

“There are all the factors for a public health catastrophe which could multiply that death toll by up to 15 times,” she said.

Death toll in China earthquake rises to 7,600

Posted by Charlie Kilo on May 12th, 2008

Is anyone else noticing the incredible uptick in earthquakes this year?

A massive earthquake struck central China on Monday, killing more than 7,600 people and trapping nearly 900 students under the rubble of their school, state media reported.

The official Xinhua News Agency said 80 percent of the buildings had collapsed in Beichuan county in Sichuan province after the 7.8-magnitude quake, raising fears the overall death toll could increase sharply.

The earthquake sent thousands of people rushing out of buildings and into the streets hundreds of miles away in Beijing and Shanghai. The temblor was felt as far away as Pakistan, Vietnam and Thailand.

Xinhua cited the Sichuan provincial government as saying 7,651 people died. The communist leadership said late Monday that “thousands” had died, and that the quake also had caused deaths in three other provinces.

The quake was one of the deadliest in three decades and posed a challenge to a government already grappling with discontent over high inflation and a widespread uprising among Tibetans in western China while trying to prepare for the Beijing Olympics this August.

Update: Cyclone death toll tops 22,000 in Myanmar

Posted by Charlie Kilo on May 6th, 2008

41,000 are still missing:

The cyclone death toll soared above 22,000 on Tuesday and more than 41,000 others were missing as the international community prepared to rush in aid after Asia’s deadliest storm since 1991, state radio reported.

Up to 1 million people may be homeless after Cyclone Nargis, some villages have been almost totally eradicated and vast rice-growing areas are wiped out, the World Food Program said.

Some aid agencies reported their assessment teams had reached some areas of the largely isolated region but said getting in supplies and large numbers of aid workers would be difficult.

Up to 10,000 feared dead in Burma cyclone

Posted by Charlie Kilo on May 5th, 2008

More incredible devastation:

As many as ten thousand people could have died in the catastrophic storm which ripped across Burma on Saturday, and the number is likely to rise as aid workers pick their way through rubble, floods and broken roads to the stricken areas of the Irrawaddy Delta.

Foreign diplomats in Rangoon were told by Myanmar’s foreign minister that he acknowledges that the cyclone death toll could rise to 10,000, after a day during which the official count had gone from 351 to 4,000 dead.

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